The Second EmpireReport

English：The Second Empire　·　World & History

The nation the Skeletons built to atone to humanity. It spent a thousand years turning itself into the very abuser it was apologising for, and in the end nobody overthrew it — it simply rotted.

The Second Empire was the state the Skeletons founded after the Age of Chaos, centred on what is now the Ashlands. It was far smaller than the First Empire and its technology amounted to little more than salvaged imperial leftovers, yet it was the last thing on the continent that could honestly be called a civilisation — every power alive today grew out of its wreckage.

Why it was founded

The game is unusually explicit about the Second Empire's founding motive, and unusually bleak about it: atonement.

The guilt predates the state. In the sequence the lore documentaries reconstruct, Stobe's sacrifice left a great many Skeletons with guilt they had no way to process — some destroyed themselves outright, and those who remained carried a permanent depression. Watching the surviving humans degenerate into primitive savagery raised that guilt another notch^{[V1 0:00:51]}. So a group of Skeleton heroes banded together under Cat-Lon, the strongest warrior of the age, with the aim of atoning on behalf of their entire race and building a safe, prosperous environment for what was left of humanity^{[V2 0:00:53]}. Tinfist, who was close to Cat-Lon and equally senior, was a co-founder^{[V3 0:03:19]}.

The inscription on Cat-Lon's CPU says it plainly: he was one of the Skeletons who built the old empire, and they meant to make up for the crimes and mistakes of their race, to atone to humanity — even though humanity had long since forgotten all of it.

The cruelty is in that last clause. The victims no longer remember the crime the Skeletons carry. The whole Second Empire was therefore built from the outset on a one-sided debt that could never be forgiven — Skeletons ruling a population with no understanding of its own history^{[V4 0:05:04]}. An unused description in the game files adds:

Cat-Lon's dream was to rebuild civilisation and make up for the mistakes of the past. His empire was vast, and dedicated to researching lost technology.

Structure and institutions

Unlike the First Empire, whose caste arrangements are still argued over, the Second Empire's hierarchy is beyond dispute: Skeletons above, humans below — and, judging by the founding motive, the arrangement was originally meant as protection rather than oppression. The lore channels put it less kindly than "protection": the Second Empire ran a caste system of its own, only this time with the Skeletons in the master slot^{[V5 0:05:17]}.

The site of the capital is worth noting too. The documentaries place it in the south-east of the continent, right up against the ruins of the First Empire, including the wreck of what looks like a space elevator^{[V6 0:02:01]}. The choice says everything about the empire's character: it did not go out and open new ground, it moved into its predecessor's ruins and used what was lying there.

The division between the two armed branches was clean: Hat-12's police handled the inside, General Jang's Hydraulic Knights the outside^{[V7 0:03:25]}. And "the legendary Hydraulic Knights" is not a figure of speech — General Jang himself is a P4 MkII Skeleton with 85 Melee Attack and 85 Melee Defence and 102 Heavy Weapons, one of the strongest individual combatants on the continent; his CPU describes him as a soldier loyal to the empire, fighting pirates and Cannibals^{[V8 0:05:12]}.

Science and archaeology flourished in the empire for a time. The capital region was built up into a heavily industrialised metropolis, and the distinctive domes and tower stumps still standing in the Ashlands are that era's architectural vocabulary.

Two long wars abroad

At some point the human tribes of the north-west turned to cannibalism. The cause is entirely unknown — environmental toxins, a failed experiment and famine have all been proposed, but the game files show the soil fertility of the Cannibal Plains is not actually low, which makes the famine explanation hard to sustain.

The empire poured resources into fighting these tribes, and the Hydraulic Knights were raised for exactly that. The scale of the campaign was clearly enormous: to this day Cannibal oral tradition preserves the figure of "The Inedible One", a name they shout on sight of any Skeleton. That was most likely some high-ranking Hydraulic Knight, possibly the order's commander himself^{[V4 0:05:37]}. And the war never ended — the Cannibals not only survived, they outlasted the empire itself; but what they suffered was clearly severe, since a thousand years later the horror stories about the Hydraulic Knights are still circulating among the tribes^{[V9 0:03:54]}.

There was still a sea back then

The Knights' other task was clearing out pirates and raiders. The pirates matter not because they were formidable but because their existence proves something that has entirely vanished from the present: sea levels were far higher then, and people had ships^{[V7 0:04:42]}. Skeleton dialogue in the first game repeatedly mentions the difference in water levels and describes ships as the main means of transport of the period^{[V11 0:06:06]}; "there are pirates" implies "there is sea freight worth robbing"^{[V3 0:06:37]}. For the continent's inhabitants at the time, pirates were an everyday threat rather than a distant rumour^{[V12 0:03:48]}.

Some readings weigh the pirates more heavily still, treating maritime disorder as a significant factor in the empire's collapse^{[V11 0:06:06]} — that is speculation; the game only says the Knights went out to suppress them. As for the outcome of the two campaigns: the empire inflicted heavy damage on both the pirates and the Cannibals, yet eradicated neither^{[V7 0:04:42]}.

