บท 8: Cordial Conflict
Before the front porch, Gao and Zhang entered simple and loose battle stances in a patch of dirt surrounded by otherwise lively grass. It was obviously used regularly as a path or for other things, like holding shipments of various kinds. Realizing something, Lin made them take off their shirts so that she wouldn't have to find a servant to sow it up for them.
Eagerly, they cast them aside, not caring where they landed, and revealed thick, muscled bodies. Their physiques were clearly not built for showmanship alone. They had carved themselves into expressions of power and strength with a healthy but not unappealing layer of fat over their layered muscles.
Jean barked, "Get on with it," and with that signal, the spar commenced. Despite weighing so much, each son could easily run circles around all but the best boxers on earth with their extreme agility and skill. It began with a few light hits at first, all directed away from the face and joints unless they knew the other would block it. The point wasn't to injure, after all, just to have a bit of fun after dinner.
But after a few quick jabs, both they and their audience, with the exception of Jean, quickly grew bored, and they accelerated. While their previous movements would have landed them in the realm of a professional or intermediately proficient boxer before, they began to exceed such speeds and fell into a rhythm.
Their dance was one of equality despite constant give and take. A jab would beget a dodge; a hit begat a counter; a feeble throw begat an overpowering; a fist slipping through a guard begat an unconventional block. Like so, their fighting styles mixed elements of several martial arts; grapples, subtle redirections, and shattering fists found their place between them, where they created a sonorous synchrony.
However, despite such high levels of fighting, they both knew that they were taking it easy. Neither really took advantage of any potentially fatal slip-ups and always avoided striking someplace that might truly hurt the other, and when one played a move, they anticipated the other's counter and gave them extra time to make adjustments if the other made a mistake or was slow on the uptake.
After at least thirty minutes, however, Gao grew tired of taking it easy and moved to end it there by finding a weakness in Zhang's guard and sending a fist flying through to his solar plexus, trying to make him lose his breath and put him out of the fight.
However, the gap was not as large as Gao perceived it to be, and his fist clipped Zhang's forearm, which gave Zhang the time to spin away to Gao's back, where, upon understanding that it was time to end it, he took out Gao's undefended legs and sent him into the air with a sweep.
Gao quickly adapted and tried to shift his weight in mid air to make the flip and land on his feet, but Zhang had the advantage here and used it to flip Gao so that his back faced the ground, and while Gao was still in the air, Zhang flipped himself in a stunning display of precision and coordination to align with the position he would need for an arm bar when they landed, where he won by submission.
They were both covered in sweat and dust, but smiles plastered both their faces as they excitedly discussed what they did well and poorly. Most of what transpired in those thirty minutes was child's play, but the last few minutes was nearly beyond the level humans could achieve and where they exerted most of their energy.
Jean was entirely dumbfounded. The rest of the family was impressed with Zhang's last move, but the rest was par for the course. As a family policy, all of the males were forced to be martially capable and extremely physically fit. Li was a bit of an exception because M recognized that his interests elsewhere made up for it, but even Li was still required to maintain a minimum level of preparedness.
Yun left to go inside and find something to do, but the rest stayed and chatted longer before Lin left as well, bored with the topic. Not long after, Jean excused himself, too, and when he did, M followed him inside while the other four kept talking. It looked like the other two might have been getting ready to spar, too, but Jean had had enough of it.
"Let's get back to the study and keep working on the written language and phonetics," M offered.
Jean nodded silently, still awed, before saying shortly after, "Do you guys do that normally?"
"Not always, but sometimes we do. Depends on everyone's moods, I guess. Why? Didn't your family do the same?"
Jean scoffed, "No. No, we definitely didn't. We were poor and didn't have a place for it, not to mention that I am... was an only child."
"An only child? Did something happen?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, your parents weren't infertile, so why didn't you have siblings? I don't understand. Is that your culture, to only have one? But no, you'd depopulate over time if that were the case."
"No, like I said, we were poor. We didn't have the money for others, even if my parents wanted more, and not everybody wants more family to take care of. We didn't need little terrors rampaging through the house with how busy we were."
"Terrors? That's a pessimistic view towards children, wouldn't you say? They're trouble, for sure, but the rewards are more than worth it. As a father, even when they were younger, I always loved them. Any trouble can be taken care of, but a person is a person, and a person's value is incalculable."
"That's not my experience. Absolutely not my experience. I hate people." That sentence put M on edge while Jean continued, "Some are ok, but I hate most of them. They're horrible, always being blinded by this and that, treating me like trash, acting stupid, and the list goes on. You don't agree?"
"Absolutely not. There are a lot of people I think the world would be better off without..."
Jean interrupted, "But I thought you said that a person's value is incalculable."
"Don't interrupt me. As I was saying, although there are a lot of people I think the world would be better off without, the potential good in a person outweighs current evil. The possibility for redemption renders the existence of nearly all people a net good regardless of current or past evil. There are few men capable of greater good than those who have seen the true depths of sin and recognized the destruction inherent to it."
M continued, "However, I must concede that we must sometimes cut our losses and rid the world of a current evil if it is dire enough. Evil should always be expunged, but force must always be a last resort. Although righteous fire can cleanse evil, utilizing it runs the risk of incinerating the latent good with in a person, too."
"That's pretty presumptuous of you, don't you think? You're pretending that you know what good and evil really is and when we should cut our losses, like you know everything."
"Of course I know what good and evil is. They are not only innate to your humanity itself but can even be reasoned manually by asking the question 'Of the possible actions, which will lead to the greatest mutual beneficence of humanity?'."
"Sensing what is good and evil is not innate to humanity. Earlier, I thought that children were terrors, but you thought the opposite."
"But that's not a question of morality, that's a matter of opinion. You're kind of onto something because we could argue back and forth whether something is or is not moral, but the perfection of the methodology is not what is in question; what is in question is whether we have a methodology of sufficient efficacy, and when most people ask that question, we can come to a an answer by the confluence of answers. The answer is where we meet."
"But that doesn't mean that morality is objective. Actually, it means the opposite."
"I never said that it was. Maybe I didn't say it clearly enough before, but what I'm trying to say is that a moral compass is inherent to everybody, and although we may arrive at slightly different answers, most of us arrive at similar answers, and we can use the point where we converge as a mutual compass to judge us all by the same standard. You'll have to use your personal compass sometimes, but we use this mutual compass for all official matters. Your world didn't have a code or mutual compass of any kind?" M asked, concerned.
"Not really. Well, maybe. We agreed on a lot of things, actually, but we could never come up with a single set of morals because we had a bunch of different codes that we had to reconcile with one another."
"But you had morals?"
"Yes, but... I guess... I guess that, in the confusion, everybody just chose what appealed to them. We had laws, obviously, but what they were always changed when new people came into power."
"Sounds like chaos."
"Yeah, it kinda was."
สถานะพลังงานรายสัปดาห์
-- การจัดอันดับด้วยพลัง 
-- หินพลัง