The phrase "slay to seek the Way" was no simple expression. Behind those four short words lay endless bloodshed and carnage.
If one failed to attain the Way and died along the path, so be it. But if one succeeded, then it meant forging a road to heaven from a mountain of corpses—and those corpses could not belong to ordinary people. They had to be true masters of the sword, even peerless powerhouses.
As for sacrificing ordinary people to the sword, honing one's murderous intent and cultivating a taste for killing, plenty of powerful nobles in ancient times had used that method to train their children.
But the facts had proved that while swords trained this way carried a taste for killing and Killing Intent, they were far too weak. They might have some advantage against the weak, but against the strong, they crumbled at the first touch.
The true meaning of slaying to seek the Way was to slay the strong in pursuit of the Way, to be born through death, and to strive for self-transcendence in that fleeting moment between life and death. One surpassed oneself time and again, forging the strongest sword.
Of course, a sword like this also risked being too rigid to endure.
In the long five thousand years of Yanhuang, the essence of its civilization had never been unyielding rigidity, nor had it been unyielding softness. It lay in finding balance between the two, seeking a union of yin and yang.
But while changes in yin and yang were easy to speak of, how difficult they were to truly achieve!
Most people had limited talent. If they wanted to hack through thorns and brambles to carve out a path, they had to take an unconventional route.
If they chose the middle way, they would be neither yin nor yang. True harmony between yin and yang meant every sword was a thought, and every thought a sword. One's swordplay could be as unyieldingly yang as possible, as yielding and soft as possible, or even unite yin and yang: reaching the utmost yang and the utmost yin alike, ascending to a higher level.
Thus, throughout history, many had walked the path of slaying to attain the Way. Indeed, many powerful figures had seen that path through.
They reached the state of being so rigid they broke, and simply snapped their own swords. Only after breaking could they truly affirm that they had attained Rigidity Extreme.
After that, there were two possibilities.
One was to be crippled for good, never again able to wield a sword as sharp as before.
The other was to rise anew from ruin: the old devil becoming a Buddha, Asura laying down his butcher's knife and becoming a bodhisattva on the spot.
This latter path was fearsome to the extreme. From then on, there would be no murderous thoughts in their hearts, nor any in their swords. Every move and every stance would contain Compassion.
But this Compassion was by no means weakness. Their swordplay would only become more lethal.
For their swords had already changed from killing for the sake of killing into swords of Compassion: slaying to protect life, cutting away karma rather than people.
This was what was meant by using the utmost softness to command the utmost hardness.
Above that lay the essence of five thousand years of Yanhuang civilization: the middle way of yin and yang in harmony.
The middle way was not mediocrity. It was like the golden curve that divided yin from yang with perfect clarity.
Once this sword was mastered, one was at once a Buddha, a Devil Ancestor, and a Dao Ancestor. One thought of Compassion, another of Asura; one acted as one pleased. It was no longer yin commanding yang, nor yang commanding yin, but "I" commanding everything.
The reason Yanhuang was so powerful in this world, with sword masters appearing one after another throughout history and far surpassing those beyond its borders, was this: a little over a hundred years ago, when the allied powers bombarded the gates of the nation,
what they faced afterward was an expeditionary force of eighty thousand Swordsmen marching west.
Of course, those eighty thousand Swordsmen first swept aside Great Shun, founded by Li Zicheng, and purged the court. But in recognition of Li Zicheng's past achievements in saving Yanhuang from ruin, they did not wipe out his line. They killed only those who preyed on the people and lorded it over them, leaving behind a bloodline that was at least relatively clean.
Then, under the leadership of the founding Grand Ancestor, Li Kaiyuan, they established the New Dynasty. It was a new system, but one that took the past as its guide, honored Yanhuang as its forebear, and bore the name Yanhuang Celestial Dynasty.
Swordsmanship needed a spirit to bear it before it could possess power.
That was why Yanhuang had never believed in the saying, "Have princes and generals been born to their stations?" For even princes and generals, though they had the finest resources, could not forge a powerful spirit with resources alone.
And so the decaying Great Shun court had been utterly powerless against those Swordsmen who aspired to save their country, held unshakable convictions, and were driven by ideals and dreams.
In his previous life, turning spirit into tangible power had been incredibly difficult, which was why revolution had been so arduous. But in this world, spirit itself was power!
That was also why the history of this world resembled the history of his previous world in some ways, yet differed in many others.
Once the nation was barely stable within its borders, Li Kaiyuan formed an expeditionary force of eighty thousand Swordsmen. With warships they had seized, they pointed their swords west and slaughtered their way across the lands, repaying every debt and settling every grievance.
Now Yanhuang had colonized the whole world, drawing sustenance from it to nourish itself. That was what had created Yanhuang's prosperity today.
At the founding of the nation, Yanhuang's population had been only four hundred billion. Now it was close to two trillion.
Yet even with such an enormous population, they could still maintain an eight-hour workday and weekends off. Ordinary people could buy a house with ten years' wages, while a dual-income couple could do it with five years'.
All of this rested on the foundation laid by that expedition west.
At the highest level of martial power, the advantage brought by the depths of a civilization's heritage was simply too great.
A spiritual civilization that was too brief and shallow could never give rise to the strongest.
As for the so-called strongest, that was what the Western nations called the swordsmanship Myths of Yanhuang.
After forging a Primordial Spirit, one could kill someone from a thousand paces away—but those thousand paces were not an ordinary person's thousand paces. They were a Sword God's.
One could also sense danger without seeing or hearing it, and evade it. The ultimate weapon of civilizational destruction, the nuclear bomb, was completely ineffective against them.
Toward the end of the western expedition, the West had already developed nuclear bombs, but they did not dare use them.
If they refrained, they only had to sign a few treaties. If they used them, all their leaders would ascend to heaven and meet God.
A Sword God was truly a match for an entire nation.
That was why such figures were called the strongest: they were a greater deterrent than nuclear bombs.
Even though Western technology had surpassed Yanhuang's at the time, spiritual matters were not cold data. The spiritual heritage of their civilization could not support the birth of the strongest.
The truth that the backward got beaten was demonstrated here in the starkest terms.
This backwardness was the backwardness of spiritual civilization, the bitter fruit of a history that was too short.
The more powerful the sword realm, the more it needed the support of philosophical dialectics.
Yanhuang was now vigorously promoting swordsmanship for the same reason: it could not afford to fall behind. Knowledge always spread swiftly. Once the world learned how formidable the strongest were, everyone began drawing nourishment from Yanhuang civilization.
If Yanhuang fell behind at this point, the consequences would be unimaginable.
As for why Great Shun had shut its doors to the world and followed the same old path as Zhao Cheng's previous life,
the reason was simple: it was an affliction of feudal rulers. As early as the eighteenth century, the imperial palace had already possessed exquisite firearms and finely crafted steam engines.
But that was not what the rulers feared. They feared that Western ideas would threaten their rule.
After all, many Western countries had no such thing as an emperor.
So they closed their borders and shut out the world. Though there were top experts who could cross the oceans alone,
with the situation at home stable, those people naturally devoted themselves to the sword. Why would they care whether the West had an emperor? In any case, the emperor could not order them around.
It was only when the Western powers grew stronger, Great Shun had decayed to the utmost after several centuries, and disasters and man-made calamities kept striking at home that these turbulent times stirred the Swordsmen's love for their country and people.
Then a formidable leader emerged and united this force. Only then came the campaigns that purged the nation within and swept across the world beyond.