Afterward, Yellow Heaven Daoist and Zhao Cheng, one old and one young, did not ride. They merely led their horses and walked toward Heaven's End Pass.
Everyone behind them likewise led their horses and followed in succession.
The wind swept up clouds of dust. Watching the two figures ahead, many people could not help but feel, at that moment, as though the old were fading and the young flourishing, the torch passing on from generation to generation.
Yet Zhao Cheng and Yellow Heaven Daoist walked as they spoke at length, speaking of gleaming spears and iron steeds, discussing mountains, rivers, and all under heaven.
At this moment, they were no longer teacher and disciple, but seekers of the Way striving for the same ideal.
The great cause of Yellow Heaven was the seeking of the Way—but what they sought was not the Heavenly Dao of transcendence, but the vast, surging Human Dao.
Later, Yellow Heaven Daoist spoke of himself. He said that when he was young and studying, his teacher's very first lesson had been "Heaven, Earth, Sovereign, Parents, Teacher." Heaven and Earth stood highest, and he had found nothing strange in that—but why should the sovereign rank above one's parents?!
The seed had already been planted back then.
Thus, when natural disasters and man-made calamities plunged the realm into chaos, when he saw wives sell themselves as vegetables for others to eat, saw people exchange children to consume, saw farmers toil bitterly in cultivation, only for the first to starve to death when disaster struck to be the very farmers who grew the grain—then he understood.
It was because Heaven and Earth had lost the Way that the cauldron had to be overturned and a new Heaven established. It was because kings were without virtue that their households had