Chapter 14 Beast Division 2 The Inaccessible Truth

October 29, 2008 at 22:42 There are many legends about black beasts, but most of them are not very reliable.The original record comes from the "Yu Zhong Nan Shan Jing".Later generations of researchers deduced from the date of writing this part that the earliest record about the beast appeared in the late Warring States period. Dongfang Shuo, a scholar of the Han Dynasty, described the black beast in more detail in his works.The animal, he said, lives in the mountains of the southwest.They don't tell the truth by nature, and they can't find the same kind for copulation, so they have special mating methods.They spray bodily fluids in the soil of the mountains, and make their offspring hide deep in the soil.Years later, when these fluids merged with the fluids of other black beasts, they broke through the ground, and young black beasts grew on the new branches.The difference between this animal and the vegetable sheep is that they drop from the branches of the tree once they are mature and wander about, while the latter can only hang forever on the fading branches.

It is said that the meat of these animals is fat, but the meat contains toxins. Anyone who eats their meat will not be able to tell the truth for the rest of their lives and become captives of the beasts.Dongfang Shuo commented that although such a situation may be true, it is not necessarily a bad thing even if it happens: what a person says is always false, which is no different from him always telling the truth.Hunters chased the black beasts all over the mountains, and their chances of successful mating became less and less, and they eventually became extinct.After that, the part of human beings who only tell the truth and the part who only tell lies gradually intermarried, and the offspring they gave birth always uttered the truth and fiction intertwined, and others could no longer get useful information from it.With the appearance of this kind of man who tells both truth and lies, the golden age of human beings gradually faded away.

Hundreds of years later, Duan Chengshi reorganized the inheritance and evolution of the false beast. He wrote that the beasts were not extinct.It is said that the place where the descendants of the beasts live together is near the ancient state of Chen, roughly equivalent to the eastern part of Henan and the northern part of Anhui in modern China.Some false beasts once served as officials in Chen State and several nearby small countries.After the fall of the state of Chen, the descendants of the beasts were divided into two branches. One branch took the surname of the beast and migrated to the south;

In the era of the Six Dynasties, the branch of the surname was changed to the surname Duan for some unclear reasons.Duan Chengshi himself comes from this family.At a public banquet, Duan Chengshi apologized to the public for his blood relationship.But he emphasized that due to the continuous neutralization of human fluids, he has no similarities with those lying ancestors. Chen Zangqi, another great zoologist of the dynasty, scoffed at Duan Chengshi's narration.He accused all of Duan Chengshi's remarks as nonsense.He also asked the public to pay attention to the profession of this speaker—a novelist. Because of this, what Duan Chengshi said was nothing more than "the words of a novelist" and had no basis.At the same time, he cited some lost documents and said that although Dongfang Shuo's records in "Shen Yi Jing" were inaccurate, his records about the extinct beasts were correct. "Shi Zhou Ji", "Gu Wei Shu" and other classics can provide supporting testimony.

Duan Chengshi then retorted that, in fact, Chen Zangqi criticized his views so much to cover up the family scandal.Chen Zangqi is actually a descendant of another branch of the Evil Beast.Obviously, he was unwilling to disclose this fact, and tried to conceal the possible adverse consequences of this truth for his academic career. As expected, Chen Zangqi fired back at the remarks.He emphasized that Duan Chengshi's claims are no different from personal attacks, because there is no evidence to support such bizarre views.Conversely, there are more than a dozen methods of argumentation to arrive at the fact that he has nothing to do with the Evil Beast.For example, the Chen family has nothing to do with the place name Chen, and he himself has never traveled in Henan and Anhui.One of Chen Zangqi's disciples wrote an article shortly afterwards, claiming that Duan Chengshi's remarks above were naked hype, and the purpose was to promote his new book that had not been published for a long time.

They fought each other for a long time, and the original supporters of both sides died soon after.The stories circulating in the market are becoming more and more bizarre.But the debate continued, and the two long-lived polymaths revised their views countless times, citing various rare and unknown documents as evidence.In the end, Duan Chengshi couldn't hold on anymore and died; Chen Zangqi was executed by the emperor not long after.After the two died, their apprentices and heirs were still arguing about it. However, no one knows the final whereabouts of the beast. This is an inaccessible truth.