Thinking, thinking again, weighing, judging, and finally choosing a course that ran against intuition and short-term interests-or simply acting on the original idea, as though all that thinking had been wasted, even falling into fresh confusion because of the thinking itself: this was what people called internal friction.
Ever since the affair at Chang'an, however, Liu Acheng had stopped resisting it. Even then, he had realized that his actions and choices might lead directly to mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
The veterans from the Huai River region slaughtered so easily beside the Ying River at Xuchang, and those fully armored Di horsemen at Lantian, so utterly exhausted that a single prod sent them tumbling from their horses, had become the finest footnotes and evidence for his internal friction.
He had begun to understand Huan Wen's vacant staring and hesitation beneath the west window.
Compared with his previous agonizing on the eve of battle, however, there was one advantage now: celebrating the New Year, with leisure to sit idly beside his wife and daughter, Liu Acheng had ample time for internal friction.
And wouldn't you know it, internal friction did have its uses. Over these past few days alone, our Liu Langya's internal friction had already gone through several iterations.
First, he no longer considered whether Great Jin could become any better.
Because extending the timeline just a little made it clear that what followed was the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen. From the broad perspective of the whole realm, things could hardly become worse. However much evil you committed, could you outdo that General of the Universe?
Yet even with the mess caused by the original General of the Universe, who could say whether that monk-emperor or the General of the Universe bore