"You defy the Way!"
"How dare you speak such wild words before the prefect!"
"Do you wish to be sliced into a thousand pieces?!"
Hearing A Shui's words, many people began loudly rebuking him.
What A Shui had said was indeed an outrageous defiance of the Way!
Speaking recklessly of the Sacred Path was no different from insulting these scholars who had devoted their entire lives to it.
The young prefect, however, did not grow angry. Instead, he said calmly:
"How many years have you studied? How many humans have you seen? You encounter one little incident and start holding forth on the Sacred Path and the Human Way?"
"Studied? Must one study books to understand?" A Shui laughed. "I was born beneath heaven and grew upon the earth. Who decreed that only reading could bring understanding of the Way? Why should scholars alone be favored by heaven and earth?"
"The Way is recorded in tortuous words that grate upon the tongue, and you call it sacred. Yet we, insignificant as droplets and dust-are the things our eyes behold and the places our four hooves tread not sacred too?"
That question left everyone at a loss.
Indeed!
These scholars kept insisting that those obscure, impenetrable words were the Sacred Path.
But these tiny creatures lived in the world too. Could what they saw and the paths they traveled not also be called the Sacred Path?
The Sacred Path should not have been a matter of one or the other.
At that moment, Lin Ke slowly spoke:
"Reading books does not mean reading the Sacred Path."
Everyone immediately turned their gaze toward him, curious about what he would say.
Originally, Lin Ke's standing would not have entitled him to speak. After all, many of those present surpassed him in both cultivation