Outside of Time - Chapter 1328

Chapter 1306 Historian Chen Mo Time

and space shift, like the wings of a jade cicada, flickering and uncertain.

Within one flickering point of light, the Tianqi Continent, located in another time and space, is reflected.

The Great Ling Dynasty.

Outside the history museum, it is late at night, the autumn air thick with the scent of autumn. Inside

, Chen Mo’s hand, holding a brush, hovers above the bamboo slips, ink forming tiny ripples in the inkstone.

Outside the window, the cicadas chirp softly, the light from the bronze lamp on his desk casting an aged yellow hue on the books throughout the room, like old tea steeped in time.

He stares at the newly arrived “Records of Rivers and Canals,” making annotations, but now his pen lingers on a single line of record.

“In the ninth year of Yuanguang, the River Embankment Commandant Wang Yan recruited people to block gourds…”

As Chen Mo’s pen pauses, ink falls, spreading a blot on the bamboo slip.

Just like his current state of mind.

This is the thirty-fifth time in recent years that he has found a record questionable.

The bamboo slips clearly stated, “In the ninth year of Yuanguang, Wang Yan, the Commandant of the River Embankment, recruited people to block the gourds,” but the inscription on the folk stele he saw last year in Chenliu County read, “In the ninth year of Yuanguang, Li Ping, the River Management Clerk, dug a canal to divert water.”

The two names appeared alternately in different historical records, like overlapping foam in a river, making his eyes ache.

Even more strangely, the water level records for the Ling River in the third year of Yuanguang differed by three feet between the *Records of the Grand Historian* and the *Old Rituals of the Han Dynasty*, as if the same river had been split into two parallel waterways in the historical writing.

“Sir, are you researching river affairs again?” The

night watchman entered carrying newly collected bamboo slips, the candlelight flickering over the ink stains on his sleeve.

“The Minister of the Treasury said the other day that the affairs of the rivers and canals are managed by the Water Officials; we historians only need to record the court documents.” Chen Mo didn’t look up, his fingertips tracing the varying depths of the inscriptions on the bamboo slips.

The clerk smiled, put down the bamboo slips, and left.

Watching the other person’s retreating figure, Chen Mo hesitated for a long while… He was about to continue, but the pen in his hand wouldn’t let go again, and he finally sighed softly.

Turning around, he found a scroll of parchment among the mountain of historical records.

It was the *Records of Great Calamities and Strange Events* .

Unfolding it, Chen Mo gazed at the crooked arcs formed by ink seeping into the texture of the parchment, his eyes finally settling on a line of text:

“In the seventy-ninth year of the Lingdi reign, Mars guarded the heart, and a red star fell to earth.”

Looking at these vermilion characters, Chen Mo fell into deep thought.

This was the last time he had discovered an error in the historical records.

The seventy-ninth year of the Lingdi reign was more than five hundred years ago, and he had searched through all the historical records, but there was no record of this event occurring in the seventy-ninth year of the Lingdi reign.

The musty smell of the parchment mixed with the scent of pine soot and ink filled his nostrils, while the copper water clock in the history museum ticked, seemingly cutting time into equal fragments.

Chen Mo suddenly remembered another strange thing he had discovered in the library three years ago.

He was proofreading the *Biography of King Mu of Zhou* when he discovered a piece of silk from the summer/winter period between the bamboo slips. Written in tadpole script, it read:

“In the year of Quail Fire, the river dried up and the mountains collapsed; the ancestors perished in the darkness.”

In the earlier tortoise shell inscriptions of the *Annals of Lingluo*, the same calamity was repeated nine times in different scripts.

It was as if the same ballad had been sung by people of different eras, its lyrics distorted over time.

Yet, in most historical records, the events were continuous, without any mention of any calamity.

It was as if history itself had played a cruel joke on future generations.

His thoughts surged.

After a long while, Chen Mo rubbed his temples, got up, walked to the window, and gazing at the first snow outside, murmured,

“What is the truth of history?”

