a running theme, in lhjc:
“神明不过人寄托而已。” 盛灵渊顿了顿，过了好一会，他又轻声说，“我么？我大概是人的妄念吧.” // “Gods are merely where humans place their trust, nothing more.” Sheng Lingyuan paused for a long moment, then said softly, “I? Say perhaps that I am humans’ foolish notion”
天神只会作为牺牲，让群魔分而食之。能镇压群魔的，只有更凶狠的恶魔吗？// Gods could only serve as sacrifices, for demons to divide and consume. The only way to suppress demons was with demons of greater evil and malice?
背叛祖训的人，不再受山神的庇佑。神明将与泥塑共朽，也或者，人们所信奉的，本来就是痴妄 。// One who betrayed their ancestors’ teachings could no more receive the blessings of the mountain gods. The gods would decay with their vessels of clay, or perhaps whatever faith people placed in them, at their base they were just foolish delusions.
赤渊每动荡一次，就有一枚封火令粉身碎骨将其镇住，如果这也能叫一“族”……
那么守火人一族，就是他亲手做出来的、诞生就是为了牺牲的祭品。难怪死都不让他安 // every time Chiyuan trembled, one of these seals would shatter itself to subdue it. If this could be called a ‘race’… Then the fire guardian race was created by his own hand, born only to be sacrificed as offerings.
不过他呢，一把刀而已。// But him? He is a blade, nothing more.
假如朱雀骨天生注定了要粉身碎骨，那么它为什么要生出灵智？为什么要有自我意识？难道就为了殉职的时候体会一次灭顶的痛苦，给这场殉葬增加一点无关紧要的悲壮？他存在的意义是什么 // If the fate of a Zhuque bone [seal] was to shatter, then why would it give rise to consciousness? Why have self-awareness? Merely for the purpose of experiencing the pain of being extinguished when it came time to die in the line of duty, to give this sacrificial burial some added pointless tragedy? What was the meaning of his existence?
太多绝望的人和疯狂的人，这些人抱着死婴、拖着残躯，必须要靠一个念想才能活下去。丹离他们这是造了一个活生生的“念想”，将一个孩子架在神坛上。可神坛……不就是祭坛吗？// Too many people, desperate and mad, holding their dead infants, dragging their broken bodies, needed to depend on a cherished notion in order to go on living. Dan Li and his faction made this living ‘notion’, placing a child on an altar of worship. But an altar of worship… was that not just an altar for sacrifice?
就因为他在不巧的时候，托生在不巧的肚子里，就必须得将每滴血、每寸魂都刮下来，献上祭台，度这些人平安? // Just because at the wrong time he was born from the wrong womb, he had to take every drop of blood, scrape off every fragment of soul, and offer them on a sacrificial altar to keep these people safe?
他曾是受万民供奉、享无尽香火的神像，经年日久，生了神与灵。可是世间没有白享的香火，神龛是要代替造神的人，餍足群魔的。 // Once he was a divine statue that accepted the worship of many and enjoyed countless offerings of incense, over time giving rise to divinity and spirit. But in this world no incense is enjoyed for nothing; shrines are to take the place of the person who created the god, to satisfy the demons.
just the way this story plays with the question, across so many characters and in so many variations, of
if you create something so that it can do what you cannot, hold the hope you so desperately need, slay the demons you cannot face, accomplish the tasks you cannot endure, bear on its blade or its hands the blood you cannot spill, can save you from chaos and strife and your own fears…
if you create such a thing and call it a god or a weapon or a tool or a monster, and set it on that path towards its (your) purpose…
if you do all this, but the thing you have created is perhaps not a thing after all but a being, a self, with its own mind and thought and ability to feel pain, to experience and act; the ability to choose but the awareness written into its existence of the purpose for which it was created, and thus the knowledge that to choose would mean to betray, but to fulfill would mean to bleed…
if you forge a sacrifice whose fate is to shatter, but first to know life…
what, then, is it? what, then, are you? how, then, do you distinguish between loyalty and betrayal, deliverance and atrocity?
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