/That's/ the part of the moment I love best, yes. That Shen Wei has enough affection for this crazy man in his life to accept the gesture.

I think the assumption that the meteor knocked the whole world back to subsistence-level is one of the things that gets to me, actually. We know they retained enough technology to create the Holy Tools in that same generation, and even if food production /was/ back to hard-scrabble for some reason, unless every (many and varied) source of sugar was destroyed, we'd still be seeing it in food preservation. Salt and sugar are the two biggies, there.

Honestly, this is probably part and parcel of my discontent with a lot of the common YOHE world-building.