Chen Mo remained silent.

Time passed, and ten years flew by.

In these ten years, Chen Mo remained a historian, and though no longer elderly, his white hair and wrinkles far surpassed those of his peers.

For the past ten years, he had been unable to resist searching for answers in the vast sea of ancient texts.

Thus, in the *Chenwu Neizhuan*, he discovered a record of “the Heavenly Emperor’s mother bestowing an elixir of immortality, which blooms once every 3,300 years,” while the same story in the *Jin Taikang Diji* changed to “the Eastern King Duke granting the secret

of immortality, which bears fruit once every 500 years.” The *Shui Jing Zhu* of the Southeastern Dynasty and the *Kuodi Zhi* of the Nineteen Dynasties of Earth and Heaven recorded the location of the same mountain by vastly different distances, yet both mentioned a stone box engraved with a perpetual calendar hidden within its belly.

Most astonishingly, when he arranged the dates of the dynasties’ demise according to the sexagenary cycle, he discovered that every 1,800 years, there would be a coincidence of “five planets aligning and the royal aura fading.”

He told his colleagues about this, but they seemed bewitched, saying he was possessed.

Even the Grand Secretary slapped his compiled historical charts in anger and rebuked him.

“History is a mirror of dynasties; how can you allow yourself to be misled by your fallacies!”

Only when his wife added clothes for him late at night would she whisper, gazing at the layers of timelines on his desk.

“I once saw you pick up half a piece of oracle bone in an abandoned garden; the cracks on it were identical to the patterns on the jade pendant unearthed from the imperial tomb last year.”

“Perhaps the stories of this world are just old tunes repeated.”

“I know your ideals; if you’ve made up your mind, I’ll support you.”

Her words reminded Chen Mo of their first meeting, of the wooden hairpin tucked in her hair, its grain seemingly identical to the withered tree rings he had seen in his childhood.

Chen Mo was bewildered.

He also believed he was confused.

So, lying on his bed late at night, unable to sleep, he looked at the darkness, at the roof, and a sentence his teacher had said twenty years ago when he first entered the history museum floated into his mind.

“The historian’s pen should be like a river lantern, illuminating the stones hidden in the silt.”

He didn’t understand then, but now, recalling the contradictions shimmering among the shelves of books, he realizes that beneath the stones lay layers upon layers of water plants, entangled by the lantern’s light.

So, in the depths of winter that year, Chen Mo resigned from his official post and embarked on a journey with a box of rubbings.

This was a thought that had always lingered in his heart. Years

of doubt, his teacher’s words, and his wife’s support solidified his resolve.

Time flows like a song, even if it’s this song, playing on a recurring cycle.

And within this song, Chen Mo discovered nearly vanished murals in a cave at the foot of Kunlun Mountain, their flood totems strikingly similar to the flood control efforts of the Holy Emperor in the *Later Book*.

In the genealogy of a fishing village in Beihai, he also saw a record of an ancestor who escaped in a giant boat during a time when the sea eye was upside down.

But this was three thousand years removed from the account in the *Great Spiritual Sutra*.

Theories of annihilation, reincarnation, and calamity, though incomplete, were meticulously organized into his travel notes.

It wasn’t until he unearthed half a stone tablet in the shifting sands of the Southern Region, and the translated inscription on it turned out to be nearly identical to the Great Spirit’s sacrificial prayer, that he finally found it.

At this moment, Chen Mo had a sudden realization.

“If the destruction of different civilizations truly exists, then they are all similar elegies written under the same starry sky.”

Thus, in the thirteenth year of his travels, Chen Mo ended his journey and began his return.

However, already prematurely aged, and now even older, he fell ill along the way and was unable to return to the capital.

He could only lie on a simple wooden bed in an inn, bleeding from his sores, weakly looking at the books he had drawn and compiled along the way.

*The Chart of the Cycle of Civilization*

—and

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