Lian considered for a moment. "So which of the old writers do you believe in? Yao? Zai the Wise? Wu the Lesser?"

Zemin chuckled again but Shuren was not impressed. He stared right at Lian and shook his head, his entire face exclaiming: This bitch.

She'd named three of the classical greats, to be sure. But based on the overwhelming male-ness of the procession she'd seen, she'd figured they wouldn't be the top three on any of their reading lists.

"No. Not those ones." Zemin replied.

They were the three great misandrists of the Central Empire. They wrote and helped the reigns of the great Empresses of history, over 1500 years ago, when the law had disinherited men from almost any rights. Wu the Lesser had once written of men: "They are good for two things. Fucking and fighting. Of the first they are useful but not enjoyable. Of the second they are useful only insomuch as they take enjoyment from life's worst miseries. They are in the full a nasty, brutish, disgusting sex, completely without rational thought, incapable of spiritual fulfillment, and often barely capable of forming a complete sentence. They are another cattle with which we women have been burdened as shepherds. No good can come from their participation in wider society, and every precaution must be taken to control and properly direct their aggressive, senseless, and disgusting habits."

In Wu the Lesser's time, men could not serve in the court of the Empress. She was overseen by ten queens and a hundred duchesses and the only men who ever set eyes on her were a set of guards whose genitals and tongues had been removed in service to the Celestial Throne. The Empress was impregnated at a time of her choosing, through a thick sheet, by a beast of a man who was slaughtered afterwards. They took the cattle metaphor quite literally back then.

To suggest a return to those times was an obvious insult, but, Lian thought, not one she necessarily disagreed with.

"Why not?" She asked. "They were in the past. Did they not have some wisdom at that time?"

"Of course you would think that," Shuren's voice was now seeping frustration. "You're a woman. And a freak of one at that. You'd love to have fifty men on leashes at your beck and call."

"Oh I've already had more than fifty," Lian winked at Shuren. The boy turned pale, then flushed into a deep red. He averted her eyes the rest of the conversation.

"There may be some wisdom in their writings," Zemin tried to placate both his friend and the Shuli Go. "But the excesses of their age are evident. Many of the issues we see today had already taken root in the Xiao dynasty. Corruption's a perfect example – the Xiao court was the most corrupt in history. I doubt they have much to offer our people who have moved on from the barbaric practices the Xiao entertained."

"Then you must be Jia Golden Age thinkers," Lian surmised, referencing the period after the Matriarchy of the Xiao age had passed. "I'm assuming Gao's at the top of your list then, even if everything's backwards."

Shuren again shook his head, but didn't dare speak up again for fear of meeting Lian's confident smirk. Zemin was the only one who responded.

"No. The taint of the Xiao dynasty was in almost everything written since it. And the scars reach back even further than that. There's very little good that's come about in the last two thousand years, it has to be said."

"So you're reaching back to...when?"

"To the classical masters. The first scribes who truly understood who we are as a people."

"Like who?"

"Wong Xieren," Shuren said forcefully, though his attention appeared to be focused on a small patch of grass poking through the stone-paved road.

"Wong Xieren?" Lian asked, unable to keep the ridicule from appearing in her voice.

"Wong Xieren. The one and same," Zemin confirmed. "Though not just him, of course. There are dozens of writers we think exemplify the path our nation should be taking. But Wong Xieren..." Zemin's own voice had traversed into reverence. "He is the foundation upon which the rest of them built their ideas."

"Wong Xieren..." Lian mumbled to herself, completely taken aback.