Chapter 1301: Historian Chen Mo

**Chapter 1306: Historian Chen Mo**

Time and space shifted, flickering like the wings of a jade cicada. Within one such shimmering point, the continent of Tianqi, situated in another dimension, was reflected.

The Great Ling Dynasty. Outside the Imperial Archives, it was deep night, and autumn’s chill permeated the air. Inside, Chen Mo’s hand, gripping a brush, hovered above a bamboo slip, as ink formed tiny ripples in the inkstone. Outside, the fragmented sound of autumn cicadas echoed, and the light from the bronze lamp on his desk cast an ancient yellow hue over the room’s numerous texts, like old tea steeped in time.

He was annotating the newly delivered *Treatise on Rivers and Canals*, but his brush tip now paused over a particular entry: “In the ninth year of Yuanguang, Wang Yan, Commander of River Dikes, conscripted commoners to block Huzi...” As Chen Mo’s brush stopped, ink dropped, bleeding into a blot on the bamboo slip, much like the turmoil in his mind.

This was the thirty-fifth time in recent years that he had encountered dubious records. The bamboo slip clearly stated, "In the ninth year of Yuanguang, Wang Yan, Commander of River Dikes, conscripted commoners to block Huzi," yet last year, on a folk stele he had rubbings of from Chenliu Prefecture, it was inscribed, "In the ninth year of Yuanguang, Li Ping, River Administrator, dug channels to divert water." The two names appeared interchangeably in different historical texts, like overlapping foam in a river, causing his eyes to ache. Even stranger, the water level records of the Ling River in the third year of Yuanguang differed by three feet between *Records of the Grand Historian* and *Old Rites of Han*, as if the same river had split into two parallel waterways under different historical accounts.

“Are you researching river matters again, Sir?” The night duty clerk entered, carrying newly collected bamboo slips, the candlelight flickering over ink stains on his sleeve.

“The Grand Minister of the Imperial Treasury said the day before yesterday that river affairs are handled by water officials, and we historians only need to record official court documents,” Chen Mo replied without looking up, his fingertips tracing the varying depths of the carvings on the bamboo slip. The clerk smiled, set down the slips, and departed. Watching the departing figure, after a long moment, Chen Mo was about to continue, but his brush would not come down again. He eventually let out a soft sigh.

Turning, he retrieved a roll of parchment from the mountain of historical records. It was the *Great Ling Annals of Anomalies*. Unrolling it, Chen Mo gazed at the crooked arcs formed by ink seeping into the parchment’s texture, his eyes finally resting on a line of script: “In the seventy-ninth year of Lingdi, Yinghuo guarded Xinsu, and a crimson star fell to the earth.” Looking at the cinnabar characters, Chen Mo fell into contemplation.

This was the last historical inaccuracy he had discovered. The seventy-ninth year of Lingdi was over five hundred years ago, yet after checking all historical texts, no such event was recorded for that year. The musty smell of parchment, mixed with the scent of pine soot ink, entered his nostrils, while the copper clepsydra in the archives ticked, seemingly slicing time into equal fragments.

Chen Mo suddenly recalled another strange discovery he had made three years prior in the Sutra Repository. At the time, he was collating *The Account of King Mu of Zhou* when he found half a piece of silk from the Xia-Dong period tucked between the bamboo slips, inscribed with tadpole script: “When the year was in Chunhuo, rivers dried and mountains collapsed, and the ancestors were entirely submerged in chaos.” And in the even earlier tortoise shell inscriptions of *Annals of the Lingluo Clan*, the same anomaly was repeated nine times in different scripts. It was as if the same ballad had been sung through different eras, but its lyrics had become distorted over time. Yet, conversely, most historical records presented a continuous narrative with no such disasters. It was as if someone had played a trick on future generations within history.

His thoughts surged. After a long while, Chen Mo rubbed his brow, stood up, and walked to the window, gazing at the first snow outside, muttering softly, “What is the truth of history?” Chen Mo fell silent.

