Li Chen said, "Returning to the matter at hand, I know little about the Great Qian Dynasty's Dao of Fortune. I hope you can clear up my doubts, Great Elder."
Shen Longcheng said, "The Great Qian Dynasty's Dao of Fortune... it complements incense-and-fire deification. You can think of the entire Righteous Qi Continent as an enormous immortal mountain whose veins extend throughout the land. Its earth veins possess spiritual essence, placing it far beyond the bounds of an ordinary blessed land."
"Under its subtle influence, the Righteous Qi Continent nurtured outstanding people upon spiritually gifted land and produced an extraordinary abundance of resources. Yet this instead gave rise to evenly matched struggles for supremacy. Powerful aristocratic clans fought one another without resolution, leaving calamities that persisted for ten thousand years."
"The Progenitor of Great Qian planned far ahead. He combined the secret art he possessed with incense-and-fire deification to establish the Dao of Fortune, using the various ranks of attainment in the mortal world to create a tightly controlled hierarchy from top to bottom..."
After Shen Longcheng gave a detailed explanation, Li Chen nodded silently. Only after a long while did he say, "I think I understand now."
The Great Qian Imperial House controlled an exclusive secret art for developing the spirit veins of immortal mountains. With this as its foundation, it controlled the distribution of benefits and recruited talented people far and wide into its service.
Thus, however evenly the Righteous Qi Continent's spirit veins were distributed, however readily they might bring about a world of everyone like dragons and great unity, distinctions still had to be drawn between high and low, ruler and subject, father and son.
The flourishing of the Confucian Dao further reinforced this.
By establishing an order in which all land beneath heaven belonged to