Fang Hui sat in silence.
The matter of chaos that Xie Liang spoke of was a common Daoist allegory. It said that Chaos had no apertures, and the two god-kings, Shu and Hu, wishing to repay Chaos for his kindness, tried to carve seven apertures into him so he could see, hear, eat, and breathe, yet they did not expect this to cause his death. This served to illustrate the principles of tranquility, non-action, and following nature. Used here, it referred to the principles observed during cultivation; the subsequent mention of the heavenly Dao subtracting and supplementing referred to the methods of action; as for the phrase be cautious at the start and respectful at the end, it was an assertion that bad beginnings rarely led to good endings.
This both obliquely alluded to the major events of these past years, where he patched and modified the sect's tribulation-transcendence secret arts, and touched upon the details of the life-and-death changes of He Qing and Yu Zhou. In short, every single line was an interrogation and a challenge. But no matter how clearly these things were stated, that was simply the way it was.
Fang Hui knew that Xie Liang had not come to reason with him. The principles that needed to be spoken had already been thoroughly discussed by them over the past seventy years. Now everyone knew that it was utterly impossible to stop him using reason, morality, or discipline, so the essence of Xie Liang's current string of questions lay entirely at the very end:
"...When I saw the Ancestor, I grew all the more confused."
This was an open confrontation of conflicts and contradictions, and it was also the clearest possible stance.
Yes, Xie Liang was taking a stance—taking a stance with the identity of the genius