freenovelworld Chapter 1023 Trip to Yunmeng Mountain (3)
Chapter 1023 Trip to Yunmeng Mountain (3)
Upon seeing this, Li Che had a bad feeling.
He had already guessed what would happen next.
What will happen to those who came before us, who harbored burning ideals, when they arrived in an era even more feudal than their previous lives?
The answer seems obvious.
Li Che continued reading:
As I looked at the news coming from outside the mountains, those records about the hardships of people's lives, memories from another world began to burn within me.
In our hometown, countless predecessors followed one after another, all for the purpose of overthrowing the mountain that oppressed the people and establishing a country that belonged to the people.
Now that I possess knowledge ahead of my time, yet witness similar suffering, don't I have a responsibility to do something?
I don't know when it started, but this thought has been haunting my mind like a curse.
At first, it was just an idea, but it gradually became an obsession, or even a delusion.
I began to selectively impart more radical ideas to some like-minded young disciples within Yunmeng Mountain.
Although it didn't address the fundamental issues, it was still some doctrines about social structure, power distribution, and class analysis, which were undoubtedly crazy in this era, so I could only do this in private.
Yes, I'm trying to establish an ideal 'prototype' here first, a 'spark' for the future.
I thought I possessed the truth, and that with my vision beyond my time, I could dispel the fog of history and chart a shortcut to the other side for this world.
Blinded by this savior-like sentiment, I completely ignored the inertia and complexity inherent in this ancient civilization, and overlooked the vast differences between real human nature and the social environment.
I treated my experience from another time and space as a panacea that could be transplanted at will.
I was too impatient, too idealistic, and too arrogant.
Ultimately, this radical attempt, detached from reality, led to a grave mistake.
I began to try to launch an experiment in the area surrounding Yunmeng Mountain.
My companions and I called this the "Yunmeng New Policy," attempting to establish a model area based on the idealized vision of the early People's Republic of China in several villages within a hundred miles of Yunmeng Mountain.
I advocated abolishing the existing land tenancy relationship and declaring that the land belonged to the farmers, which directly affected the fundamental interests of local gentry and clans.
The villagers were organized to forcibly redistribute the land under the guise of collective labor.
They also attempted to implement a simple work point system to record labor, with the aim of distributing the harvest according to need.
I attempted to break down the existing clan system and village elders' self-governance, and to establish a village council to manage all affairs, modeled after the rudiments of the commune in my memory.
I personally instilled the concepts of equality and mutual assistance in the council members and required them to implement the production plans I set.
This completely undermined and angered the original rural power structure. The gentry and clan elders outwardly complied, but secretly harbored resentment.
I also ran night schools and personally lectured the villagers on topics that went far beyond literacy and arithmetic.
More often, it criticizes the divine right of kings and fatalism, and promotes the idea that human will can overcome nature and that all beings are equal...
Thinking about it carefully, they probably wouldn't understand these ideas. The reason they come to listen to the lectures is simply to encourage them to learn. I will give free eggs to those who attend the night school.
I even encouraged villagers to question government decrees and resist unreasonable corvée labor and taxes.
In this era, this was tantamount to openly challenging imperial power and the entire social order.
Driven by unrealistic fantasies of fighting, I organized a village protection team composed of young and strong villagers under the pretext of defending against bandits and protecting my home, and secretly taught them some discipline training and fighting skills.
This step is crucial in pushing things into an irreversible abyss.
The ideas I bring are fragmented, distorted by my own emotions and obsessions.
It ignored the inherent limitations of the small-scale peasant economy, the powerful inertia of a thousand-year-old patriarchal society, and seriously underestimated the backlash from vested interest groups.
The conflict stemmed from a grain requisition during the autumn harvest.
When the government came to collect grain, the council I led directly resisted paying the grain tax and used the money for collective reserves.
This became the last straw that broke the camel's back.
Taking advantage of the situation, local gentry banded together and, under the pretext that "the demons of Yunmeng Mountain are gathering to resist taxes and plotting treason," incited some villagers to quickly report the matter to the government.
The government reacted extremely quickly; within just a few days, a well-equipped county army arrived, leaving us no time to react.
The village protection team was no match for the regular army; they crumbled at the first touch.
The villagers who participated in the resistance and several core disciples were killed on the spot, and the so-called model area vanished in an instant.
I am the source of this disaster.
My arrogance, my impatience, and my simplistic approach to complex social problems ultimately led to the death of my trusted disciple, caused undeserved disaster for the villagers who depended on me, and brought unprecedented shame upon Yunmeng Mountain.
Every time I think back, those desperate cries seem to still echo in my ears.
The cost of the failed experiment was far greater than I had imagined.
