No wonder the soldiers on the entire Square looked quite old, individually they were old people with grizzled white hair. So it turns out that they were the old soldiers who voluntarily chose to sacrifice themselves.
Yue Yang was overwhelmed by their sacrificial spirit.
In front of life and death, how many people could do this? In China, there were countless incidents of people simply standing by and watching, saying it’s ‘none of my business’, not assisting even as one sees death in front of them. All the different sorts of coldness and detachedness in the society had sealed Yue Yang’s heart off tightly. What he saw was a lot of ingratitude, betrayal and repaying kindness with violence. What he saw the most was vile people making threatening gestures and kind-hearted people weeping bitter tears… All sorts of despicable, gloomy incidents such as bumping into fragile items, death by depression, death by nightmare, entrapment, hitting people without seeing blood and related things like that, made Yue Yang’s heart tremble in cold.
(Yunichan: what Yue Yang means by ‘bumping into fragile items’ is the practice of how merchants of porcelain antiques sometimes place their most fragile items at certain positions of their roadside stalls so that passers-by will easily knock into them, hence getting them to pay for them. As for ‘hitting people without seeing blood’, it’s usually an expression of getting an advantage out of somebody without having to resort to physical violence. What Yue Yang is referring here are basically unscrupulous methods of harming others mostly to reap benefits for oneself.)
Kindness? Honesty?
Aren’t these things precisely the weaknesses that were preyed on and used by some people to their advantage?
He had always thought that the spirit of sacrificing oneself for others had already been spurned by people. Only idiots would do something like that.
Learning from Lei Feng to do good deeds, was something that was indeed present in the past. Now if anybody tried to do selfless deeds, that was equivalent to courting death…… Of course there would still be people who do that, but what they get from it was mostly tears of pain and suffering. For example, if one were to see a hit and run robbery and stepped forward bravely to defend the weak, one would be stabbed by a knife. Even the person who was being robbed would not see this as an heroic action for a just cause and would probably even think that this fellow was meddling in other people’s business. Another example, if one were to help an old woman, one must pay a great number; If one were to find a wallet and gave it to the authorities, one would immediately be suspected of hiding and keeping a part of it for oneself ……
(Yunichan: Lei Feng was made into a model of altruism and dedication to the CCP by propaganda from 1963 onwards.)
After travelling dimensions, he came to the Soaring Dragon Continent.
Yue Yang discovered that the world here was entirely different from the one he had known.
It was extremely normal to behave just as he was in China, but after coming here, he had become a ‘weirdo’… He was a weirdo for always protecting himself, not letting himself be harmed and always protecting his own interests first. In China, Yue Yang believed that the people, who thought like himself, were practically innumerable. But in Soaring Dragon Continent it was the opposite, Fourth Aunt could reduce her family fortune to zero for him and use the thousand jin of gold that she had saved up for countless years to seek and buy a [Spirit Beast Awakening Knowledge Pill] for her adopted son. She even left her own daughter with no money to learn skills.
If Fourth Aunt could do all that for her family, then what about these old soldiers?
Each of these old soldiers were blood-soaked from their battles and had rolled about in piles of corpses. They have came back alive with great difficulty. Yet in the final life-and-death crossroad they did not hesitate to choose to sacrifice themselves for other people… to give away the opportunity for them to save themselves to other people, to young people who were total strangers but with more hope.
If he did not see this with his own eyes, Yue Yang would absolutely not believe that this would be true.
China also used to have this practice of sacrificing oneself for others. There was an innumerable succession of heroes from the Yan Huang Tribe, hence the Flame of Wen Ming was able to extend its life and became the only one left burning in the Four Big Wen Ming Ancient Empires.
In Soaring Dragon Continent, for Da Xia Empire to be able to stand for thousands of years and not fall, it should be because of the longstanding existence of such spirit.
Precisely because of the devotion and sacrifices made by the predecessors.
That’s the reason why later generations could grow and multiply and hand down from generation to generation ……
“Let’s go, we have already done our best.” The eagle-eyed guy patted Yue Yang’s should