Senior Sacrifices

At the end of the Warring States Period, the Qin Kingdom began to become more and more powerful after the Shang Martingale Change Method was adopted. After the internal strife of Lao Ai and Lu Buwei, the First Emperor, Ying Zheng, appointed Li Si as the prime minister, and Wang Jian and Huan Gonggong as the grand generals. This action infuriated all the people in the world. Some of them raised their hands to fight back, and the most powerful force was the Mo family. Since the Mo family had always followed the strategy of "loving each other but attacking each other", the world's righteous scholars all responded, and those who responded threw life and death away, and the people of the martial world all revered them as "ink people". Faced with the pressure of the Blizzard Qin, could the Mo family turn the tide? This was how a life-and-death duel would begin? [Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] [Next Chapter]

I can cover the sun and the moon with my heart! The color of the mountains and rivers changed! The Heavens had no eyes, but they were able to defy the heavens and turn into a demon! The heaven and earth were moved! Blood flowed like a river, washing away the muddy water! The universe was turned upside down! Close]

When I started translating Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan in 2010, blissfully unaware of the depth and the magnitude of the work, several people tried to dissuade me. One potential publisher even lured me with an offer to translate another work of Kalki. Reason: there were already many translations around. Yes, there were. But most of them, though done with utmost sincerity, failed to create the emotional bond with the readers which the original author had effortlessly done in the Fifties when Ponniyin Selvan was serialised in a popular magazine. I did not rush up. I did not have a target or deadline. I let the translation work progress in its own pace. That explains the six long years I spent for this project. I read and re-read the first draft a dozen times before handing it over to my editors. There were many points of contention. There were issues where we could not reach a consensus easily. Finally the hard copy was ready for publication in 2016. The publisher had jitters and so did I. We got ready rough copies of two volumes. I gave it to two of my friends, who had read the original more than sixty times, with a mandate to read them in one go. They did and said “This is the best you can do in English.” The work culminated not when the book was released by a former Central Minister in 2016, not even when it went for three editions but when an ardent fan of Kalki sent a mail to me in 2019. “It was as if Kalki himself rendered his great work in English.”

This book is about the relationship between the Buid value system and their history of resistance to the lowland world.

A tremendous piece of research, conducted over ten years, in which are listed, in alphabetical order, the names of over 60,000 officers of the British Empire who died during the Great War, including nurses and female aid workers. Based on the CWGC Registers, the information provided includes not only that shown in ‘Officers Died' but also the place of burial or commemoration. The alphabetical listing means that looking up a name does not require prior knowledge of the regiment (as in ‘Officers Died') though this information is given, as well as cross-reference to the relevant page number in ‘Officers Died’.

How much can one man give when faced with the prejudice of two worlds? Acknowledged at last by the Governing Council, his life mating accepted, Jonathan Thomsin makes a home on Daran with his husband, Talin of the Warrior Order. He knows he will never see Earth or his family again and learns to live with that endless grief. Jon is ecstatic when the Daranii Council gives Jon permission to return to Earth for life-saving surgery and allows him to contact and stay with his family for six months. He will be healed in body, his grief left behind on Daran. Everything is possible, even peace between Daran and Earth. There are many issues to solve, people to convince, and prejudices to overcome. For Jon, there was one problem that overshadowed the rest. He had been irrevocably changed while on Daran. Jon forgot the old adage “you can’t go home again.” This is book 2 in the Daranii Justice Series, you must read book one, The Price of Surrender, before reading The Promise of Sacrifice to enjoy the full story.

Various fundamental and vital areas and aspects of human life are in some way crucially interwoven with the ideas, ideals, and practices of sacrifice. As an attention-grabbing example of how importantly sacrifice may influence society, let us mention (suicide) terrorist attacks that by spreading sorrow, panics, and fear have changed the face of today's world. But the importance of sacrifice reaches broader and deeper. The authors of this book show that it is connected with the origins of human culture and its transformations. This interdisciplinary book brings the results of the research in the areas of humanities and social science. Various aspects of sacrifice are considered and connected. The book is an important contribution to the formation of a culture of sacrifice and offering, appropriate for the modern world. Professor Robert Petkovsek is the Dean of the Faculty of Theology, University of Ljubljana. Research Professor Bojan Zalec is the Head of the Institute of Philosophy and Social Ethics at the Faculty of Theology, University of Ljubljana.