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language: Korean (English tr. Anton Hur)
country: South Korea
year: 2025
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: The Bleeding Empire, #2
dates read: 7.11.25-13.11.25
Kim Sung-il’s Blood for the Undying Throne (tr. Anton Hur), sequel to Blood of the Old Kings, is a more than worthy follow-up to the first book in the series. the translation did feel a bit less polished, but that didn’t significantly impact my overall enjoyment of it: it governs.
like Blood of the Old Kings, it follows three main characters. one is Arienne, the young sorceress who was one of the three protagonists of the first book. here she finds herself venturing into the desolate wasteland once known as Mersia, devastated a century ago by what is generally believed to be a powerful weapon of the Empire. another is Emere, the younger prince of Kamori, a supporting character in the first book; serving as a Councillor in the Imperial capital, Emere finds himself drawn into Imperial political machinations and, like Cain in the first book, presented with a fateful choice. finally, there is Yuma, the Chief Herder of the city of Danras, through whom we see the history of the country known before the Imperial conquest as Merseh and her decision to ally herself with the Empire in hopes of overcoming the necromancer-king Eldred.
it’s a book about a lot of things: colonial assimilation, regime change, destiny. it is also, perhaps first and foremost, a book about an E/empire consuming itself. Blood for the Undying Throne zeroes in on what was already a striking element of Blood of the Old Kings, namely the Empire’s use of the corpses of dead sorcerers as the basis of its power — both its military power, as these “Power generators” drive gigantic military automata and P/powered armor, and its economic power, as these generators provide essentially electricity that illuminates streetlights, turns mills, etc. the Empire is very literally built on death — on, as becomes apparent over the course of the novel, murder, not only of magic-users in the lands it conquers but even of those sorcerers born among its own citizens in the Imperial heartland. there is a certain wishful thinking here: the novel imagines a world where the corpses left in the wake of Empire can still scream, and where their screams have the potential to shatter the Empire’s power.
if it is, as Kim says in his acknowledgments, a book about “regrets”, it is also a book about rebellion and about the fragility of domination. as Blood of the Old Kings did, Blood for the Undying Throne affirms that sometimes even a losing battle is worth fighting, if only to show the future that someone has been willing to fight back against tyranny — to show the future that tyranny can be fought, so that in a future time, when the moment is right, people will know that rebellion is a possibility.
I was not, perhaps, quite as thoroughly consumed by this book as by Blood of the Old Kings, but it’s still extremely good. please read these books!!
moods: adventurous, dark, reflective, tense