Chapter 1303: Historiographer Chen Mo

Chapter 1303: The Historian Chen Mo

Time and space shifted, flickering like the wings of a jade cicada—unsteady, elusive.

Within one such glimmering speck appeared Tianqi Continent, nestled in another realm of time.

The Great Ling Dynasty.

Outside the Imperial Archives, midnight deepened beneath autumn’s heavy breath.

Inside, Chen Mo held his brush suspended above bamboo slips, ink rippling faintly in the stone inkstone.

Beyond the window, autumn cicadas chirped in broken fragments; the bronze lamp on his desk cast a glow that bathed every scroll in aged yellow—the hue of old tea steeped in time itself.

He had been annotating the newly delivered *Treatise on Rivers and Canals*, but now his brush halted over a single line:

“In the ninth year of Yuan Guang, River Dyke Commandant Wang Yan conscripted laborers to seal the Hu Zi breach…”

As his hand stilled, a drop of ink fell, blooming into a dark stain upon the slip—

mirroring the turbulence within his mind.

This marked the thirty-fifth discrepancy he’d uncovered in recent years.

The slip clearly stated, “In the ninth year of Yuan Guang, River Dyke Commandant Wang Yan conscripted laborers to seal the Hu Zi breach,” yet last year, while rubbing inscriptions from a fragmented stele in Chenliu Commandery, he’d read: “In the ninth year of Yuan Guang, River Works Clerk Li Ping excavated channels to divert the floodwaters.”

Two names alternated across different histories like overlapping foam upon a river’s surface—blurring his vision until it ached.

Even stranger: records of the Ling River’s water level in the third year of Yuan Guang diverged by three feet between *Records of the Grand Historian* and *Han Rituals of Old*, as though a single river had split into two parallel streams beneath the historian’s pen.

“Still verifying river records, sir?”

A night-duty clerk entered, arms laden with freshly collected slips, candlelight glinting off ink smudges on his sleeve.

“The Minister of the Treasury remarked just the other day,” the clerk said gently, “that matters of rivers and canals belong to the Water Office. We historians need only transcribe imperial decrees.”

Chen Mo didn’t look up. His fingertips traced the uneven grooves carved into the bamboo.

The clerk smiled faintly, set down the slips, and left.

Watching his retreating back, Chen Mo remained still for a long while. He meant to resume his work—but his brush refused to descend again. At last, he sighed softly.

Turning, he rummaged through mountains of historical texts until he found a scroll of vellum—

*The Chronicle of Calamities of the Great Ling*.

Unfurling it, he gazed at the crooked arcs formed where ink had seeped into the grain, his eyes finally settling on one line:

“In the seventy-ninth year of Ling Di, Mars lingered near the Heart Star; a crimson star fell to earth.”

Staring at those cinnabar characters, Chen Mo fell into deep thought.

This was where he’d last discovered a historical inconsistency.

The seventy-ninth year of Ling Di lay over five centuries in the past—and yet, scouring every chronicle, he found no record of such an event occurring that year.

The musty scent of mildew mingled with pine-soot ink filled his nostrils, while the bronze clepsydra in the archives ticked steadily, slicing time into equal fragments.

Suddenly, Chen Mo recalled another oddity from three years prior, uncovered in the Scripture Pavilion.

While collating *The Biography of King Mu of Zhou*, he’d found half a silk fragment wedged between bamboo slips—inscribed in tadpole script:

“When the year aligns with the Star of Quail Fire, rivers dry, mountains collapse; the ancients vanish into primordial chaos.”

Even earlier, on oracle bones from *The Annals of the Ling Luo Clan*, the same catastrophe appeared—repeated nine times in varying scripts.

It was as if the same ballad had been sung across ages, its lyrics warped by time’s passage.

Yet elsewhere, the historical record flowed seamlessly—no trace of disaster at all.

As though someone had played a jest upon posterity within the very fabric of history.

His thoughts churned.

