Though he had lived two lives and had never been a good man in either, behind his great evils lay the heart of a bodhisattva. Using violence to suppress violence and evil to restrain evil was his method, yet he had never laid a finger on any ordinary commoner or done anything to make their lives difficult. He knew full well that in times of rise and fall, those who suffered most were always the simple, ignorant common folk. Perhaps his conscience had not yet died; he had always hoped that, once he had the ability, he could do something for them.
Yet the vicissitudes of life were unpredictable, and some things were beyond his foresight. He had not known what that token would come to mean for the Yue Family after he gave it to them.
Today, he had ruthlessly crippled his grandnephew's hand because his way of doing things had always been to strike straight at the root of the illness, using heavy medicine to cure grave disease and stamping out the first sparks of danger. He did not have time to educate him with painstaking care. He could only forcefully set chaos right. Better to suffer pain for a moment than for a lifetime.
This indeed taught Yue Wuchou and his son a lesson. Neither of those two generations ever used that token, but the Yue Family's business only grew larger and larger.
The saying that wealth did not last beyond three generations was not without reason. As wealth accumulated, descendants no longer knew the hardships their forebears had endured in building their fortunes, nor did they understand the uncertainty and dangers of the world. Sitting atop immense wealth within easy reach, sitting atop the connections left by their ancestors, what trouble could not be easily resolved?