Those disciples of Yunmeng Mountain who were influenced by radical ideas did not become completely sober despite the setbacks outside the mountain.
Some of them, on the contrary, thought that I was too conservative and not thorough enough.
They attributed their failures outside the mountains to a lack of public awareness, but failed to reflect on the disconnect between theory and reality.
One night, several of the most radical disciples of Yunmeng Mountain left a letter and departed without saying goodbye.
They descended the mountain, carrying with them the theories they had learned from me and filled with a passion to transform the world.
They are no longer content with slowly working their way up from the bottom, but are trying to climb the social ladder.
They went to lobby and try to win over those officials in power whom they considered enlightened, fantasizing about realizing their ideal blueprint overnight through a change of power.
The outcome was inevitable, and it was bloody.
To seasoned officials, their words were not merely heretical, but treacherous and inciting to rebellion, shaking the foundations of the nation!
Almost without any suspense, these young people with unrealistic fantasies were quickly arrested, interrogated, and then publicly executed on charges of treason as a warning to others.
When the news reached Yunmeng Mountain, I broke down.
It was I who, with those undigested and unrealistic doctrines, personally led them to their doom!
This time, the storm it triggered far exceeded the last one.
The imperial court's attention once again focused on Yunmeng Mountain, and it began to suspect that it was a long-planned source of rebellion.
The pressure was like Mount Tai pressing down, threatening to crush the entire Yunmeng Mountain into dust.
It was my master who stepped forward.
Despite his ailing health, he exhausted all the connections he had built up throughout his life, running around and making deals at all levels, even risking his own life and the thousand-year-old reputation of Yunmeng Mountain to barely persuade the imperial court.
Ultimately, the matter was characterized as "a small number of disciples being misled by heresies and acting on their own," and was unrelated to the mainstream of Yunmeng Mountain.
The traditions of Yunmeng Mountain have been barely preserved.
But my master, this old man who lived a simple and unassuming life, suffered a series of setbacks and soon after the incident subsided, he passed away in despair.
On his deathbed, he held my hand tightly, his cloudy eyes barely holding any light, only repeatedly murmuring:
"Wrong...all wrong...Yuanshan, stop...stop..."
I knelt before my master's bedside, watching him take his last breath. At that moment, I felt my own soul die with him.
Endless regret, like a cold tide, completely overwhelmed me.
It was me, this jinx from another world, who killed my master, killed those young disciples, and almost destroyed the thousand-year-old foundation of Yunmeng Mountain.
Li Che slowly put down the letter, his gaze deep and thoughtful.
From the moment he saw Wang Yuanshan's experiment in the letter, he had a bad feeling.
As expected, the process and outcome were exactly as he had anticipated.
He closed his eyes, as if he could see through a hundred years of time, that soul from the same world, eagerly trying to sow seeds of fire on a foreign land, but ultimately burning itself in the process.
"That's too radical, Comrade Wang..."
Li Che sighed silently in his heart.
He could understand that urgency.
That ancestor came from a country that was once poor and weak, but was reborn from the ashes through drastic changes and countless sacrifices.
The generation he represents has a deep-seated sense of urgency that makes every minute count.
They witnessed firsthand, and even participated in, how to break down an old world and establish a new order as quickly as possible.
That profound impulse to reform and the consciousness of national salvation, which runs deep in his soul, would instinctively burst forth when he faced a feudal society that also suffered from oppression and injustice, and he would replicate that proven path.
He viewed complex social evolution as an engineering project that could be rapidly accomplished using advanced theories.
They believed that the power of ideas could overcome all real-world obstacles, but underestimated the strength of traditional inertia and ignored the complexity of human nature.
"This is not your fault alone, Comrade Wang."
Li Che's gaze seemed to pierce through the letter, revealing the soul struggling painfully between the gap between ideals and reality.
"This is a limitation of the times, a cognitive imprint that your generation could not completely avoid under a specific historical background."
Although Li Che also comes from modern times, his historical context is different from Wang Yuanshan's.
He witnessed similarly radical experiments, as well as the subsequent reflections and adjustments.
Living in an era of information explosion and global perspective, he understands that social change is a complex systemic project that cannot be accomplished overnight by simply transplanting theories.
It requires consideration of specific levels of productivity, cultural traditions, and social structures, and it requires patience, strategy, and even... some necessary compromises.
Wang Yuanshan's tragedy lies in the fact that he arrived at the starting point of a long process, carrying with him the ultimate answer to an era of radical change.
His failure was the inevitable result of the collision between two different temporal and spatial logics.
"His plight is pitiful, and his aspirations are commendable, but his actions were too reckless." Li Che sighed and picked up the letter again.