After a long silence, Chen Mo rubbed his temples, rose, and walked to the window. Outside, the first snow of winter drifted down. He murmured to himself:

“What is the truth of history?”

Chen Mo fell silent.

Time passed. Ten years slipped by like wind through reeds.

Throughout this decade, Chen Mo remained a historian—but though not yet old, his hair had whitened and wrinkles deepened far beyond his years.

For he could not resist scouring the ocean of texts, seeking answers.

In *The Inner Biography of Chen Wu*, he found: “The Heavenly Emperor’s Mother bestowed the Elixir of Immortality—blooming once every 3,300 years.”

Yet in *The Gazetteer of the Tai Kang Era of Jin*, the same tale read: “Lord Dongwang granted the Formula of Longevity—bearing fruit once every 500 years.”

The *Commentary on the Waterways* of the Southeastern Dynasties and *The Comprehensive Gazetteer* of the Nineteenth Generation of Di Tian placed the same mountain a thousand miles apart—yet both mentioned a stone casket hidden within its heart, engraved with a ten-thousand-year calendar.

Most astonishing of all: when he arranged the fall dates of every dynasty according to the sexagenary cycle, he discovered that every 1,800 years, a convergence occurred—“Five Planets Align, and the Mandate of Heaven Fades.”

He had shared these findings with colleagues—but they looked at him as though bewitched, accusing him of madness.

Even the Chief Academician slammed his meticulously compiled historical charts and thundered:

“Histories are mirrors of the realm! How dare you cloud judgment with heretical nonsense!”

Only his wife, tucking a robe around his shoulders in the dead of night, would glance at the layered timelines stacked on his desk and whisper:

“I once saw you pick up a shard of oracle bone in the abandoned garden—the cracks matched exactly the pattern on the jade huang unearthed last year from the imperial tombs.”

“Perhaps all stories in this world are but old songs replayed.”

“I know your dream. If you’ve made your choice, I stand with you.”

Her words reminded him of their first meeting—when she wore a simple wooden hairpin whose grain seemed identical to the rings of a withered tree he’d known as a child.

Thus, Chen Mo grew lost.

He began to believe he was mistaken—deluded.

So on sleepless nights, lying in bed staring at the darkness and the ceiling, he remembered what his teacher had told him twenty years ago, upon his first day at the archives:

“A historian’s brush must be like a river lantern—illuminating stones buried in silt.”

Back then, he hadn’t understood. Now, recalling the contradictions shimmering across shelves of texts, he realized those stones were entangled in layer upon layer of riverweed—snagging the very lantern meant to light the way.

That deep winter, Chen Mo resigned his post. With a chest of rubbings, he set out on a journey across the land.

This had always been the quiet longing in his heart.

Years of doubt, his teacher’s words, his wife’s support—they had forged his resolve.

Time flowed like song—even if the melody repeated in cycles.

During his travels, Chen Mo discovered a fading mural in a cave at the foot of Kunlun Mountain—its flood totem identical to the account of Emperor Ling Sheng’s flood control in *The Later Chronicles*.

In a fishing village by the Northern Sea, clan genealogies preserved a legend: during the Year the Sea Eye Turned Upside Down, ancestors fled on a great vessel.

Yet this tale contradicted *The Great Ling Sutra* by a full three millennia.

Theories of collapse, of cycles, of cataclysm—though fragmented—were woven by him into intricate threads within his travel journals.

Until, in the shifting sands of the Southern Wastes, he unearthed half a stele. Translated, its inscription bore uncanny resemblance to the Great Ling’s ritual prayer for heaven.

In that moment, Chen Mo glimpsed clarity:

“If civilizations truly perish one after another, then beneath the same sky, they all compose similar elegies.”

And so, in the thirteenth year of his wandering, Chen Mo turned homeward.

Already prone to premature aging and now advanced in years, he finally fell ill along the way and could not make it back to the capital.

Lying on a crude wooden cot in a roadside post station, he coughed up blood while weakly gazing at the books he had compiled and illustrated throughout his journey—

*The Diagram of Civilizational Cycles*.