empire

and later emperors

In my honest opinion, I don't think that large scale use of human sacrifices by the leaders of the Mexica warranted genocide by conquering nations. Hyang chose to take all the Mexica warriors as government s*aves, sentenced to hard labor overseen by their indigenous enemies. What resulted was basically genocide, because the once populous Mexica tribe was whittled down to what the author euphemistically calls "a minority in Mexico" where it used to be the majority. I find that kind of decision reprehensible. I think some readers would say you can't judge his actions by modern standards, but what's the point of a rebirth from modern times into the past if you can't fix some of the big mistakes that people made in the past? The biggest hatred that modern day Chicanas like me have of Spaniards and the real conquistadors was that the indigenous people were taken as s*aves and treated little better than beasts. Most of the Mestizo people in Central America and further south were the product of r*pe, and all the cultural artifacts and archeological treasures were either burned, destroyed or looted by the conquering Europeans. The author made the Koreans in this fictional version of history seem like the good guys because they championed the cause of the downtrodden enemies of the Mexica, but I feel like the author still disregarded the inherent dignity and worth of indigenous life by basically annihilating the Mexica people from the face of the earth. Maybe there are people who are reading this that say, "all the Mexica people were disgusting and worthless because of their human sacrifice customs", but I just want to say in response to that: there are countless good people who are descendants of the Mexica. People who became scientists, doctors, religious leaders, philanthropists, actors, and more... what was wrong was the superstitious ideology of the time. Once that was eliminated, the descendants of the Mexica became normal people. Isn't this common sense? Because of that, I am quite disappointed with the author's "Mexica punishment" treatment.

I felt uneasy, disgusted and disappointed when reading the section on the Mexica for many reasons. I really felt like the author had deeply seated anti-indigenous racist sentiments (believe me, I'm very familiar with that kind of mentality, having grown up around the distorted thinking of those who hate indigenous people and their culture). Maybe that's because about half of my ancestors were indigenous people from Mexico like the Mexica, so I was offended by a lot of sh*t the author wrote about in the section on the New World/New Land (a term which in and of itself can be considered racist). There are a few examples of humiliating descriptions or plots about the Mexica and nearby tribes, but the worst one is probably the friendly warrior who met the Koreans during the first "peaceful" foreign delegation to Tenochtitlan. The native warrior was a captive who was going to be used in human sacrifice, and when a Korean soldier yelled out an expletive at him, he misunderstood that his nickname in Korean was that expletive. Then, from that point on, that poor Native schmuck was called that expletive by all the Koreans he worked with — simply because it's hard to pronounce his actual name. WTF author???!!! Can you be any more offensive???? Okay, using that language misunderstanding as a joke was fine at first, but when it became a running gag, I was quite offended and annoyed. Is it really that hard to pronounce his real name? Even if it is, Westerners also think that Asian names are hard to pronounce, but we put up with it because we don't want to look like complete ***holes. I mean, that's common decency, to strive hard to pronounce someone's name in their native language as correctly as possible. Insisting on calling that poor guy by an expletive is a real copout... in short, it pissed me off.

so the first two chapters are about his life in the modern world and him being obsessed with history and invention after that he got a job as a civil servant and then later quit to work in smithy after that he died of an explosion and was sent to the past. He was then regarded as a prodigy because at the age of 4-5 he read many books that are for adults then went on to inventing things