Kingdom - Ch. 799 - The Cycle of War

[Grimmycoffee]

I love how Shibashou's looking perfectly through Riboku's bullshit.
This was the first run, and he didn't like it at all, since it was all just Riboku using Seika as pawns and all he saw about Qin was nothing like what Riboku kept telling him Qin was.
SHS will be much more reluctant to go on a second run after this.


A bunch of people have called out RBK for that, Kanki is one that pops to mind, that he's only looking outwards, never inwards. He's only set on keeping the status quo up, he's not advancing or fixing anything, and he knows Zhao's government is completely rotten but still refuses to do anything about it because ???
Honestly, it's really shocking that this is actually being portrayed as a fault of RBK rather than a virtue someway somehow considering how strong the RBKwank can get on this manga.

Do you remember around what chapters did Kanki and those other people say that?

 

[Doomer]

At this point he should seriously just use his popularity and stage a coup. Like yeah, he can talk about Qin being wrong with the unification thing, but the Zhao higher ups are pretty corrupt and unlike with Qin, this is something Riboku can do something about if he really cared about his people. Since it's not like he's Yang Wenli with his insistence on democracy, there's ideologically nothing stopping Riboku from toppling the current King.

a LOGH reference, don't see those to often

 

[Doomroar]

riboku still a massive hypocrite, "omg Qin is evil, how dare they want to unify china?" yea it's much better now with several kingdoms that always war with one another, with psychotic and pedo kings and then we have you and your soldiers who massacre hundreds of thousands of soldiers and enslave who knows how many, how are you not evil riboku? you are way worse then Qin. with Kanki dead Riboku is now the most evil character.

The fact that Riboku refuses to kill the current King of Zhao and put the decent brother into power is the worst part of his character

 

[AlexAK47]

I like this guy Shi Ba Shou. And fuck you, Riboku!

 

[quiproquo]

Would like to have a Riboku plushie ngl

Don't give them strange ideas 🤣

 

[quiproquo]

a LOGH reference, don't see those to often

And very good indeed

 

[tave49]

You really feel for shibashou on this one. He is fully aware that seika got screwed over.
Even thinking back on riboku's speech about how qin would eventually wipe out seika is seika does nothing... I dunno i dont fully buy it. Seika is not a big strategic position for the overall unification war. Nobody really feels threatened by it since everyone knows seika only moves out to protect itself. It doesnt even mess up the unification from a formal standpoint since seika has no kings nor lords and shibashou's decisions never override the city's.
Like, unless eisei's successor was arrogant enough to invade this tiny city for no good reason, there was a very good chance qin would leave it alone.
But that's not happening anymore. Riboku's flowery words may have very well doomed seika

 

[jarjaxle]

Respect to Kan Saro.....

Riboku..well spoilers have said it all...I hope when what happens he has Tears of Regret falling

 

[Marenjii]

Riboku's constant grandstanding makes me like him less and less. Like sure, the bloodshed from unification would be massive, and he should defend his home, because who knows what happens post-unification? Maybe King of Qin goes tyrant for all anyone knows. But he let a pedo king sit on the throne, even after said King's decisions would have potentially caused untold slaughter because the King was too chickenshit to let his army go help in the war. Now he is letting the awful son of said pedo King sit on the throne, when there is a legitimate second option. As far as I'm concerned Riboku is fine with sacrificing children to a pedo King, and now sacrificing innocent people to a King that's also massively depraved.

 

[Konrad2]

Thanks for the scanlation.

 

[Kushinda]

I gotta say.
Historically that battle was a wash where the Qin "lost" on account of not achieving a breakthrough, not because they were slaughtered like cattle. It was a strategic failure, not a tactical one. I don't like this much Riboku shilling, not even the actual Chinese suck him off this much even when he's considered a great dude and a hero of the era.

 

[Manu_2006]

I hope the zhao freak king rapes Kaine in front of riboku <33

 

[sixtem]

riboku still a massive hypocrite, "omg Qin is evil, how dare they want to unify china?" yea it's much better now with several kingdoms that always war with one another, with psychotic and pedo kings and then we have you and your soldiers who massacre hundreds of thousands of soldiers and enslave who knows how many, how are you not evil riboku? you are way worse then Qin. with Kanki dead Riboku is now the most evil character.

Actions taken in self-defense are not equivalent to the actions of an aggressor. It's also silly to regard Ei Sei's ideal as all that functional. Actual history shows that Qin Shi Huang was a despotic tyrant that killed millions, so supporting his unification is like putting the King of Zhao in charge of all of China even after millions are slaughtered in wars of conquest.

Ignoring that and just looking at the manga's universe, you still have the reality that, even after unification, conflict and war aren't going anywhere. It just becomes internal or against foreign groups.

At this point he should seriously just use his popularity and stage a coup. Like yeah, he can talk about Qin being wrong with the unification thing, but the Zhao higher ups are pretty corrupt and unlike with Qin, this is something Riboku can do something about if he really cared about his people. Since it's not like he's Yang Wenli with his insistence on democracy, there's ideologically nothing stopping Riboku from toppling the current King.

Riboku's biggest flaws are his loyalty to hierarchy and how terrible he is with politics. The former gives him an ideological opposition to a coup and the latter means he'd probably fuck it up. There's also the practical risks of triggering a civil war that would weaken Zhao and open it to invasion from its other neighbors in addition to the risk that his lands could be sacked and his people slaughtered if he rebels.

The King of Zhao is horrendous, but the depraved crimes he commits cause far less suffering than what Riboku may trigger with a coup.

 

[Kushinda]

Actual history shows that Qin Shi Huang was a despotic tyrant that killed millions

Said history was written mostly by the Han dynasty that followed him and was very interested in making a statement on why exactly the Qin dynasty was so evil and corrupt that it had to go and that they totally weren't making their own powergrab. The first emperor was brutal, but not outrageously or especially so by the standards of the time (for context this was around the same time Rome obliterated the cities of Corinth and Carthage from the face of the earth). All in all his rule was almost certainly more good than bad.

But what about the mass burial of scholars?

The majority of the people buried were not scholars but fangshi, essentially so-called oracles, magicians, and charlatans that preyed on common folk and officials alike. Most of the hostility towards Qin from the Confucians was a combination of provincialism and being at heads philosophically.

But what about the book burnings?

Qin's burning of books isn't good but it also wasn't actually special. Qin had burned books that were deemed dangerous or morally suspect since the time of Ei Sei's grandfather. He also didn't burn any books with technical information, essentially the ancient equivalent of STEM subjects plus some philosophy, and kept a copy of all burned books in the imperial in case any of them were actually useful, but those were lost when the Han-Chu contention put the entire capital in flames. For some reason Liu Bang and Xiang Yu don't get any shit for it.

But what about his tyranny?

The actual legal codes we have found are basically not much different from Han legal codes. Qin may have been relatively strict, but that was only in comparison to the extremely ineffective feudal governments of the Warring States period. Feudal governments are infamously worthless at actually enforcing any of their laws. Qin's reputation for tyranny isn't completely unearned, but an actual legal code that got enforced (i.e. "rule of law", the main argument of legalism) is going to look tyrannical to people who were previously either untouched by the central government or believed themselves to be above the law.

 

[Higasho]

Thanks for translating.
Excited for the 800th chapter. :3