The second day of school began with a problem no one had wanted to touch.
History.
Language could be taught without too much blood.
Shared-space behavior could be framed as efficiency.
Food transition could be sold as survival.
Even early civic learning could hide itself inside better administration.
But history?
History was where empires kept their appetite polished and holy.
The old learning modules were still stored in the school's core memory membranes. Chu Yan had reviewed them the night before. Victory records. Expansion charts. predator-glory epics. Discipline legends about low-class obedience and imperial inevitability. Human worlds described as hostile resources rather than civilizations.
It wasn't only propaganda.
That would have been easier.
It was memory arranged to make war feel natural.
The attendants knew this too. He could smell their tension before the lesson began. History, under the old model, was safe because it required no questions. It was recital. It was reverence. It was young bodies absorbing the emotional logic of violence before they could recognize it as logic at all.
Now the children were filing in again, mixed classes and mixed instincts, carrying with them the previous day's newness.
They were louder.
That alone felt like proof of change.
Not wild, not chaotic. Just less erased. More willing to occupy space with their voices.
Luosha arrived first among the dominant types and immediately tried to claim the largest curved learning station by spreading himself across it as if body mass were an argument. A low-class child named Iri, smaller and clearly prepared to surrender on reflex, stopped short.
Chu Yan saw the old system appear in their postures before anyone said a word.
He stepped between them.
"You chose that place yesterday," he said to Luosha.
Luosha blinked. "It has room."
"And today?"
Luosha hesitated. That was the point. To interrupt instinct long enough for thought to enter.
Chu Yan turned to Iri. "Where did you learn best yesterday?"
Iri startled like being spoken to directly was still a small violence.
"Near the side light," Iri whispered.
Chu Yan pointed. "Then go there."
Iri obeyed, still uncertain.
Chu Yan looked back at Luosha. "And you?"
Luosha looked annoyed.
Then thoughtful.
Then reluctantly moved one station over.
The attendants watched as if they were witnessing a dangerous experiment with no certainty of containment.
They were.
Once the children settled, Chu Yan opened the history membrane.
The room dimmed slightly.
Old images shimmered into view.
A battlefield.
A torn city.
Imperial ZERG forms moving through smoke like gods of hunger.
Several children made fascinated sounds.
A few leaned forward eagerly.
The attendants went rigid with expectation. This was familiar ground. At last, a lesson the empire knew how to teach.
Chu Yan let the image stay for three breaths.
Then he asked, "What are you seeing?"
Silence.
One attendant nearly twitched.
The oldest habit in the room had just been broken.
Finally, Luosha spoke. "Victory."
Another child said, "Food."
A third, high-class and eager to be correct, said, "Imperial expansion."
Chu Yan nodded at each answer.
Then he asked, "What else?"
This time no one answered quickly.
The image shifted under the membrane's glow.
Smoke.
Broken structures.
Bodies too small to identify clearly.
Iri raised a limb halfway, then lowered it.
Chu Yan waited.
Iri tried again. "Damage."
The room changed around that word.
Not because it was dramatic.
Because it was true in a direction the old lessons never rewarded.
Chu Yan repeated it.
"Damage."
Then he looked at the room.
"Who was victorious here?" he asked.
Luosha frowned. "Us."
"Who was damaged?"
A pause.
The children looked at the image again.
One of the mid-tier juveniles said, slower now, "Them."
Chu Yan let the silence stretch.
Then he asked the harder question.
"And us?"
A visible confusion passed through the room.
The attendants looked deeply uncomfortable now. One of them opened their mouth, perhaps to restore the proper frame, but Chu Yan's gaze flicked once in warning and the attendant went still.
The children stared at the battlefield.
At last, one low-class child near the back said, almost in surprise, "If we are still fighting after, then us too."
The room went quiet in a new way.
Not frightened.
Thinking.
Chu Yan felt it like a current.
"Yes," he said softly.
No lecture.
No moralizing.
He changed the image.
Now the membrane showed a resource chart from an old war period. Increased military output. Reduced civilian nutrition. accelerated hatchling sorting. labor redirection. casualty replacement rates.
The numbers meant little emotionally to the youngest, but patterns did.
"What happened here?" Chu Yan asked.
"War," someone said immediately.
"Yes," he said. "What else?"
The children scanned the chart with furrowed concentration.
One pointed to a declining line. "Less food."
Another to another. "More workers."
A sharper child noticed the juvenile sorting rate. "Faster children."
That made several attendants flinch.
Good, Chu Yan thought.
Let them flinch.
Because that line was the whole truth of war in one statistic:
children processed faster to keep the machine fed.
He did not hide it.
"War," he said, "ate the future first."
The words settled in the room like dust after impact.
For a moment no one moved.
Then Luosha, who always hit hard at the center of a thing once he understood where it was, looked up sharply and asked, "Then why call it glory?"
There it was.
The first true history question.
One attendant made a tiny, involuntary sound of panic.
Chu Yan looked at Luosha and answered with perfect calm.
"Because if they called it hunger, too many people would have seen themselves in it."
The room stilled.
This was dangerous.
This was necessary.
He could feel the old empire resisting around them—not in bodies now, but in the walls, the inherited systems, the memory membranes full of narratives polished for generations.
Good.
Let them resist.
That meant the lesson was real.
He split the display into two columns.
On one side: an old imperial victory account.
On the other: the material consequences that followed.
Expansion.
Then supply collapse.
Victory.
Then juvenile acceleration.
Tactical success.
Then labor depletion.
Fear imposed on others.
Then fear normalized at home.
The children didn't understand every detail.
They didn't need to.
They only needed to see that a story could be told in more than one direction.
A mid-tier child asked, "Were we lying before?"
The question might have broken a different teacher.
Chu Yan only said, "We were telling one side loudly enough to drown the rest."
The attendant nearest the wall lowered their gaze.
Something in that answer had touched them too.
Because history lied to adults just as effectively as it lied to children.
Near the end of the lesson, Chu Yan changed the membrane one final time.
No battlefield.
No chart.
Just a simple timeline.
Names.
Registry.
Doors.
Schooling.
Food transition.
Treaty proposal.
The children stared.
The sequence looked too recent to be history.
Too large to be only the present.
"What is that?" Iri asked.
Chu Yan looked at the line and felt, abruptly, how strange his life had become. A child building history while still young enough to sit on the floor among students.
"This," he said, "is the part after."
After what? Luosha's posture demanded.
"After a world decides survival is not enough."
The lesson ended there.
Not because he was done.
Because they needed to leave with room still open inside them.
As they filed out, the attendants were quieter than the children.
One remained behind.
Older.
Careful.
One of the same attendants who had once warned him that honesty weakened command.
Today, her posture held something different.
Uncertainty, yes.
But not resistance.
She bowed and said, "If we teach them history this way, they may question everything."
Chu Yan looked at the darkened membrane where the old battlefield image no longer glowed.
"Yes," he said.
She waited.
He added, "That is how we know they learned it."
The attendant held still for a long moment.
Then she bowed deeper and left.
Later, in the palace, Chu Yan added another framework note:
History must include cost, not only triumph.
War should be taught through systems and consequence, not inherited appetite.
Children must learn that glory without aftermath is distortion.
He sat with the note for a long time after writing it.
Because this one was bigger than the others.
Doors changed sleep.
Food changed instinct.
Registry changed identity.
History changed what a civilization thought it deserved.
And if the ZERG empire could be taught to look backward without worshipping hunger, then perhaps it could one day look forward without needing an enemy to understand itself.