“So, you’re giving overlords the credit for all those inventions.” Cassie’s voice was doubtful.
“Not precisely.” Jun balked. “The overlords were never any good at invention. Their only talent lay in exploitation. This is evident from the very start. There would be no overlord culture at all if they hadn’t solved the puzzle of how to exploit horses as something more than a source of meat. From there, they learned to exploit other human beings.”
“How do you mean?” Cassie asked.
“Consider the topic of metallurgy. History books frequently sing the praises of overlords for their invention of bronze weapons, but this is ridiculous when you think about it.”
“Yes, I see your point.” Griffin seemed to be turning over a new theory in his mind. “Mining metals requires a detailed knowledge of the local terrain. This could only be achieved by a sedentary population who worked the land and could identify ore deposits. Metal craft would also require a specialized labor force. A farming community with a dependable food supply could afford to support the efforts of miners and metalworkers. In contrast, nomads on horseback held only a superficial knowledge of the terrain through which they moved. They certainly had no specialized skills other than combat.”
“But they could threaten and bully the people who did,” Cassie observed. “Once an overlord gang was able to target a farming community that had its own miners and metalworkers, they could force them to make weapons to overlord specifications.”
“I believe you’re both right,” Jun concurred. “The same principle would have been true in the invention of the spoke-wheeled chariot. Sedentary woodworkers and blacksmiths would have crafted the vehicles the overlords required to carry out their endless battles with one another.”
“Because nomad populations were so mobile, I can see how they might have spread their extorted inventions all the way east to China. But what about horse domestication?” the pythia insisted. “I mean, there are wild horses in this part of Asia so that might have happened right here.”
“DNA,” Rou murmured cryptically.
Jun wisely decided not to remark on the fact that his granddaughter had finally found her voice. Apparently, he realized that doing so would only dampen her budding conversational skills. He proceeded as if she’d been actively conversing with the group all day. “Yes, you are correct. Until quite recently, horse domestication was believed to have developed in isolation in China. However, we now have DNA results which prove that theory to be false.”
“How so?” Griffin asked.
“The yDNA of all the horses in China, in fact of all domesticated horses in the world, comes from a bloodline that originated in Kazakhstan. It would seem that domesticated male horses were brought into China by the overlord nomads and bred with wild mares who were caught locally and later domesticated.”
“So, the overlords loaded up their horses and their war wagons and came to China looking for a new place to set up their extortion racket,” Cassie said. “But that still doesn’t connect all the dots for me. Why are you so sure that the man in my vision was your Yellow Emperor?”
Jun seemed to take no offense at her dogged persistence. “There are many stories associated with the man known as Huang Di—the Yellow Emperor. Some have been dismissed as pure myth when they should have been viewed as clues to his real identity. Let’s start with the name itself, ‘Yellow Emperor.’”
“Perhaps an association with the river of the same name?” Griffin suggested.
“Or quite literally a description of the coloring of the man,” Jun countered. “Cassie said the man in her vision was blond. Myths tell us that the Yellow Emperor had four eyes. Two appeared shut at all times, but he could always see what people were doing.”
“Now that has to be fiction,” Cassie objected.
“No,” Rou asserted quietly.
The two visitors glanced at her in puzzlement.
Jun smiled. “You need to consider how Caucasian eyes might appear to an Asian who had never seen such eyes before. The Caucasian eye is more deeply recessed in the skull than an Asian eye. It is the reason your eyelids have a fold, and ours do not.”
Griffin peered at Cassie’s face and then at Jun’s, apparently noting the difference for the first time. “You’re quite right, of course.” His voice held a note of amazement.
“In Asia, there are women who have plastic surgery to create a double eyelid because this is considered more beautiful.”
“Get out!” Cassie exclaimed. “It’s the skin-bleaching issue from Africa and India all over again—everybody trying so hard not to look like themselves.”
“I imagine because the Western standard of beauty dominated so many colonized countries,” Griffin speculated. “A sad legacy of overlord values.”
“Perhaps now you can understand why an ancient historian might have interpreted double eyelids as another pair of eyes,” Jun continued. “A figurative way of saying that the Yellow Emperor had Caucasian eyes.”
His listeners offered no contradiction.
“But there is more evidence,” the trove keeper went on. “Much more. The Yellow Emperor is frequently credited with inventing the spoke-wheeled war chariot. As we have just discussed, this is an invention brought to China by overlords. Any sort of wheeled conveyance would have been far more useful on the open plains of the steppes than in the mountains of China.
“Aside from the war chariot itself, Huang Di supposedly invented the south-pointing chariot. He is said to have won a decisive victory over an enemy on a foggy battlefield using this device to find his way. The most interesting fact about a south-pointing chariot is that it only works over flat terrain. If the wheels
