Zheng Qing had first read about the choice of "eating grapes" in Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged: faced with a plate of grapes, some good and some bad, would you choose to eat the good ones first, or the bad ones first?
If you ate the good ones first, every grape you encountered afterward would only get worse; if you ate the bad ones first, every grape you encountered afterward would only get better. This was used to demonstrate positive and negative attitudes toward life.
But as he gradually grew older and saw more of the world, Zheng Qing slowly realized that there were no good grapes or bad grapes in this world. For most people, life only came down to whether they "had grapes" or "didn't have grapes."
People without grapes would seize and eat them the moment they saw them, regardless of whether they were good or bad.
People with grapes would always pick the freshest, plumpest, prettiest, or most distinctive ones from the plate. The rest, good or bad, would eventually become table decorations before ending up in the trash.
Put simply, there were too many choices, to the point that choosing or not choosing no longer mattered.
Just like the North District Wizards.
Before Ilena became the Great Sage, large numbers of tricksters from the North District had been willing to serve as test subjects for formal wizards just to learn one or two crude tricks. For wizards born without "grapes," being able to eat grapes was the greatest fortune—even if those grapes were scorned by traditional wizards as heresy. Becoming official students of First University through Edge Academy had been something they never even dared dream of.
In contrast, elite children born into ancient Wizarding Families did not even need to care about the differing characteristics