Time seemed to have stopped.
This was the effect on the mind.
Whether it was Xu Kun or those outside watching Xu Kun's Myriad Feather Trial, all silently observed everything he did.
Xu Kun had already summed up righteousness and justice with a single Confucian classic.
But back at Qufu Academy, Xu Kun had also studied the teachings of Wang Yun, the grand president of Jiangnan Academy.
There were four crucial words in Wang Yun's teachings: the unity of knowledge and action.
Throughout history, many people had understood countless principles, but saying them was one thing, while doing them was another.
For example, a certain representative of the military school had written the poem "Song of Hao Li," including these two stanzas: "White bones lay exposed in the wild; for a thousand miles, no rooster crowed. Of the living, barely one in a hundred remained; the thought of it broke one's heart."
Judging from those lines alone, one would certainly think he loved the people as his own children.
Yet the youth who slayed the dragon would eventually become a dragon himself. Even the few whitewashed records left of his later deeds in history were still utterly horrifying.
"Whenever he slaughtered men and women by the hundreds of thousands, not even chickens or dogs remained. The Si River ceased to flow because of it, and within five counties, no trace of travelers remained."
Likewise, the great poet who had written, in his youth, "Sow one grain of millet in spring, reap ten thousand in autumn. Across the land, no field lies idle, yet farmers still starve to death," and who had written before passing the imperial examination, "Hoeing beneath the midday sun, sweat drips into the soil. Who knows that every grain upon the plate was earned through bitter toil,"