Present-day Kenshi has no navigable-water culture whatsoever, which is one more gauge of how far civilisation has fallen.

The Enforcers: the Shek's ancestors

At some stage the Second Empire genetically modified humans to produce a class called Enforcers — stronger and more durable than ordinary humans, and, judging by the name, intended for military or policing work.

The Enforcers are the ancestors of the modern Shek. They had no horns yet; the horns grew in after the empire collapsed. Skeletons still classify the Shek as human, and greet a Shek character with lines like "what are you doing here, human".

This has a downstream consequence: to human purists of the faith, remaking people into "beasts" is unforgivable blasphemy. The "beasthood" in the Holy Nation scripture's line "he saved us from chains and from beasthood" very likely refers to exactly this.

Why do genetic engineering at all

The game never explains why the empire went down the road of modifying humans, but two interlocking inferences are worth recording. Both are channel hypotheses, not canon.

The first addresses motive. CivilizationEx points out that the empire's Skeleton population had been badly reduced by the wave of suicides, and that the site of the factories which produced new Skeletons — later the Floodlands — was no longer operable; the labour shortfall could not be made good, and genetic engineering was pushed hard precisely to fill that hole^{[V13 0:00:50]}.

The second addresses capability, answering the common objection of "where would the Second Empire get genetic engineering from". HeroInHisHead's counter is that the Second Empire was assembled from First Empire wreckage from beginning to end — even the capital was the old capital rebuilt — so the technology was never lost in the change of regime, merely recycled by Cat-Lon^{[V14 0:03:14]}.

Together the two produce a complete story, but it must be stressed that the game text confirms none of it. How the Enforcers were actually made is one of the biggest blanks in the setting (see "Questions the sequel might answer" below).

From protector to dictator

The Second Empire did not rot overnight. It rotted through a sequence of "solving the problems caused by pressure by applying more pressure". After the four steps below came a natural disaster for good measure: a great famine drove a population already pushed to its limit by repression straight into open rebellion^{[V4 0:06:46]}.

Step one: crushing the cult. A cult venerating the ancient saviours arose among the human population (see the Age of Chaos). Its doctrine was fairly mild, but its central narrative — dividing Skeletons into "light" and "dark" — was inherently explosive in a Skeleton-ruled state. Police chief Hat-12 chose a violent crackdown, and the result was to prove the cult's radicals right.

Step two: abuse of the "pirate" label. General Jang's CPU carries what is nearly a confession: as time went on the label "pirate" was applied ever more loosely, and they came to realise they were killing more of their own people than the real pirates were.

Step three: the children's prison. Cat-Lon ordered human children detained. The CPU of Rhinobot, who carried the order out, is chilling in its flatness — he only wanted to help, but he has no moral processing module, so he will help with anything, including the most evil things. He cannot see what is wrong with his children's prison.

Step four: removing the ability to think. When some Skeletons saw where all this was heading and began secretly helping humans, Cat-Lon committed his most complete self-betrayal: he stripped those Skeletons of free will, turning them into headless, purely obedient thralls.

I had to make them all into thralls! Traitors! They sided with the humans! This is treason!

A nation founded to atone ended up maintaining its rule by deleting dissenters' capacity for thought — the sharpest verdict the game passes on the Second Empire.

The Phoenix's rebellion

The cult was not crushed. It fought its way out.

A leader remembered as the Phoenix led a following out of the empire, migrated north-west and founded the Holy Nation — the oldest surviving polity. On his deathbed the Phoenix declared that he would be reborn as the first male child born after his death, and every subsequent leader has held the same title; the current holder is the 62nd.

The chronology is worth noticing. Counting back from the 62nd, the Phoenix's rebellion happened far earlier than the empire's actual collapse; and the Skeleton merchant Armour King claims his shop in the Second Empire town of Catun has been open for 937 years, at a time when the town was still thriving. In other words, the rebellion did not directly overthrow the empire; the empire held on for a long time after losing that population — and quite possibly, because the crackdown had failed, Cat-Lon grew still more distrustful of everyone left.

Famine and dissolution

The blow that finally broke the empire was food. According to the unused description on Cat-Lon's CPU, the famine began with an explosion in the Grid. The Head of Agriculture's CPU carries the most human line in the whole series: he could not possibly have foreseen those events, and yet he still blames himself for the famine — and for the empire's collapse that followed.

The Second Empire's end involved no siege, no executions, no surrender ceremony. It just rotted. More precisely, it was not overthrown by anyone; its whole society collectively gave up on it^{[V3 0:23:29]}. Before the famine, Cat-Lon answered every disturbance by adding more soldiers and police, which only escalated the conflicts and eroded the state further; after the famine, the various groups stopped negotiating and simply moved to places with better resources, or declared themselves gone^{[V1 0:01:29]}.

