The Second Elder's move was not a sudden repentance, nor a dramatic return to the right path.
He was simply continuing to follow what his heart had long decided.
Having long since lost the right to lie down there, he lacked the obsessive insistence the other four elders had.
But he knew what had been done to the ancestor's head.
Maybe at the beginning the Second Elder had been angry, struggled, hesitated.
He didn't choose to rebel; he chose to console himself.
He told himself that what he had done, and what the Zhao ancestors had done generation after generation, was all for the permanent survival and accumulation of power for the Zhao family of Jiujiang.
Lie to yourself for long enough and you begin to truly believe the lie.
Often the person least able to accept the lie being exposed is the one who was deceiving themselves.
Only under that self-deception could the Second Elder find comfort.
So when he saw with his own eyes the collapse along the central axis of the Zhao ancestral mansion, when he realized that the supposed "Zhao family's foundation" had vanished in an instant, it was less that he worried for the Zhao family's future than that he worried for his own life.
He desperately wanted to find, within that shattered lie, a continuation that would absolve him.