Only the weak blame the world and make excuses for their own incompetence

Over the next two days.

Su Ji and Su Jiu wandered aimlessly through the bustling city of Suhang.

Su Jiu asked no more questions.

Su Ji said nothing more.

The two simply walked, one after the other. Neither spoke, and the silence carried a strange, eerie weight.

They walked past clamoring street markets and crossed crowded stone bridges.

Occasionally, Su Ji would stop at a roadside stall to buy a skewer of candied hawthorn or a box of osmanthus cakes.

He didn't eat them himself, but just held them in his hand.

Then, under Su Jiu's puzzled gaze, he would casually hand the food to a snot-nosed little beggar by the road.

Watching this series of baffling actions, Su Jiu's confusion deepened.

She noticed that Su Ji's gaze rarely lingered on their surroundings.

Most of the time, he was looking at the sky.

Whether the sky was clear and boundless or heavily overcast.

He would always subconsciously raise his head, over and over again, to gaze up at that vast expanse.

...

Night fell.

The streets of Suhang were even noisier than during the day.

The lights of ten thousand homes illuminated the bluestone paths as bright as day, reflecting the bright moon in the sky.

Whoosh! Bang!

A massive firework exploded in midair.

The brilliant flash instantly lit up the entire night sky, as well as every joy-filled face on the streets.

Children ran and played in the crowd holding all sorts of decorative lanterns, their silvery laughter rising and falling.

It was unclear what festival it was today.

Su Ji and Su Jiu walked side by side through the crowded tide of people.

Neither of them spoke.

They seemed separated from the surrounding liveliness by an invisible barrier, appearing completely out of place.

Su Jiu suddenly stopped in her tracks.

She turned her head and looked at Su Ji beside her.

Su Ji also stopped. He had a newly bought sugar figure in his mouth, crunching it loudly, and spoke indistinctly.

"Why did you stop?"

Su Jiu did not answer.

She just looked at him quietly, for a very long time.

Reflecting the distant fireworks, her clear, fox-like eyes flickered with an emotion that Su Ji could not understand.

It wasn't until Su Ji felt a bit uncomfortable from her stare and was about to turn his head away that she finally spoke, her voice clear and cold.

"Senior Brother."

"Hmm?"

"You have been looking at the sky these past few days."

Su Ji paused his chewing. He raised an eyebrow in surprise.

"Have I?"

"Yes."

Su Jiu's answer was simple and decisive.

Su Ji fell silent.

He swallowed the remaining half of the sugar figure in his mouth.

His Adam's apple bobbed, but he made no sound.

In the distance, fireworks bloomed gorgeously in the night sky one after another, before instantly returning to nothingness.

The flickering light and shadows cast Su Ji's face in alternating brightness and dark.

He remained standing there motionless, like a stone statue.

After a long, long time.

Su Ji finally reacted.

"The night wind is getting a bit cold."

"I am not suited to stay here either."

"Of the ten thousand lit windows, not a single lamp is left on for me."

"Let's continue to stroll somewhere else."

Su Ji turned and disappeared into the crowded tide of people.

...

Over the next few days, Su Ji visited many more places.

It was as if he wanted to walk all the paths he had never walked in his life.

He traveled aimlessly through mountains, rivers, and the wilderness.

Su Jiu followed at a constant distance.

She didn't ask where he was going, and he didn't ask why she was following.

A bizarre tacit understanding was maintained between the two.

On this day, they arrived at a small town nestled by mountains and water.

The town was not large. Cooking smoke curled upward, the sounds of chickens and dogs could be heard, painting a peaceful and serene scene.

Su Ji's footsteps stopped in front of an ordinary farmhouse courtyard.

In the yard, a little boy of about seven or eight was squatting on the ground, hugging an empty birdcage, crying out of breath.

A dark-skinned peasant man, likely the boy's father, squatted beside him, looking somewhat at a loss.

"Dad... Little Yellow... Little Yellow is dead..."

The boy sobbed, pointing at the motionless yellow lump in the corner of the birdcage.

The man sighed, reached out to pat the boy's head, and spoke with a hint of reproach.

"I told you long ago, out of all the birds you could catch, you just had to catch an oriole."

