Thousand Autumns: Qian Qiu (Novel) Vol. 1

by Meng Xi Shi

Grudges have a source, and debts a debtor, but involving innocent people should never be commended. When you don’t save the people you could have, when you don’t take action when you could have, a shadow lodges in your heart forever. Whether other people know about it—whether they’ll feel grateful—that’s their business.”

The universe is fathomless; the heavens and earth vast. From time immemorial, the course of nature has run eternal, and amidst all this, human beings are impossibly small. If I wish to become one with heaven, ascending to godhood and returning to the void, then the rivers and mountains, the sun and moon, the heavens, the clouds, all of them would be me. There’d be no boundaries between all that exists in the world, and me.

But this flower was good-natured, always tenderhearted and compassionate. That’s why it met with trouble after trouble. It seemed to bring all this trouble on itself, but it also anticipated and accepted the consequences of such tenderness. If others thought that softness was a weakness, then it was they who were truly blind.

Some people were unaware of the evil in the world and gave their kindness indiscriminately. In the end, all it did was exhaust them and others both. But there were some people who did see through to the evil, and that insight was precisely why they refused to change—why they carried on being gentle and tenderhearted.

“Everyone holds evil thoughts inside their hearts; the difference lies in whether or not they act on it. Why castigate them for being human?”

Here was a face that oozed arrogance and conceit, saying words that came out gentle as water. It was categorically incongruous. The concierge didn’t know that they’d just had a confrontation; when he heard Yan Wushi’s tone, so tender it practically dripped, he froze.