The King of Chasing the Sun knew Dabei had gotten to the heart of it. Everyone was actually the same.
When heaven's will was inscrutable, all you could do was sigh. When heaven's will was a person-fuck you, who the hell were you?!
You were being controlled either way, but it felt completely different. The difference really lay only in how you thought about it. The more you understood the truth, the more restless your heart became.
Perhaps it was not really a distinction between "an inscrutable abstraction" and "conscious control." It could probably be summed up as a difference in strength. When submitting to someone else's manipulation, most people would obey with reverence if that person was powerful and unfathomable. If they felt the other party was a living being they could challenge, it naturally felt different...
Even mortals were like that. Whether you admired your boss or thought your superior was a dumbass, whether you accepted their authority or not, your attitude toward your work would differ. You might even want to replace them. It was perfectly normal.
Put plainly, the more ambitious someone was, the more they acknowledged only those stronger than themselves. What Yan Qianlie had said amounted to the same thing. If you treated me well, I might like you quite a lot, but whether I listened to you might depend on my mood. Perhaps one day I would stop acknowledging you altogether. Only if you were stronger than me would I submit.
This was very likely the root of why everyone in the World Within the Book "rose up against heaven," each wanting to stir things up themselves. Before this, none of them had really felt that the Heavenly Dao deserved much reverence. That was why so many thought, "I could replace him." Even