"This bird has the wildest nature and is the hardest to tame. Locked in a cage, nine times out of ten, it will bash its own head until it bleeds, beating itself to death."

The boy looked up, his red eyes full of grievance and confusion.

"This bird is really silly."

"Why wouldn't it just obediently stay in the cage? It had food and water, and didn't have to suffer the wind and sun. How nice is that?"

Hearing this, the man shook his head, a complex smile appearing on his face.

"The silly one is you, child."

"Take a few years ago, when there was war in the north. The leading general captured a city of civilians, but encountering continuous heavy rain, he couldn't march with that group of people, so he ultimately had to order a massacre of the city."

The man lit a dry tobacco pipe, took a slow drag, and his eyes grew distant.

"Some people were so scared they hugged their heads and cried, kneeling and begging for mercy."

"Some people thought themselves clever, taking an umbrella and putting on a straw raincoat, showing that they absolutely wouldn't hinder the march."

"But there were also some people who would rather stand singing in the rain than return under the eaves to see if they could find a straw raincoat to eke out a living."

"Tell me, were these people silly or not?"

The boy shook his head, half-understanding.

The man smiled, the smoke rings leaving his mouth and slowly dissipating.

"As long as you are silly enough, you don't have to think so much."

"Because just staying alive already takes all your effort."

"But clever people think too much."

"About dignity, about the future, about freedom, about what comes next..."

"The more they think, the deeper they sink, and the more tiring it is to live."

Outside the courtyard wall, Su Ji listened quietly.

He looked at the empty birdcage, then looked at himself.

Su Ji's Adam's apple bobbed, but he couldn't say a single word.

He turned and continued walking forward.

This time, his steps were much heavier than before.

...

It was unknown how long they walked.

They arrived at a desolate, uninhabited dead end.

Ahead was a cliff tens of thousands of feet high, looking as if it had been cleaved by a deity's giant axe, thrusting straight into the clouds with no top in sight.

The cliff face was as smooth as a mirror, with not a blade of grass growing on it.

Yet in such a treacherous place, a few wisps of cooking smoke surprisingly rose.

At the bottom of the cliff, over a dozen crude tents were actually pitched. A group of ragged workers sat around a campfire, all with miserable faces, sighing in despair.

"Boss... can we really build a tomb in this godforsaken place?"

A younger worker asked, his voice carrying a hint of crying.

The one called Boss was a burly middle-aged man.

He nodded without speaking, merely stuffing a charred piece of flatbread into his mouth and chewing vigorously.

"But... but this cliff is perfectly straight, without even a place to land your foot. How are we supposed to get up there? Let alone build a tomb on it..."

"This simply isn't work meant for human beings!"

"Our nine clans will probably all be implicated and exterminated for sure..."

Another worker wailed in despair, drawing a chorus of agreement from the surroundings.

"Exactly! We are just too unlucky!"

"How is this any different from throwing our lives away!"

The burly man finally swallowed the mouthful of flatbread.

He ignored the crowd's complaints and simply raised his hand, pointing toward the smooth cliff face in the distance.

Following his finger, the crowd looked over and saw a few blue-grey mountain sheep effortlessly treading across the near-vertical cliff face as if walking on flat ground.

"A path that even beasts can walk."

The man's voice was hoarse yet powerful, drowning out all the complaining.

"And we cannot?"

Everyone was stunned.

The man stood up and patted the dust off his clothes. A fiery determination burned within his weather-beaten eyes.

"As long as I wish to walk, the path is right beneath my feet."

He scanned his companions, whose faces were still etched with despair, and his voice suddenly boomed like a clap of thunder.

"Only the weak curse the heavens and blame others, making excuses for their own incompetence!"

"Get your damn asses up!"

"Today, even if we have to claw with our fingers and bite with our teeth, we are going to carve a path out of this cliff!"

With that said, he was the first to unhook the iron pickaxe from his waist, turning and marching toward the despair-inducing precipice.

The rest of the workers looked at each other. The despair on their faces was gradually replaced by a fierce unwillingness to yield.

That was right.

If beasts could walk this path.

Why couldn't they?

Su Ji stood in the distance, watching these mortals. He watched as they picked up their crude tools and marched toward that seemingly insurmountable natural barrier.