4 ideas
The carpet maker Ostvan spends his entire working life knotting a single carpet from the hair of his wives and daughters. The sale of one carpet can fund only one heir, so custom requires him to kill any second son born to him. The episode shows a craft tradition so total that it overrides a parent's bond with his child.
Each carpet takes one lifetime to make. Because every generation's survival depends on the previous generation finishing its work, no individual can opt out, and the system reproduces itself without anyone needing to believe in its purpose.
The Emperor has been overthrown, but the collectors still arrive and the weavers keep producing tribute for him. People who say the Emperor is gone are dismissed or punished as heretics. Once a practice is woven into livelihood, status, and identity, contrary evidence threatens the whole social order, so the community rejects the evidence rather than the practice.
The book is a mosaic in which each chapter follows a different person, from weavers to officials to rebels investigating the Empire's remains. Every narrator sees only a local piece of the system. The purpose of the carpets becomes clear only when those fragments are added together, which shows how a vast mechanism can stay invisible to everyone working inside it.