Liu Wei casually strolled along the streets, full of busy mortals who didn’t spare him a second glance. He had done as Qingge and her group and changed his clothes to something less attention-grabbing than his usual sect robes, though his intent wasn’t to completely obscure the fact he was a cultivator, but rather just to make it less obvious to the masses. Now that Qingge had formerly launched her investigation, he finally had time to pursue his own goals in the city and while secrecy wasn’t strictly necessary for them, constant attention from everyone around him would undoubtedly become an annoyance rather quickly.

He didn’t have time for additional slow-downs. He hadn’t even originally intended to involve himself so closely into the investigation, but he hadn’t been able to help himself with how easy it was for him to make his fellow sect members to such great effect.

It wasn’t that bad either way. He had planned to contact the Li Family regardless and what were a few days to a man as old as himself and with goals this monumental anyway?

As for these goals, he could feel them rapidly growing out of reach, even as he progressed towards them. Before this visit, he hadn’t been to a mortal city in decades if not centuries and as such, his arrival here had shown him an uncomfortable blind spot in his previous plans.

He had previously only thought off the injustice occurring right under his gaze, in his own sect. But naturally, it didn’t stop there. It extended far beyond it, into other sects and, most notably, into the vast populations of mortals. If anything, the sect seemed like a paradise of equality compared to the city. Some of the mortals were drowning themselves in excess while others were literally starving to death. It was a tragic sight.

Liu Wei had spent a significant amount of time pondering these problems over the last few days and had arrived at a harsh conclusion: he currently wasn’t in a position to do anything about this. Sure, he could seek to rectify singular cases of injustice but with the millions upon millions of mortals populating the sect’s territory, any impact that he might have would be pretty much negligible. He would instead continue to focus his effort on changing the sect itself. The values he was trying to imprint on it would hopefully spread out from there, should he be successful.

And for now, that meant he had better things to do than to further follow along his spiraling pathway of thoughts, as the large sign reading ‘Moonlake Academy’ hanging above the gate he had arrived before reminded him off.

…

Liu Wei had never been at a mortal academy before and he was already surprised with the academy grounds being nothing like he had imagined them to be. Where he had expected something roughly resembling the sect’s Training Hall, they were more resemblant of a large park with paths trailing in between patches of vegetation.

Spread out among them were benches and tables, some of which were occupied by pairs of groups of people dressed in simple but elegant robes of mostly black and grey color. Most of them were occupied with conversations they were holding or with stacks of parchment they were either reading, or taking notes on. The first pair that Liu Wei listened in on seemed to be fiercely arguing about the merits of a particular… type of wood in ‘recent architectural trends’.

A second was completely absorbed in their debate on different subspecies of donkeys and a larger group he came by was seemingly competing on who could make the most inflammatory statement about the works of someone named ‘Geming Lei’ who Liu Wei could only assume to be another academic.

They were all topics that Liu Wei considered supremely uninteresting and yet these mortals were managing to position an ever-continuing number of questions about them in a way not entirely dissimilar to a cultivator’s contemplation of the Dao.

In the center of the park was a large complex of buildings resembling architecture from the sect. The largest was revealed by a sweep of the soul sense to be a library. While that was certainly impressive, considering that it seemed to rival the sect’s own library by sheer volume, written knowledge was not what Liu Wei was seeking. With no other indicator of where to go, he decided to head into the second largest building for a start.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The building’s interior was a large hall with multiple stories of walkways, connected in several places by stairs, going along its outer walls. From these walkways, doors led off to separate rooms in all directions but the front. It was teeming with people rushing from room to room or standing around and talking with their peers.

In the center of the room stood a large board upon which different topics were denoted alongside room names and times. From the look off it, these were the lectures held today. Deciding that familiarizing himself with the place and the system would be beneficial, Liu Wei skimmed the lessons that were soon to be held. It was late morning and most of the lectures dealing with ethics were apparently held later in the day, but there were still three options available at least.

It didn’t take long for Liu Wei to decide on the one named ‘Advanced Ethical Philosophy: Exploring Finiteness’. The other two were labeled as ‘basic’ and ‘beginner’ respectively so he couldn’t imagine them to be that interesting.

The lecture was said to be taking place in ‘Lecture Hall 14’ and it didn’t take him long to spot the corresponding door on the second floor and he headed there, wasting no time to enter the room.

Several Benches were arranged in rows on a slight slope, reminding him of the ranks of an arena, facing a small podium at the front. Feeling slightly out of place, he headed to one of the rows in the back and sat down on an arbitrary seat.

Over the next minutes, the room filled up with people, until it was roughly at half capacity by number of seats. Then, a man who was noticeably different from the rest entered. His robes were pure white and he was walking on a cane, clearly being of a rather advanced age, maybe in his sixties or seventies. Nevertheless, a certain air of authority seemed to surround him, not unlike the presence of an early-stage soul cultivator, though the man was a mortal through and through.

The room immediately grew quiet as the newcomer made his way towards the podium, followed by a docile looking younger man who was carrying a stack of papers, probably an assistant to the former. After reaching the desk situated on the podium and having accepted the papers, the old man spent a few moments sorting through them in silence. Then he turned towards the room and began to speak with a raspy voice:

“Hello everyone, welcome back. I’m pleased to see all off you here with me today. Now, considering the topic of this class, I think it’s quite appropriate we pick up where we left off without dallying for long. As we talked about last time, the transient property of human accomplishment seems to have quite dubious implications regarding notions of personal honor under the traditional school of the honorable Yaozu Wu, at least when viewed through the lens of more recent theory. As you know, however, Master Wu’s work is the basis of many modern models of ethical conduct and questioning it comes with a whole host of additional problems. In today’s lesson, we will get into the question of how to approach these and potential solutions for this dilemma. First off, as always, I ask you to assume the following…”

The lecture went on for roughly two hours and left Liu Wei absolutely stomped. He had known that mortals could naturally spend much more time of their short lives on activities outside the range of diligent cultivators, but this was far beyond any of his expectations. He was reasonably sure to have understood the broad picture of what the professor had been getting at, but he certainly didn’t feel like he could rephrase the specifics in his own words, much less debate someone about them.

A lot of that could definitely be chalked up to his complete lack of prior knowledge on the subject, but even beyond that it was incredibly impressive. By comparison, his own philosophical contemplations seemed, while not wrong, incredibly banal. There was a growing feeling of admiration for the accomplishments of the mortal mind in Liu Wei.

That feeling was mixed with another one however. Because as deeply reflected and impressive this philosophic exploration was, it was also completely useless. As transcendental as the theories were, they were completely inapplicable to any actual actions. It was nice to know these thoughts existed, but he wasn’t going to change the sect with fancy hypotheticals and insightful abstractions. Aside from the fact that most of his disciples wouldn’t understand a thing if he put them inside this kind of lecture, he wanted to install a basic sense of right and wrong in them, not make them question the nature of their own existence.

Had he known just how serious the ‘advanced’ part of the lectures title had been, he wouldn’t have visited it to begin with. But he had, apparently based on residues of his own old arrogance, assumed, that the things that a mortal would consider advanced would naturally be basic knowledge to a cultivator. It was laughable to think that he had assumed he would have to tutor his hires before they could start teaching the disciples…

Regardless, he would take this as good news. As long as he found some people teaching more basic ethics, they would most certainly be able to tutor his disciples better than he ever could on the topic. And if, along the way, he could pick up some additional philosophical knowledge as well, he would consider that a… welcome bonus.