Only half an hour later, Zhang Xing was no longer angry.
He actually understood the reactions of Li Ding and Bai Yousi, those two favored children of heaven, very well:
They were core members of great Guanlong clans. Long before Great Wei annexed Eastern Qi and Southern Chen and subdued the Northern Wasteland and Southern Ranges, their fathers and grandfathers had already been central participants in and founders of this regime. They themselves were its future and hope. To them, what happened today was far more than something long anticipated finally coming to pass, far more than witnessing a mountainside collapse beside the road. It was like watching something in which they had invested so much, something they had regarded as a mainstay, finally head irreversibly into a dead end.
It was their own house that had finally collapsed.
Rather than incomprehension or ignorance, their feelings were more a kind of nostalgia and reluctance to let go, along with an unwillingness to believe it.
Taking it a step further, even Sima Changying and Bai Hengqiu, those two half-fledged schemers in the Southern Office, would probably feel loss, shock, and unease, and brood and sigh over it either in private or in public.
And this made Zhang Xing realize all the more that his views and theirs on the Great Wei regime, and on deeper matters, were as far apart as heaven and earth.
Especially since Great Wei had merely, at last, chosen the lane toward death that would most likely end in disintegration. Between that and its final demise, beyond the Third Dongyi Campaign, there were probably still a whole string of scripts to play out: thirty-six rebel banners rising amid dust and smoke, a restoration under the imperial uncle, internal strife in Guanlong, and rival heroes contending for supremacy.