Chapter 192: The Birth Of Mythology
Xiang Chuan finished drinking all the soup in the bowl, contentedly patted her little belly, and looked up to find that the people around her were still distracted. She thought that young people nowadays really haven’t seen much of the world.
But there was no helping it; most modern literature was created by AI, focusing on being wholesome, formulaic, and templated, and lacking the classic literary foundation from ancient human history, making it read extremely dry. Xiang Chuan recalled handing over those few books of The Count of Monte Cristo to the Cultural Affairs Bureau, then, bored at home, casually looking at a few modern novels on the shared electronic bookshelf, and after ten minutes, she couldn’t stand it anymore and closed the first book.
Simply put, it was a love story about a man and a woman who accidentally met on a shuttle during interstellar voyage, and gradually warmed up their feelings through coincidences and chance.
The good news was that there were no love rivals inside, no “female competition” that 21st Century readers would criticize, or even the “dual purity” setting favored by those readers who pursued spiritual feudalism.
The bad news was that the writing was extremely dull and boring.
She really couldn’t believe there was a story in the world more boring than those assembly line domineering CEO novels! She was wrong! She would never complain about domineering CEO novels again! Xiang Chuan wailed in her heart at the time.
At the same time, she also understood why the sudden appearance of those three classic novels, The Count of Monte Cristo, could cause such a huge reading frenzy, and why the Twelfth Fleet treasured the incomplete Romeo and Juliet.
The novels written by modern AI probably weren’t even as good as the school’s history books.
Thinking about it, AI-generated novels also needed a database to support them, and the modern database only had that one non-circulated Romeo and Juliet; what else could the creation-type AIs from other fleets write?
Compared to these dry stories, the appearance of The Count of Monte Cristo, Don Quixote, and Dream of the Red Chamber was like dropping a nuclear impact on culture-starved modern people.
Not to mention the historical backgrounds in the books that could make the Historical Research Institute’s keyboards smoke from typing, the stories alone were very attractive.
Whether it was the revenge-style satisfying read of The Count of Monte Cristo or the highly satirical Don Quixote, every afternoon during rest time, Xiang Chuan saw students from different clubs gathered together, deeply engaged in discussing the plots.
The love story in Dream of the Red Chamber was even more attractive to female classmates. Although its poetry and writing style differed from the more straightforward The Count of Monte Cristo and Don Quixote, plots like reincarnation reunion, ancient marriages, and emotional ups and downs had an overly fatal attraction for young girls tormented by modern novels, to the point that Xiang Chuan even saw a few female classmates who vaguely had the potential to become “Redologists.”
This also proved that classics become classics because they can attract large numbers of followers no matter the era.
However, after so many days, most residents of the Third Fleet had finished reading at least one of these three novels. Some were attracted by the stories and historical backgrounds and started a second round of reading, but more people turned their attention to new books.
A recent social survey by the Cultural Affairs Bureau showed that nearly ninety percent of the Third Fleet’s residents hoped to regularly read ancient novels.
Modern people’s pursuit of culture is extremely terrifying, especially after tasting some sweetness, like thirsty bees gathering in front of the flowerbed named ancient literature, hoping to draw more nectar.
Although Xiang Xue’s live stream binge-watching and their newly started drama website took on some of the demand, Xiang Xue’s binge-watching was only one or two episodes a day, making some impatient modern people unable to wait, whereas the fully public ancient classic novels allowed them to immerse themselves more in the stories.
Lin Minzhi had discussed it with Xiang Chuan at home several times, and Xiang Chuan also thought the Cultural Affairs Bureau’s strategy of releasing basic novels once a month was good, but she still hoped to squeeze some benefits from the Cultural Affairs Bureau before finalizing the detailed process.
There was no way around it; for the future life of eating and waiting for death, she needed to save some deposits, or else one day she might lose millions like the Club Building did to a fire.
The group with the most rest time was the students. When regular working people had just finished one book, students might have already finished The Count of Monte Cristo and Don Quixote and started focusing on tackling Dream of the Red Chamber.
After many students had read the three ancient novels thoroughly, they originally thought they understood ancient views on love, but Xiang Chuan’s two constellation stories directly stunned everyone into silence.
Sibling marriage, uncle-niece marriage… Is this the imagination of ancient people?
So terrifying!
The classmates sat back in their seats, somewhat distractedly eating the fried rice in their meal boxes. After the interpersonal relationship baptism just now, comparable to a meteorite impact, even the taste stimulation from the delicious fried rice in their mouths felt a bit weaker.
Xiang Chuan was too lazy to care about these young people’s complex states of mind now. Since transmigrating here, it wasn’t the first time the people around her were stunned silent by ancient civilization; she herself had been stunned silent by that liquid food on the first day. She just treated it as cultural impact between two generations.
She was now contacting Manager Wu, who was tasting fried rice in the canteen, and had obtained permission to use fruit. She was having the canteen’s kitchen AI cut some fruit and send it over.
After all, fried rice had quite a bit of oil; one bowl of soup couldn’t fully cut the greasiness, and fruit was needed at key moments.
At this moment, Xiang Xue, who had been silent for a long time, suddenly spoke from across the screen:
[Sister Xiang Chuan, is there something special about the ancient sky? Something that allowed ancient people to look at the stars and make up stories.]
This sentence resonated with the surrounding classmates, who also looked at Xiang Chuan with curiosity.
Xiang Chuan looked up; by now the artificial sun had fully set, the sky showing its original appearance, with planets nearby occasionally visible being left behind by the escort ships during voyage, and even the Milky Way clearly visible.
She spoke faintly: “The sky back then was nothing special; compared to now, it was quite ordinary. Stars were clearly visible less than half the time each day. But people back then could only use firelight to illuminate the night, so they could see the stars more clearly than during our fleet’s departure from Earth.”
“At that time, people perhaps believed that everything in the world had meaning, so they created stories about the birth of the sun, moon, and stars in the sky, and the land, rivers, and seas underfoot.”
“There were too many stars in the sky; through imagination, they compared them to various creatures and human figures, using stories to enrich their images.”
“Later, as human society developed and technology progressed, people gradually understood how nature, the sky, and stars were born, so no new mythological stories were created.”
“Imagining the unknown is the beginning of all mythological stories and all fabricated stories.”
It was also the trait most lacking in modern civilization, Xiang Chuan added in her heart.
