Chapter 1304: The One and Only State!
The wind blowing in through the window caused the candle to flicker. The pages of the Cycle of Civilization flipped gently. The book cataloged the rise and fall of the successive dynasties. And in the end, Chen Mo had organized it in a way that revealed a closed cycle, like the path of a bright moon on a long night. That cycle caused him to realize that every word of history, the name of every era, and all other things were just evidence of the turning of the wheel. And that wheel never stopped moving.
Despite being weak and sick, Chen Mo used the last of his strength to carve his insights on to twelve bronze slips. Because the details were put onto bronze slips, they would be able to stand up to the corrosive power of time. Chen Mo knew that his enlightenment would be nothing but a tiny ripple in the great river of reincarnation. Even still, he persisted.
The imperial historians used some unknown power to obscure the way time overlapped. They used myths to cover the truth about destruction. They used different words to hide prophecies. But Chen Mo was now carving the truth into the bronze slips.
The last line he wrote was, “The reincarnation of all things ends in the unification of silence.”
Thunder boomed outside! Rain fell steadily onto the roof over his head. The rhythm of the sound caused Chen Mo to slip into something of a daze. Suddenly, he found himself thinking about a thousand-year-old document Sealed Tributes, which mentioned a rain of destruction that had a similar rhythm.
“I’m about to depart...” Chen Mo murmured. His life force was about to go out, and his vision was blurring. He had lived a life that felt like being trapped in a boat on the open sea. Nobody understood him. But at least he left behind something.
“I still have some regrets...” he whispered. As he lay there waiting to die, he eventually struggled to lift his head and look out the window at the storm.
Perhaps it was his regret that caused it, or perhaps his blurred vision, but the next time the lightning struck he noticed that his shadow on the wall seemed to overlap perfectly with the bronze slips, the Spirit Empress’ nine revelations hexagrams, the inscriptions on the ancient oracle bones, and the coiling dragon carving on the golden imperial edict of the reigning dynasty.
Chen Mo was stunned momentarily. Then his eyes began to shine brightly.
Whenever someone tries to grasp the trajectory of history, they actually become that trajectory.