Cui Yigeng sat there, merely holding a chess piece in his palm. From this day forth, the fate of Diligent Academy lay in his hands.
He said, "Though that was not the path I chose, if I had to do it over again, I would still face it the same way. So all of this may be considered my choice."
Among the four great academies of All Under Heaven today—Diligent, Dragon Gate, Green Cliff, and Twilight Drum—not one dean was not a True Lord.
Cui Yigeng, merely at the peak of Divine Presence, a True Lord who had bought on credit, sitting in such a position—it was almost possible to foresee Diligent Academy's plummeting reputation.
The title of "number one academy under heaven" was certainly impossible to keep; even holding firmly onto its place among the four great academies would be difficult.
Take Great Righteous Academy, for instance—the foremost beneath the Four Great Academies. It inherited the scholarly lineage of Lu Yihuan, a Confucian School master of a generation, and was teeming with talent, its foundations profound. It had sought to squeeze into the Four Great Academies for many years, even once declaring that "it is perfectly reasonable for there to be five Four Great Academies," sharpening its head and drilling forward with all its might.
With Cui Yigeng taking charge of the academy under such circumstances, what awaited him was not honor or status, but a storm of abuse crashing down upon his head. People would not remember why Diligent Academy had declined. They would only remember that it had declined in his hands.
Even setting all that aside, simply taking charge of Diligent Academy was not something so easily established. Even without counting Zhong Xuanyin, Diligent Academy still had famed Confucian scholars like Jin Qingjia.
Cui Yigeng was