"When all beneath heaven recognize beauty as beauty, ugliness already arises; when all recognize goodness as goodness, what is not good arises."
Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, good and bad, right and wrong.
These were subjective human judgments, not objective realities. Good birds and beneficial birds, harmful insects and beneficial insects, wicked beasts and auspicious beasts—these, too, were human judgments.
Only after the Wa Huang Clan inaugurated "Humanity" in bygone days did these concepts come into being.
All creatures slaughtering one another, the weak becoming meat for the strong—these were nature's true colors within a framework greater than "Humanity."
Outside "Humanity," there was no good or evil, no right or wrong. From the top of the food chain to the bottom, creatures ate their way down, without any distinction between good and evil or right and wrong.
The reason the immortals of ancient times observed the Way of Heaven, carried out Heaven's workings, and established "Humanity" was precisely to give humans better lives, allowing them to flourish and grow strong against nature's backdrop of the weak becoming meat for the strong. Ultimately, it was through this that they became the rulers of the Primordial Wilderness.
The Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors led humanity and passed down civilization. They had also tamed and harnessed tigers, leopards, bears, and elephants for their own use. When Yu the Great cast his cauldrons, he captured the Monster souls of three thousand ferocious beasts and imprisoned them upon the vessels. Strictly speaking, this was no different in essence from the methods of the later Demonic Path; the only difference was that one used beast-Monster souls, while the other used human souls.
Shi Feiyang's refinement of Cold Xian, a great Monster from ancient times, into a god-demon fell into the same category.
But this great