From beginning to end, Lü Zhongqi's voice had remained gentle and calm.
Yet after refracting and echoing endlessly off the pitch-black rock walls surrounding them, that gentle, calm voice gradually swelled into stormy waves crimson as blood.
"As the saying goes, 'He who bears a nation's filth is fit to rule its altars of soil and grain; he who bears a nation's misfortunes is fit to be king beneath heaven.' What this means is that if an ethnicity, a nation, or even a civilization wishes to survive and develop, its leaders must do the things that are unavoidable, utterly filthy, dark and cruel, vile and humiliating, in place of the people."
Lü Zhongqi continued, "The people are both shortsighted and greedy. When order collapses and the times grow turbulent, they desperately long for a savior to appear. Yet once that savior truly rescues them from the depths of misery, they often begin to despise the savior's methods as too extreme, too cruel, too filthy.
"Even when that age of dwindling humanity, darkness, and bloodshed gradually passes, the people will be like fish with only seven seconds of memory. They will forget everything they did to survive during the Blood-colored Era, forget that they themselves benefited from the Blood Alliance's radical, cruel, evil, and inhumane policies, and shove every sin and all responsibility onto the Blood Alliance.
"Meng Chao, do you know what that is like?
"It is like survivors of a maritime disaster drifting onto a deserted, resource-starved island. To hold on until the rescue team arrives, they have no choice but to slaughter one another, even literally practicing 'the weak are meat for the strong,' gnawing on the flesh of the dead, the injured, and the weak.
"In the end, the strongest among those survivors became their leader.
"The