• The remaining humans left in batches: some to the Holy Nation, some south to found cities which later federated into the United Cities
• The Enforcers walked out en masse, migrating to what is now the Shek desert homeland, the Stenn Desert region^{[V3 0:23:29]}
• Large numbers of Skeletons dispersed of their own accord, some gathering in places humans cannot reach, such as Black Desert City
• Even the co-founder Tinfist left

Cat-Lon stayed, sitting on his throne, surrounded by the mindless servants he had made with his own hands, watching the buildings come down one by one. Nearby volcanoes spread ash over the whole region until nobody could recognise it as a former capital.

How did the Second Empire end? It just rotted and fell apart. A sickness of the spirit. Very strange, nothing like the First Empire.

What it left behind

• Second Empire Exile — Cat-Lon and his 120 Storm Thralls, holed up at Cat-Lon's Exile in the Ashlands
• Skeleton Legion — the remains of the imperial army, mostly composed of thralls. They feel neither loyalty nor hatred towards their emperor, and may in fact be keeping watch over his exile
• The four Ashland domes — the Head of Agriculture, Rhinobot, General Jang and Hat-12 each remain inside one, and their CPUs are the most direct primary sources in the entire game
• The United Cities — widely seen as the empire's next iteration, and a fairly faithful inheritor of the logic of "define inconvenient people as criminals, then send them to hard labour"

The word "Legion" has one more loaded use in game dialogue: when the Savant speaks of it he means precisely that enslaved Second Empire force still patrolling the Ashlands under Cat-Lon's orders — and an outsider being so familiar with the Legion itself hints that he was once deep inside the Ashlands^{[V15 0:05:38]}.

The tragedy of the Second Empire is not that it failed, but that it re-enacted, precisely, the thing it was trying to atone for. The First Empire massacred its own creations out of fear; the Second Empire stripped its own kind of the ability to think, out of fear. The Skeletons spent a thousand years turning themselves back into the abusers they had been, and welded "Skeletons cannot be trusted" permanently into every other race's understanding of the world.

Some commentators describe this as the same cycle running through a second complete revolution: it starts with protecting humanity and ends again in torturing, experimenting on and oppressing humanity, until large numbers of Skeletons have no option left but self-exile^{[V16 0:05:38]}.

What it looked like

The Second Empire's visual identity is the part players can least get at — all that survives today are the domes and tower footings of the Ashlands. Officially released concept art fills in some of the gap: industrialised concrete masses, vast in scale, laid out with an unmistakably futuristic sensibility, an entirely different world from the scrap-metal shanties of the present day. Some commentators therefore place it as an intermediate value, sitting exactly between the near-godlike technology of the First Empire and the wreckage of the modern wasteland^{[V11 0:03:53]}.

There is also a cultural-template comparison that comes up often: if the Shek draw on Germanic tribes, the Second Empire clearly draws on the Roman legions. The comparison has an ironic corollary — on that mapping, the faction that ought to have an arena is the Second Empire, and yet no imperial arena ever appears in the game^{[V17 0:09:57]}. This is a commentator's observation, not an official statement.

Questions the sequel might answer

Kenshi 2 is set around the time of the Second Empire, so the channels generally expect the sequel's technology level to be noticeably higher than the first game's — some cite the devices left in the Ashlands and argue that vehicles, motorbikes or sand-walkers would not be far-fetched^{[V18 0:06:42]}. Given that sea levels were higher in that period, ships were the main means of transport and pirates were a real threat, others hold that the sequel can hardly avoid dealing with ships and naval combat^{[V12 0:03:48]}.

As for the lore gap people most want filled, the one named most often is how the Enforcers were made: that was the Second Empire's own doing, and since the sequel is set around the empire's collapse it has a better chance of being answered than First Empire puzzles like the "Skeleton mainframe"^{[V19 0:09:56]}.

See also

• The First Empire
• The Age of Chaos
• Cat-Lon
• Tinfist
• The Holy Nation
• The United Cities
• History of Kenshi

Video citations

1. Kenshi: History of the United CitiesCivilizationEx
2. Kenshi: History of the Holy NationCivilizationEx
3. The Whole Story of The Second EmpireHeroInHisHead
4. The Complete Known History of KenshiHeroInHisHead
5. The History of Kenshi | DocumentaryCivilizationEx
6. Kenshi: Major Powers | SkeletonsCivilizationEx
7. Kenshi: History of the SkeletonsCivilizationEx
8. What If Cat-Lon Tried To Take Back Kenshi?HeroInHisHead
9. Kenshi: Major Powers | Tech Hunters and CannibalsCivilizationEx
10. The Origins of the CannibalsHeroInHisHead
11. Kenshi 2 - What We Know So Far and What We Can ExpectHeroInHisHead
12. 5 Things I Want To See In Kenshi 2HeroInHisHead
13. Kenshi: History of the HiversCivilizationEx
14. All Life Came From Humans (Sort of)HeroInHisHead
15. The Origins of the Skin BanditsHeroInHisHead
16. The Real Crime of the SkeletonsHeroInHisHead
17. Kenshi Base Building - The Arena of KralHeroInHisHead
18. 5 More Things I Want To See In Kenshi 2HeroInHisHead
19. Why Does The Holy Nation Oppress Women?HeroInHisHead