Carve Out the Mad Stone

In Liu Yuan’s family, the elders hold absolute authority over the younger generation. Children are treated as tools for their parents, while the parents, in turn, serve as tools of the system—bound tightly by the obsession with being “useful.” Within this structure, Liu Yuan’s father grew up to be fearful, fragile, and emotionally deprived. When familial power gradually shifted into his hands, he inherited and reinforced the very order that once shaped him. He became a perpetrator, passing down the same learned behaviors to the next generation. 

Carve out the Mad Stone explores the intergenerational transmission of emotional coldness—a cycle rooted in long-standing structural oppression, social inertia, and the pressures of survival. “Love,” a seemingly fundamental emotion, is often devalued in many families, replaced instead by the deeply embedded cultural expectations of ritual and filial piety. People must first learn how to be loved before they can learn to love others. Yet individuals who grow up without emotional nourishment often enter society armored, perpetuating the coldness they’ve inherited. 

When we begin to question these traditional structures—when we, like Liu Yuan in the story, keep asking why rather than blindly accepting the order imposed on us since birth—we open the possibility of constructing a new, healthier system: one that breaks the cycle, disrupts the transmission of indifference, and dismantles inherited chains.