Courtesy Before Force

Time passed slowly, yet quickly.

To those with nothing to do, time was a sharp weapon that tormented them. More than ninety-nine percent of people could not find meaning in meaningless stretches of time. The less than one percent remaining already understood the meaning of their existence, so no matter how time flowed, they would never feel lonely or empty.

To busy people, however, time was clearly never enough. Whether they deliberately found tasks for themselves or were assigned tasks by others, no amount of time was enough for them. After all, from the moment a task was created, it was destined not to leave its completer with much free time. Otherwise, there would be no need for the task to exist.

Take eating, for example.

If everyone could live without eating,

then farming would clearly lose its meaning.

Striving and vanity would lose their meaning as well.

After all, even if you strove, you would still be just as incapable of starving to death as I was without striving. Assuming neither of us died accidentally, once you realized the gap between us, you would fully understand the pain of striving. You might even question yourself, because you would discover that your efforts could not change anything. And so, you would lie flat.

That was the most basic principle.

And once large numbers of people all lay flat,

what was affected would no longer be merely more people.

It would affect the spirit of the whole.

Negative emotions would emerge.

It perfectly matched Cao Gui's saying on warfare: "One drums up courage in the first beat, it wanes in the second, and is exhausted in the third." No one's mental string could remain taut forever. If it was not released after being stretched to its limit, what followed would naturally