As the sage said, the unprepared answer indeed made the Qingtian family a little depressed. Although they were still performing their work, anyone could see their depression.
From their perspective, this seems unreasonable and understandable.
Heren culture always yearns for hazy, ambiguous, ambiguous, and neutral expressions. The country's problems are extremely obvious to outsiders from Rigal.
The people at the bottom resigned themselves to pretending that the problem did not exist, and many people were unwilling to resist even if they died, because in their minds, resisting was a problem more serious than death; while the warrior class, the mainstay of the aristocracy, was obsessed with its own ideals. The state is to die in a vigorous battle instead of surviving to face and solve the problems faced or left over from the past.
Their pursuit of honor is indeed more commendable than that of many Rigal knights, but it is not what a qualified upper class of ruling class society should expect.
Perhaps it is the precarious experience of the many disasters that have occurred in this land in the past that has created such an extreme culture. From Rigar's point of view, there is almost no qualified leadership class among people. They always seem to be eager to pursue the so-called "perfect ending".
He may be qualified as a warrior, but a leader who is eager to prove himself in danger is destined to fail to become the leader of an army, a town or even a country.
That king is a man whose spirit can accommodate mountains and rivers.
Only those who can survive and face the problem can ultimately bring about change.
The Qingtian family is different from other martial arts families on the Crescent Continent today in many aspects, but the time spent traveling with the sages is still no match for the cultural influence of more than ten or twenty years.
Even though he usually seems to be able to listen to his words, he has great respect for a foreigner and seems to be very open-minded.
When it comes to some core issues, the profound "tradition" superimposed on us by four thousand years of civilization will still emerge.
The death of a samurai is the flower that blooms and the fruit that blooms at the end of thousands of years of rich tradition.
But whether this is a poisonous flower or a poisonous fruit remains to be measured.
In the past, which was considered a long time ago from human eyes, Henry visited this continent.
Compared with the current territory, this country is not as stable on the surface, but it also has a different kind of elegance.
That was an era when the samurai spirit had not yet degenerated into a martial arts culture. Territories that had friction with each other and could not adjust would select the samurai with the most outstanding martial arts skills.
Wearing gorgeous armor and carrying a flag with the family crest on his back, he faced off against the warriors sent by the opponent's territory on the top of the mountain.
Both sides reported names with extremely long prefixes. This name often included the name of the family, which lord they came from, which sect they came from, and what kind of great people their ancestors had in the past.
Then fight to the death one on one.
It was a country where the royal family had relatively loose control over its territories. Therefore, the oligarchs among the Chinese had a certain degree of autonomy and formed several large interest groups. However, they still maintained a superficial peace with each other, so any friction was only in the form of duels. The era of resolution.
That was also the peak era that the samurai now cherish.
Not only because they could find the value of honing their martial arts, but also because their survival goals were relatively clear at that time.
Later, Xinjing took back power and strengthened local control. The power to attack civilians such as disrespectful discussions still existed, but duels between samurai, especially samurai duels between different territories, were restricted by various ambiguous controls and became increasingly harmless.
The power of the royal family and local governments are always ebbing and flowing. As a servant class, they are also a management class. It has always been a big problem for warriors to whom they offer their loyalty.
Nominally all the martial arts families in New Moon Continent are loyal to the royal family, and their power and many things are provided by Xinjing. But the local high-ranking Chinese nobles also have the power to make judgments in person, because Xinyuezhou is an entire continent and a huge empire, and it is impossible for Xinjing to personally inquire about everything.
Human life span is short.
A well-nourished human aristocrat who lives a healthy life can only live for seventy or eighty years at best. Even if he has been acting as a ruler since his youth, his peak period of rule will never exceed thirty or fifty years.
In addition, there are changes in generations caused by assassinations, accidental deaths, dismissals, etc. However, after the change of generations, the rules set by the previous generation are often not clearly understood but inherited. After hundreds of generations of management and accumulation, the new generation with a history of four thousand years has become a new generation. Whether it is the laws or the power possessed by those in power on the Moon Continent——
In fact it's all very confusing.
Strong central control prohibited local internal fighting, and there were no foreign wars for a long time.
The population of the aristocratic class exploded. With people busy with work, many powerful Chinese took advantage of their authority to propose to Beijing to increase departments in order to give birth to their own children.
In name, the administrative department is refined to strengthen control, but there are so many things to be refined.
Let’s take a case that is widespread in New Moon Continent today:
If two shops in a commercial street have a dispute over the land area of each other's shop, it used to be that the local government only needed to take out the land deed and come to the Bureau of Land and Resources to measure it to figure out who was right and who was wrong. But now it will be between various government departments. Got kicked.
The market management officials felt that this was a matter for the urban construction officials. The urban construction officials left the problem to the planning bachelors of the Bureau of Land and Resources and asked them to find a solution. After the bachelors painstakingly found out the problem, they had to submit the report to the civil affairs bureau of the government because they did not have the power to directly implement it.
The Civil Affairs Bureau will then report the matter to the Hua Clan, and the Hua Clan will finally determine whether the implementation will be carried out by people from the Market Administration Bureau or the Urban Construction Bureau.
