Time had long since lost all meaning to Fang Zheng.
Days rose and fell, winds churned and clouds surged.
No one knew when Cihang Jingzhai had completely vanished from people's memories. Or perhaps there had never been many who remembered such a sect in the first place.
Fang Zheng sat silently atop the shattered roof, gazing at everything around him.
Nothing remained here anymore, only stretches of ruins.
Yet Fang Zheng still remembered Fan Qinghui's despair, her screams, struggles, breakdown, and ultimately, the sight of her willingly sinking into depravity.
But to Fang Zheng, that was not the source of his headache.
In this world, Fang Zheng's most troublesome enemies had not been threats from outside, but the forces of capital within.
Facts proved that capitalists were all cut from the same cloth, no matter the era, nation, or region.
After Fang Zheng gradually opened up private capital, society had indeed entered a period of great prosperity. But before long, capital began to expand and, just as Fang Zheng had anticipated, infiltrate political power. They used money to buy officials and even "bought shares" in sects to acquire private armed forces.
Afterward, they began trying to seize their own territories. They started emulating Lu Buwei, rallying the masses with misleading slogans such as destiny, freedom, and equality for all. Fang Zheng had not intervened at first, wanting to see whether the system he had designed could withstand this invasion of capital. But facts proved that the political structure of that era was still too fragile before capital. Many local leaders had been dragged into the muck by sugar-coated bullets.
During that period, capital flourished, but the shadows accompanying its growth deepened as well. As materialism spread and people's desire and craving for money intensified, dark underground dealings also began to