Honghuang: Starting from the Strange Great Shang

Let me raise a point. There's a problem that many authors on Qidian (a Chinese online literature platform) have overlooked: they start as scions of noble families, but when they encounter trouble while venturing out, they don't expose their families. Once the incident is over, they treat it as the past.

Is the transformation from a human emperor to the Son of Heaven a form of surrender? Even the so-called human emperor of the Shang Dynasty had to submit to divine authority. In contrast, the Son of Heaven in the Zhou Dynasty directly granted the monarch the power to govern the people on behalf of Heaven, freeing the monarch from the constraints of religious belief.

Stop bringing up "Investiture of the Gods." The Shang Dynasty was a terrifying dynasty where people ate each other, used human sacrifices, and killed people indiscriminately. At least the Zhou Dynasty was better than the Shang Dynasty. What makes the Shang Dynasty worthy of the title "Emperor"?

The protagonist should immediately break the life-sharing contract. This is completely entrusting one's life to another, which is the protagonist's biggest flaw. To put it bluntly, if the enemy wants to kill the protagonist, they can simply kill the Qilin instead.

A life-and-death pact? Speechless! It's like the protagonist's life has a loophole, entrusting their life to someone else. Surely the imperial family wouldn't be without such a countermeasure. This design is an outdated concept from old novels; it's now considered extremely toxic and disliked. I wonder if it was changed later?

Why did hundreds of emperors call themselves "Son of Heaven"? Was it because "Son of Heaven" had a higher status, or because they were too shy to use the term "Human Emperor"?

I was really looking forward to the ghost cultivation scene at the beginning, but then I realized the protagonist couldn't choose one of the four options. Immortal and Martial are common choices, so I was really looking forward to Witchcraft and Literature, since the system could even help with comprehension. In the end, I chose Martial, one of the more common choices, and even then, it turned out to be the weakest one. Why couldn't the protagonist just choose the most prestigious one?

The road divisions are too abstract. In universal values, gods and immortals are synonyms for the ultimate and all-encompassing. The other three roads are also included in this. Trying to be conventional for the sake of being unconventional is really awkward.

The title of the work does not match the content of the work.

Many people, after watching a few videos from marketing accounts, claim that King Zhou abolished human sacrifice. They ignore proper historical records and just blindly follow these marketing claims. King Zhou only reduced the number of offerings used by other nobles in their sacrifices; he didn't reduce the number used by his own. Marketing accounts are masters of taking things out of context.