Meanwhile, silence still hung over the hall. No one else had noticed Fei Yuanzhong leaving.
"The world belongs to all..."
"The world belongs neither to one man nor to one school or faction. It belongs to everyone under heaven."
Everyone carefully mulled over those words. In the turbulent world of the Martial Dao, commoners were weeds, and human lives were ants. Everyone had always known that the world belonged to the Son of Heaven-or, rather, to the powerful, the sects, and the great clans. History books recorded only emperors, generals, ministers, Celestial Persons, and Martial Saints. Those ant-like commoners amounted to no more than a few sparse words in the histories: "A great famine struck that year, and people ate one another," or "Floating corpses filled the rivers, and white bones covered the wilderness."
Yet Zhao Feng's theory now claimed that the world belonged to the commoners too. This dealt a profound shock to the thinking of the Martial Provincial Graduates present.
But on closer consideration, if the world truly could belong to all, if everyone under heaven could share it, then these endless ages of turmoil could indeed be reduced or eliminated.
"Brother Zhao's thinking certainly stands like a lone tree apart from the forest. Unfortunately, it's nothing but a fool's dream, with no possibility of coming true," Liao Kuan said snidely.
He and Fei Yuanzhong had come to the tea gathering with the task of promoting Confucian Neo-Confucianism, and they had also hoped to make an impression on Fairy Su. Instead, Zhao Feng had demolished their efforts with four words, bringing all their work to nothing. Fei Yuanzhong had fled outright, his Dao heart shattered. Liao Kuan, who had already disliked Zhao Feng, now bore a grudge against him.
"Perhaps it can't be achieved now, but one day