"Chronicles of Time? What tomb—this is only my painting."

Inside the false Chronicles of Time.

The Painter watched as, from the album, ancient heroes stepped out one by one, all kinds of familiar figures; his thoughts seemed to traverse time and space, returning to the very first ages.

The Painter, from the moment of birth, could not understand what kind of creature he was.

He was a scribble woven from countless thick and thin lines, like a child scrawling with a pencil on a wall.

That squirming mass of line-draft shadow sat quietly in the empty, primitive Nine-State world, witnessing the birth of many creatures.

He watched them evolve, grow; grasslands appeared, forests, schools of fish, tribes.

In his idle moments, what he loved most was to gaze at this great land; just watching tiny insects crawl back and forth could hold his attention for an entire day.

He loved that brilliantly magnificent animal world of the hunt, of killing and growth, as though composing a resplendent ode to Civilization.

Later, those insects grew and changed; the animals awakened wisdom and formed tribes.

Each time the strong chieftains of those races returned from the hunt, dragging prey back to the tribe, they would roar at the sky while the people below cheered.

He was deeply shaken by those scenes.

His meaningless life was lit up by this scroll of survival of the fittest, as if he had come to understand the meaning of his own existence.

Then, he became the chieftain of all races, enjoying their tributes, solving their difficulties, building houses for them.

The primitive animals began inexplicably to offer him tribute.

He, a rough creature of lines, was gradually called an Immortal.

In those days, all lives were ordinary animals, with no Divine Techniques, very simple, kind, and sincere.

Xian was no longer lonely; Xian had many, many adorable and simple animal friends.

But their lives were far too short; each parting by life and death came with despair and weeping.

In their eyes before dying of old age, there was always a burning, unwilling gleam of longing.

Xian began to hate parting, to hate death.

"Why does this world have death? I don’t want them to die. I don’t want to live in loneliness." A stronger loneliness lingered in his heart; the friends around him died or left, one after another.

Clearly his side was still so lively, with newly born animal friends, yet each time he sent off new friends, an ever more intense sense of loneliness wound through his whole being.

He watched the first generation of mighty, stalwart tribal chiefs fall, then the second generation leave, then the fourth, the tenth...

He could not understand why he alone was undying, while all other lives would depart from him.

Gradually, Xian learned to paint.

He discovered that he could not keep their forms, but the murals on stone could keep their figures forever; those ordinary stone walls were more useful than this so-called Immortal.

The laughter, tears, and regrets of their lifetimes seemed like scroll after scroll, which Xian painted onto the stone walls again and again.

His friends kept dying; he kept painting.

He lived entirely in a valley filled with murals, hoping to paint pairs of eyes that would never weep, to hold fast a life that flashed by in an instant, to let all beauty from then on never wither again.

Seas changed into mulberry fields and back again.

His painting skill gradually took on a mysterious resonance.

He slowly discovered that life possessed a structure that was a Soul Shell.

His art grew ever stronger; following the contour of the other’s soul, each stroke, each line, in the end he painted out every Soul Shell, cell, and piece of flesh and blood of the other.

Until one day, his painting suddenly came alive.

He had drawn the other’s Soul Shell and stuffed it back into their body.

His animal friends had returned.

Those corpses stood up.

Undying existence began to appear in the world.

Xian laughed aloud:

"I’ve done it. Next I will leave behind paint seeds, tuck them into your bodies. After you die, your bodies will automatically become Eternal Scrolls—undying and immortal, long-lived and imperishable!"

"My friends, we can stay together forever."

At that time he was kind and simple, bearing only a pure wish—to be with his friends forever, to laugh together, sing together, roast meat before the bonfire together, and smile as they watched the little animals below hunt.

The paint seeds began to be spread into every living being.

After their deaths, they had a certain chance of resurrection.

The Embers virus appeared for the first time in this world.

At first, people rejoiced in the resurrection of their friends, for there was no creature that wished itself to die.

Until one day, they slowly realized that those resurrected would turn into a kind of bloodthirsty Monster that ate people.

From this, war and despair unfolded; Xian could never forget those sky-piercing beacons of war, the exploding earth, shattered windows, wailing tribes, blood-stained city-states, and the countless bloodthirsty Ghosts spreading across the land.

