Outside Of Time

1785  Historian Chen Mo

Time and space wavered like the shimmering wings of a jade cicada.

Within one of those flickering points of light lay the Tianqi Continent—another spacetime entirely.

Great Ling Dynasty.

Outside the Historiography Academy, the autumn night was thick with chill.

Inside, Chen Mo's brush hovered over a bamboo slip, ink congealing in the inkstone with faint ripples.

The brittle chirps of fall crickets seeped through the window as bronze lamp light bathed the room in a stale yellow glow, like aged tea steeped in time itself.

He had been annotating the newly delivered Records of Rivers and Canals, but now his brush paused over one particular line:

"In the ninth year of Yuanguang, River Defense Commandant Wang Yan recruited civilians to repair the breach at Huzi…"

A drop of ink fell, blooming across the bamboo slip like the turmoil in his mind.

This was the thirty-fifth discrepancy he had uncovered in recent years.

The strip clearly stated "River Defense Commandant Wang Yan", yet last year in Chenliu Commandery, he had seen a surviving folk stele inscription that read: "In the ninth year of Yuanguang, River Clerk Li Ping dug diversion channels."

The two names alternated across different historical records like overlapping froth upon a river's surface, straining his eyes.

Stranger still, records of the Ling River's water level in the third year of Yuanguang differed by three feet between The Grand Historian's Records and Han Old Ceremonials—as though the same river had split into two parallel courses beneath historians' brushes.

The Great Ling Annals of Disasters and Omens.

Unrolling it, his gaze settled on a line where ink had bled into the fibers, forming crooked arcs:

"In the 79th year of Lingdi's reign, Mars stationed in Heart, and a crimson star fell to earth."

The vermilion characters held him in silent contemplation.

This was his last discovery of historical discrepancy.

The 79th year of Lingdi was over five centuries past, yet no such event appeared in any other records from that year.

The musty scent of parchment mingled with pine-soot ink as the water clock's drips sliced time into even fragments.

Suddenly, Chen Mo recalled another oddity from three years prior in the sutra repository.

While collating The Biography of King Mu of Zhou, he had found a fragment of Summer-Winter period silk wedged between bamboo slips, its tadpole script reading:

"When the year rested in Firebird, rivers ran dry and mountains crumbled; all ancestors perished in primal chaos."

And on oracle bones from The Basic Annals of Lingluo Clan, the same calamity was repeated nine times in differing scripts—as though the same ballad had been passed down through eras, its lyrics mutating with time.

Yet most historical records flowed seamlessly, devoid of any such disasters.

Almost as if someone had played a grand jest upon posterity.

After a long silence, Chen Mo massaged his temples and moved to the window, watching the first snow as he murmured:

"What is the truth of history?"

Chen Mo fell silent.

Time flowed. A decade passed.

Chen Mo remained a historian, though his white hair and wrinkles far outpaced his peers—for these ten years had been spent obsessively scouring texts for answers.

In The Inner Biography of Dust and Steel, he found: "The Heavenly Emperor's Mother bestowed elixirs of longevity, blooming once every 3,300 years." Yet Jin Taikang Geographical Records recounted the same tale as: "The Eastern King conferred longevity arts, fruiting every 500 years."

Southeastern Dynasty's Commentary on the Water Classic and the 19th Earth-Heaven Era's General Geography placed the same mountain ranges five hundred kilometers apart, yet both mentioned stone caskets containing ten-thousand-year calendars buried within.

Most startling of all—when he aligned the collapse dates of dynasties by the sexagenary cycle, every 1,800 years coincided with "the five planets aligning as royal energy extinguishes."

He had shared these findings, only for colleagues to call him possessed.

Even the Academy Chancellor had slammed his chronological charts and raged:

"Histories are the mirrors of dynasties! How dare you muddy them with occult nonsense!"

Only his wife, adding robes to his shoulders at night, would stare at his layered timelines and whisper:

"I once saw you pick up half an oracle bone in the abandoned garden—its cracks matched the jade scepter unearthed from the imperial mausoleum last year."

"Perhaps all stories under heaven are but old tunes replayed."

"I know your convictions. If you resolve to seek answers, I will stand with you."

Her words reminded him of their first meeting—the wooden hairpin in her hair had borne grain patterns identical to the growth rings of a withered tree from his childhood.

Lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling, he recalled his teacher's words from twenty years prior when he first entered the Historiography Academy:

"The historian's brush should be like a river lantern—illuminating the stones beneath the silt."

Back then, he hadn't understood. Now, faced with countless contradictions flickering across shelves of texts, he recognized those stones were buried under layer upon layer of weeds, tangling the lantern's light.

Thus, in the heart of winter, Chen Mo resigned.

With a box of rubbings, he embarked on a journey—a resolution years in the making, fueled by lingering doubts, his teacher's words, and his wife's support.

Time flowed like a song, even if that song played on repeat.

Along his travels, Chen Mo discovered fading cave paintings at Kunlun Mountain's foothills—their flood motifs identical to Later Books' account of Emperor Lingsheng controlling waters.

In a northern fishing village's genealogy, he read of ancestors fleeing in great boats when the sea's eye inverted—a tale three millennia removed from Great Ling Scripture's records.

Theories of collapse, cycles, calamities—fragmentary yet interconnected—were compiled into his travel journals.

Until, in southern desert sands, he unearthed half a stele. When deciphered, its text nearly matched the Great Ling's ritual prayers word for word.

In that moment, understanding dawned:

"If civilizations truly rise and fall, they all write similar elegies under the same stars."

After thirteen years of travel, Chen Mo turned homeward.

But age and premature frailty took their toll. He fell ill en route, unable to reach the capital.

Now lying on a crude inn bed between fits of bloody coughing, the feeble historian gazed upon the work of his lifetime…

Atlas of Civilizational Cycles