And because all of this has to be handled by multiple departments, even if everyone starts working as soon as they take over, it often takes a long time.
It often takes two to three months just to determine who will be responsible for this matter.
And if the untouchables are so impatient that they bother the officials by reporting repeatedly, then perhaps the market management people will simply designate their two shops as "located on a national highway and illegally occupied" in anger, and then send ashigaru to demolish them. Merchants were either driven out of the city or were executed for being "discourteous to the nobles" if they resisted during the demolition.
There are too many people and many departments have jurisdiction over one matter. At the same time, these departments often have extremely strong power because they are all children of nobles.
The extremely deep distrust between the nobles and the government among the people is based on this opacity and inequality.
Because they were overstaffed, they didn't know which department would be in charge of them; but because the officials were all descendants of the Chinese ethnic group, and the aristocratic class had high status and overwhelming power, no ordinary man could resist.
Moon Country is too old.
Just like the remnants of biological thought in the other world, the system of this country is also the embers left by its predecessors.
Laws and regulations that may no longer adapt to the times, overly powerful aristocratic power, and an increasingly redundant and cumbersome administrative system, there are many problems.
Maybe someone tried to change this.
But they will always be dissuaded by people around them with words like this:
"It's tradition"
"This is how it's always been"
"You think your own strength and wisdom can compete with the wisdom of great men of the past thousands of years?"
"The little kid who doesn't know how high the sky is"
The nobles are powerful in the eyes of the people.
But the samurai themselves often didn't see it that way.
They have carefully honed their martial arts skills, but they have no use for them; they have been taught to be loyal ministers since childhood, but who should this loyalty be dedicated to?
Loyal to the family master, loyal to the lord, and loyal to the royal family.
So when there is a conflict between these loyalties, which one should take priority?
If you can clearly distinguish your allegiance, life will become simpler and clearer, but this is also an irreversible thing left over from thousands of years of tradition.
Even the current emperor himself has no authority to change.
The way of the samurai only tells you to be loyal and hone your martial arts.
But I won’t tell you who my loyalty is to, and why my martial arts are honed.
Because the culture accumulated over thousands of years is too complicated, there are few things in this country that can easily lift the veil and explain everything clearly. Everything is ambiguous, everything is ambiguous.
If all things are ambiguous, then the words and deeds in life should be as ambiguous as possible.
But only death is optional.
Therefore, samurai all aspire to die in a grand duel with a famous opponent.
But during this journey, the people of the Qingtian family have never really had such a longing for death.
The Qingtian family in Qingzhi Town no longer exists, and they have no place to return.
This loyalty to Xinjing, cultivated by the head of the Qingtian family, is unknown to Xinjing.
The feudal army has won successive victories. Although Xinjing has taken some actions, due to the complicated bureaucracy and the long-lost martial spirit, judging from the current situation of the war, all aspects of the response are still half a beat slow.
Unknown threats pervade this land.
All were beyond their imagination and abilities as samurai.
And they are not even qualified to pursue a gorgeous death in battle. The death methods of these well-trained warriors along the way are almost ridiculous.
The self-educated spiritual world has been shaken until today.
That is the dissonance between the ideal world, the things I have been nurtured to pursue since my childhood, and the reality I currently live in.
But broken dreams may not be a bad thing.
Because this is not a good dream in the first place. It is just a Taoyuan Township that belongs to each individual created by the warriors in the past when they were unable to change the status quo. It is a set of "No matter what the country is like and the floods are behind me, I I have fulfilled my personal honor as a samurai, so I am not at fault."
A clever evasion.
But the time has come.
Xinjing's approach of taking back local authority and strengthening the central government gave the vassal areas an opportunity to take advantage of it. Local governments became loose, bureaucratic, and overstaffed. And civilians are even less trusting of the government.
The starting point may be to avoid chaos and bloody conflicts. If power is in the hands of one person, there will be no resisters. However, Xinjing has never solved those deep-rooted problems. It just blindly uses force to suppress them with force, thinking that everything has been perfectly solved.
If judged from the perspective of a sage, the emperor who made that decision more than two hundred years ago must have been an incompetent and idealistic fool.
Because he actually thought that the problems accumulated by a country for four thousand years could be solved by such simple and crude actions.
The moment he made that decision, the turmoil in New Moon Continent was a foregone conclusion.
The fact that it has been able to last for such a long time is definitely not due to how capable the royal family and nobles of the New Moon Continent are. It is simply because the country is large enough and the tradition is deep enough. It takes time for many things to happen.
Like the sinking of a great ship.
The fall of a great dragon.
Death is not necessarily a bad thing.
The sunlight vacated after the giant tree falls will give more room for life to grow.
The death of a giant whale nourishes an ocean.
The death of a giant dragon and its returned vitality can also rejuvenate a deserted island.
"Seeds germinate better in burned soil."
Suffering and death do not mean the end of everything.
New flowers will always bloom on the ruins.
All he could do was to let the flower bloom as much as possible.
Bear the right fruit.
