"Well, we don't tend to think about it that way? Giving to a monastery gives you outcomes you want in the world, like clean and fast trains or better schools or vaccines for children. It doesn't matter how it affects your personal moral standing, it matters what the outcomes are."

"...vaccines?"

"Where you inject someone with a weakened version of a virus so their immune system gets practice defeating it?"

"That's, uh, a string of words?"

"...does your society have, uh, steam engines or printing presses or noise-cancelling headphones?"

"We have woodblock printing."

"--uh, good news, societies can be much much better than your society. In my society only 1% of people are farmers but everyone still has more than enough to eat, and only 1 out of every 4000 children die before their fifth birthday, and you can send a book from one side of a continent to the other in less than an eyeblink."

...

He is a the son of a vice minister. He is a member of the Three Judicial Offices. He is not actually entirely qualified.

And he couldn't tell you how many people were farmers, or how many children died, but... it was more than that.

"Do you know how? --I understand if you don't."

"Time doesn't move as long as we're inside here, but at some point I will prop my door and ask my family to call a monk and then the monks will verify that this is real and then you can get a medical caravan. We don't even have to let time move in your world until the caravan is ready."

"Do we have a plan for getting a caravan out of a window?"

"...well, actually, we'd just need to get a cold-chain refrigerator through a window which... is not actually that much easier..."

"I don't know how big that is, but I do believe you. There's also a drop on the other side, if that helps."

"Anyway there are a bunch of engineers who would be overjoyed to discover they now have to figure out how to fit medical supplies and textbooks through a window."

"The textbooks have to be easier."

"But one of the most important projects of my empire is giving vaccines and medicine and nutritional supplements to everyone outside our borders, so we can do it for your empire too. --It'll probably be easier, since you already have a government and monks even if they aren't very good ones."

"You will have to be careful to appear like you are in the spirit of trade and not conquest-- though you might be the strangest traders, you're not going to be that much stranger."

"How would we conquer you via a window?"

"You would be able to fit people through that window, and then you'll have them in the middle of our capital city."

"And then someone could just close the window and our soldiers would be trapped in your capital city, except that we don't even have soldiers, just caravan guards, because wars of conquest are a really bad idea."

... how does this empire even function. How.

"That is fair."

"If you conquer people that don't have enough cultural similarities with you, they get very mad and will blow themselves up around key infrastructure. And at a certain point of civilization you have to educate someone from their earliest childhood so they can participate and you can't really assimilate the people you conquer anymore, except by forcibly educating their children, which will piss them off and then see my previous sentence."

Ah, so Fortitude's empire isn't very good at empir-ing, noted. (Or maybe they are so good internal power struggles are moot?)

"I'll take that under advisement."

Fortitude thinks. "I guess you're probably not as advanced in the Teaching as we are, so society isn't built around people mostly being advanced in the Teaching."

He somewhat doubts this. "Should I know what the Teaching is?"

"It's-- knowing what the will of Heaven is and being able to follow it?"