"Kong Ke's successor, yet he learned Yu Zhou's tricks!" Seven Hates' voice mingled with Zuo Qiu Wu's, dark and heavy, with a hint of mockery. "The dignified headmaster of All-Under-Heaven City's foremost academy, disciple of the Most Sacred One—how do you teach your students? You don't teach the Five Classics at their desks; do you fill them with novels and storybooks instead?"
Zuo Qiu Wu merely said, "A devil of Transcendence truly has uncommon tastes. I never expected that, after betraying the Human Race, you would still care so much for it. After betraying the Confucian Sect, you still care so deeply about its lineage!"
"The Hundred Schools endure because they learn from one another, their living waters never running dry. The Devil Race endures because there is always oppression, always beasts!"
Within the flames of time burned Zuo Qiu Wu's regret. "I still remember how much the young Wu Zhaixue hoped you would be the former."
The power of historical records lay in "truth." It was the power of documentation. The more objective it was, the more powerful it became. The sharper it was, the crueler.
Yet, as Sima Heng had said, Zuo Qiu Wu wrote history like fiction.
It was not that he failed to understand the significance of truth to history. Among historians, he was second only to Sima Heng.
But throughout the more than ten thousand pages of Diligent Academy's historical chapters, no straightforwardly presented truth could fulfill his hopes for the academy's future.
Countless evolutions had yielded no result.
He could only "write."
He knew that what he was inscribing was not history. He had long since strayed from the path of the "historian."
This was the power of the "novelist," a school long unnamed in the world.
His pen could write the possibilities he