Time flowed, and ten years passed in a blink. During these ten years, Chen Mo remained a historian, and despite not being elderly, his white hair and wrinkles far exceeded those of his peers. This was because, for a decade, he couldn't help but search for answers within the vast ocean of texts. Thus, in *Esoteric Biographies of Chenwu*, he found a record stating, "The Heavenly Emperor's Mother bestowed the elixir of immortality, blooming once every three thousand three hundred years," while the same story in *Geographical Records of Taikang of Jin* became, "Lord of the East imparted the secret of immortality, bearing fruit once every five hundred years." *Commentary on the Classic of Waterways* from the Southeast Dynasty and *Comprehensive Records of Lands* from the nineteenth generation of Ditian differed by a thousand *li* in their accounts of the same mountain's location, yet both mentioned a stone casket containing a perpetual calendar hidden within its belly. Most astonishingly, when he arranged the collapse dates of various dynasties according to the cyclical characters, he discovered a recurring "alignment of five planets, signifying the end of imperial destiny" every eighteen hundred years. He had once told his colleagues, but they, as if possessed themselves, claimed he was possessed. Even the Head Academician angrily reprimanded him, pounding on the historical charts he had organized. "Historical records are the mirror of a dynasty; how dare you confuse people with such monstrous absurdities!" Only his wife, when adding clothes for him late at night, would softly say, looking at the layered timelines on his desk: "I once saw you pick up half an oracle bone in the abandoned garden; its cracks were identical to the patterns on the jade *huang* unearthed from the imperial tomb last year. Perhaps the stories of this world are merely old tunes replayed. I know your aspirations; if you have made up your mind, I will support you." Her words reminded Chen Mo of the wooden hairpin in her hair when they first met; its grain seemed to have become identical to the annual rings of a withered tree he had seen in his childhood. And so, Chen Mo was lost in confusion. He also believed he was losing his mind.

So, late at night, lying sleepless in bed, he gazed at the darkness and the ceiling, recalling a sentence his teacher had spoken twenty years ago, when he first joined the Imperial Archives: "A historian's brush should be like a river lantern, illuminating the stones in the mud." At that time, he hadn't understood, but now, recalling the shimmering contradictions in the shelves full of texts, he realized that beneath the stones lay layers of tangled water weeds, ensnaring the river lantern's light.

Therefore, in the depths of winter that year, Chen Mo resigned from his post and embarked on a journey of travel, carrying a box of rubbings. This was a thought that had always resided in his heart throughout those years. Years of doubt, his teacher's words, and his wife's support had solidified his resolve. Years passed like a song, a melody repeating its refrain.

Amidst this "song," Chen Mo discovered nearly faded murals in a cave at the foot of Kunlun Mountain; the flood totems depicted there were identical to the records of Emperor Lingsheng's flood control in *The Later Book*. In the genealogies of a fishing village by the North Sea, he also saw records of ancestors escaping on massive boats during a year when the "sea eye" was inverted. Yet, this conflicted with the records in *The Great Ling Classic* by a full three thousand years. Theories of destruction, reincarnation, and catastrophe, though fragmented, were meticulously organized by him in his travel records, interwoven in countless ways.

Finally, in the shifting sands of the Southern Regions, he unearthed half a stele. When its characters were translated, they were remarkably similar to the sacrificial prayers to Heaven of the Great Ling Dynasty. At this moment, Chen Mo gained some enlightenment: "If different civilizations truly were destroyed, then they all wrote similar elegies under the same starry sky."

Thus, in the thirteenth year of his travels, Chen Mo ended his journey forward and began his return. However, already prematurely aged and now truly old, he finally fell ill on the way, unable to return to the capital. Confined to a simple wooden cot in a relay station, he lay spitting blood, weakly gazing at the books he had compiled and drawn throughout his journey: *The Diagram of Civilizational Cycles*.