R. F. Kuang

“You would make a terrible prostitute. No charm.”

“You’re a war orphan. You’re a southerner. You weren’t supposed to pass the Keju. The Warlords like to claim that the Keju makes Nikan a meritocracy, but the system is designed to keep the poor and illiterate in their place. You’re offending them with your very presence.”

Combat, Strategy, History, Weaponry, Linguistics, and Medicine

“Consider me bullied and intimidated, just let me sleep.”

“Sometimes I think this is as bad as the Speer Massacre,” Kitay said cheerfully. “And then I think—nah. Nothing is as bad as the casual genocide of an entire race! But this is pretty bad.”

“A scholar traveling a well-trodden road passes a pear tree. The tree is laden with fruit so heavy that the branches bend over with its weight. Yet he does not pick the fruit. Why?”

If a tree by a well-traveled road has this much fruit, then there must be something wrong with the fruit.

White Tiger, the Black Tortoise, the Azure Dragon, and the Vermilion Bird.

Jun can teach you how to be a decent soldier. But I can teach you the key to the universe,” Jiang said grandly, before bumping his head on a low-hanging branch.

“Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world. I need you to suspend your disbelief. I need you to simply accept that these things are possible.”

“I’m supposed to take it as true that you’re a god?”

“Don’t be silly. I am not a god,” he said. “I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.”