{"id":6244,"date":"2026-09-06T20:36:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T19:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/?p=6244"},"modified":"2026-09-06T20:36:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T19:36:12","slug":"know-your-enemy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/know-your-enemy\/","title":{"rendered":"Know your enemy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2015 Sun Tzu, The Art of War<\/p>\n

Well, apparently nobody in the \u201cSalvos\u201d world got the memo, which makes the world so convincing and believable.<\/p>\n

The Humans are the most ignorant of all major species, it seems, since they have a wrong understanding of Demons, Elves, Kobolds, and Spirits. They think Demons all follow Regnorex, and that he rules the entirety of the Netherworld, while in fact he rules an area a thousand miles across, making it the size of the Motharis mountain range. They didn\u2019t know that wild demons are a thing until Salvos told them. They don\u2019t know anything about history \u2013 nothing about the Worldwalkers, nothing about the state of the Nexeus of old, almost nothing about space travel, nothing about the Dragons, about the Kobold lore, nothing about why the Elves attack them periodically, and nothing about the Corruption. They think the Spirits are some kinds of spiritual entities you pray to, while they are merely material entities similar to the Demons; they think the Spirit Lord is some kind of a God and pray to him, and they know nothing about the Arcraem.<\/p>\n

The worst problem is that they would never admit that they don\u2019t know those things. They have their misapprehensions and they hold on to them with incredible force.<\/p>\n

The Demons are hardly any better. The Vanguard of Regnorex, the 100 Primeval Demons, know that the mortals wear clothes, but they don\u2019t know why or how, so they wear pants on their heads and so on. They don\u2019t know that there was a Kingdom before Regnorex, in the ancient times, or that the Devil used to be the King of all Netherworld. They don\u2019t know that there are sub-surface layers of the Netherworld, or that there is Corruption, or how it came to be.<\/p>\n

The Fairies seem to know more, which is logical since the Fairy Queen was there when Trico deceived them all and broke the world. The Spirit Lord knows all about the Corruption, and has measures to deal with it in the Spirit Plane. Unlike what the Humans think of him, he seems to be a calculated, self-serving bastard, who has been condemned by the Arcraem and unsuccessfully confronted by the Archangel, and I suspect him to be Trico himself, but I don\u2019t have strong evidence for that. In any case, the System identifies the Spirit Lord, also known as Soli, as the arch-villain, and the supreme danger that will result in the destruction of the Nexeus and the death of the Arcraem if not stopped.<\/p>\n

In any case, the fact that you get the feeling of deep history, that\u2019s mostly forgotten, and almost everybody has distorted or outright wrong ideas about everything, makes the whole thing look like an actual, old world, with actual civilizations that inhabit it and interact mostly from the position of ignorance. If everybody knew everything and everybody was on the same page of every story, the whole thing would look completely fake and implausible.<\/p>\n

So, the Humans think their problem are the invading Elves and Demons. The Kobolds think their problem are the humans who are causing the end of the world with summonings. Salvos thinks the problems are the Corruption and the sacrificial ritual of Regnorex which is likely to break the world completely. The Archangel thinks the problem is the Spirit Lord, because he received the orders from the Arcraem to that effect. So, it seems that only Salvos and the Archangel seem to be on the same page, but neither of them knows the whole truth, or the Archangel would be in the Netherworld dealing with the problem. Also, it seems that the Arcraem is placing Salvos, probably by focusing the timelines so that she can be the right person at the right place at the right time with the right knowledge. The funniest of all is that the Archangel looked completely insane before we got enough information to figure out that he just knows ten times more stuff than anyone else, and that he and the Spirit Lord are on the same page while everybody else is completely ignorant of anything important.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help but try to imagine how people will react once they are clued in. We can surmise part of it from the level of incredulity of the Human Elites when Salvos explained what she knew about the Corruptions, the Kobold lore, the Dragons and the Worldwalkers. Someone who actually knows stuff can look crazy, and that, too, is why the world feels credible. Basically, nobody knows who they are, why they are there, who their enemy is, and who their supposed allies are. In such a situation, their survival is accidental.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6244"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6245,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6244\/revisions\/6245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}