The final outcome was that all living people in the world were eaten, and the world itself turned into Embers.

The entire world became a true scroll, all of it one Soul Shell after another outlined by lines. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

The obsession of "staying alive" began to unify among the painted soul-beings, and the Embers virus thus became a virus of evolution.

The first great biological explosion of the world began from this.

No one knew how despairing Xian had been then; faced with the tragic world he had created with his own hands, he chose to be killed, to let all beings slay him—but he was too strong.

Countless resurrected Ember Creatures, endowed with Divine Techniques, became Extraordinary beings, became mighty Divine Beasts; hundreds of thousands besieged him.

Only then did they barely manage to kill him.

He was dismembered into Soul Shell and Soul Muddy Qi.

After his death, his Muddy Qi became the Pseudo-human.

His Ember shell became the Embers of Xian, eternally sealed.

But he was still too hard to kill; his main consciousness’s Muddy Qi still lived, gradually becoming the Painter, awakening upon a wasteland covered in black, blood-reeking Earth.

"How am I still alive?"

"I should have died long ago."

He walked out of the wasteland and discovered that, after evolution, all the living beings under Heaven had transformed from Mortal Beasts into Divine Beasts, born with all sorts of racial Divine Techniques.

He had fallen; the Mortal Beasts of this world had also become Extraordinary, yet only the Human Race possessed no Divine Techniques.

This race still went through birth, aging, sickness, and death.

So, he bestowed Enlightenment upon the race that had formed in his mind after his fall—the Pseudo-humans—and let them go and seize possession of humans.

Viewed from a macro perspective, this was not wrong.

"After I died, now that I have shed the body of Xian, I have gained a lifespan; like them, I will age and die. I will continue protecting this era, and I will die quietly."

He chose a mediocre life, married a Ancestor of a Divine Beast, had a daughter, and spent an incomparably ordinary span of years, growing old and dying together.

But he, who had once yearned for death with unbearable intensity, when truly facing death, felt the Life Force gradually being drained from his body, and this made him develop a violent terror of death.

On the verge of death, he actually became afraid to die.

Clutching that fear of despair, after he died, his wife and daughter buried him deep in a tomb.

In that moment, the Painter was born once more.

And this time, driven by fear of death, he began a long, long struggle to survive.

In his youth, he had been full of fighting spirit; for the sake of his friends, for the sake of preserving their youth, he painted without cease, unwittingly walking all the way to today—decayed, foul, skilled in calculation.

More than fifteen million years later, he had gone through all the vicissitudes of time.

"So, I had already died long ago."

The Painter suddenly murmured with a laugh, "How ridiculous—seeking death while alive, seeking life after death. How ugly; I’m no different from those other lives."

"It’s not that I refuse to ascend; it’s that I am an Earth-bound Spirit and simply cannot ascend."

At this moment, a black Three Flowers bloomed from the crown of his head.

The kind and gentle Xian of his youth overlapped with his present figure; that searing emotion blazed in his heart.

On this day, I know who I am.

The Xian who had once been kind and tender had finally returned.

"After so many trials, I have at last walked back onto this path, to see the people of this world anew."

The black radiance deepened; it seemed as if people’s eyes were being devoured by endless darkness.

The voice was distant, as though descending into this world from ancient history.

"Once, I tried to preserve their faces; I wanted to paint visages that would forever bear smiles and know no sorrow, to stop this world from weeping, to end the helpless partings of life and death among humanity."

"Thus the world came to be filled with eternal corpses, and the Embers Disaster arose. They are still laughing."

The cold, desolate voice narrated:

"The essence of Embers—their repetition of their former lives in place—is nothing more than the memorial portraits I painted in mourning."

He reached out; the false Chronicles of Time fell into his hand, and he said faintly:

"The Chronicles of Time are nothing more than the Eternal Scroll I painted in an attempt to preserve history."

"Very well, then. Come."

He picked up his brush and began to paint toward the body of himself who had lived a second mortal life, tracing the body, depicting the Spiritual Root; the Seven Colors Spiritual Root was fused back into his flesh.

An unprecedented, vast aura shrouded the entire Nine-State, as if proclaiming that the King of this world had returned.

He took a single step forward, standing openly and upright above all the heroic figures of the Chronicles of Time. "We are all Eternal Scrolls in the annals of history."