Chen Du put down the animal-skin scroll and remained silent for a long time.
He could not have been more familiar with the history of the Xia Kingdom on Blue Star. In its five thousand years, more than one dynasty had unified the land.
From the Qin, Han, Wei and Jin to the Sui, Tang, Song and Yuan, the land had divided and reunited, but after every great division, it had always been unified again.
Unification was an obsession etched into the bones of Xia Kingdom civilization, and a fate that played out again and again upon that land.
Even after a hundred years of division, someone would eventually step forward and declare, "All under heaven shall be one."
That was the way of history, was it not?
Yet in the tens of thousands of years of the Heavenly Human Realm's history, there had never been a true unification.
Let alone unification, not even a powerful nation that had occupied more than half the land had ever appeared.
The dynasties on this land were like leeks, growing and being cut down one crop after another. None had ever truly grown into a towering tree.
And according to the records, the Heavenly Human Realm was almost entirely flat. There were no mountains towering into the clouds, no natural hazards that were difficult to cross, and no barriers that naturally divided the land.
On Blue Star, such terrain would almost inevitably have given rise to unification.
Plains meant convenient transportation, rapid troop movements, and the technical feasibility of centralized rule.
Yet the Heavenly Human Realm had never been unified!
He continued turning the pages, the rise and fall of one dynasty after another passing beneath his fingertips.
Gradually, a strange pattern emerged from the vast sea of historical records.
On no fewer than ten occasions, a nation or tribe on this land had shown signs of swallowing the world whole.
Sometimes it was a mighty ruler who burst onto the scene; sometimes a tribe had mastered advanced smelting techniques.
Sometimes it was simply that the right time, the right place, and the right people happened to come together.
Every time, he watched a tower rise, watched its master entertain guests, watched as he was about to become the first dynasty to unify this land—and then the tower collapsed.
It collapsed for no reason, in ways that were bizarre and absurd.
Some dynasties had their granaries submerged by an unprecedented flood at the very last moment before launching a war of unification.
Some mighty rulers had the command tent struck by a meteorite on the eve of leading their armies into battle.
Some tribal alliances had clearly gained an overwhelming advantage, only for their leader to drop dead from eating an undercooked bean.
Every failure on the brink of success was accompanied by a reason so absurd that no one could argue against it.
Once was coincidence, twice was luck, but three, five, ten times could never be natural disasters.
Clearly, someone did not want the Heavenly Human Realm to be unified and needed the flames of war to keep spreading.
And cruelest of all, the warfare had never truly ended.
In the tens of thousands of years of the Heavenly Human Realm's history, there had been a small conflict every three years, a major one every five, a war that mobilized entire nations every twenty, and a war that swept across the entire Heavenly Human Realm every fifty.
War was as regular as breathing, as inevitable as the turning of the seasons.
Every generation was born in the flames of war, grew up in them, and died in them.
No one knew what peace tasted like.
For their ancestors, generation after generation, had lived amid flashing blades and sword shadows.
How was this the great pattern of the world, division after long union and union after long division? This was clearly a carefully designed chessboard.
Misery! Such misery!
The common people of this land had never known a peaceful day since they were born.
The grain they grew was seized by armies,
The houses they built were burned down in the flames of war,
Their sons were dragged away to serve as soldiers, and their daughters were abducted by marauding troops.
They knelt on the ridges between their fields and prayed to heaven,
Yet heaven answered them only with more frequent, denser rains of arrows.
And all of this had begun tens of thousands of years ago.
If this truly had been designed by human hands, what did the person behind it all want the Heavenly Human Realm to become?
Standing deep within the Dragon Tomb, Chen Du returned the last scroll of history to a stone shelf.
His fingertips brushed the bamboo slips, mottled and broken from insect damage, and he finally understood the deeper meaning of the Yan Emperor's words.
The Yan Emperor had said that becoming a true dragon was the only hope because he, too, had seen what Chen Du now saw.
He had wanted to sweep away the nations and unify the Heavenly Human Realm by his own strength, then marshal the might of the entire realm against the hidden hands whose origins were unknown.
Over tens of thousands of years, more than ten attempts to swallow the world whole had been snuffed out, and the flames of war had spread without end.
Had the Yan Emperor not borrowed the power of the dragon bones to become a true dragon, he likely would not have escaped the fate of failing on the brink of success either.
And Chen Du had slain the Yan Emperor, that true dragon, with a single stroke of his sword. These people likely had no hope either.
He had thought he had avenged Qinghe Village,
Repaid the blood debt owed to Grandma and Niuwa,
And done something for all those on this land who had died wronged.
But in the end, he had changed nothing.
The warfare would continue,
Those due to be conscripted would still be conscripted,
The villages due to be slaughtered would still be slaughtered, and the Niuwas destined to die amid warring armies would still die,
And the grandmas destined to be pinned to the village entrance with spears would still die.
He had destroyed the Yan Kingdom, but tomorrow there would be another Yan Kingdom.
He had killed the Yan Emperor, but tomorrow there would be another Yan Emperor.
The feeling rekindled the anger that had gradually died down in his heart.
It was not directed at any one person, but at those hidden masterminds, high above all else, who treated countless living beings as chess pieces.
But this time, he pressed the fire back down. There were too few clues about the people behind the scenes.
There were only scattered fragments pieced together from the histories. Beyond that, he knew nothing.
Pursuing them rashly would only expose him. He had to wait.
Wait for them to appear again, wait for more traces to surface.
Hide the blade in its sheath, conceal its edge in the abyss.
Wait for the wind to come, for the clouds to gather, for the people behind the scenes to show themselves.
And so he went to the ruins of the Yan Kingdom's royal city.
That day,
The setting sun was red as blood. Surviving courtiers and surrendered soldiers knelt trembling on both sides of the scorched stone road.
The leaders, elders, and disciples of the great sects, all the martial arts experts who had surrounded and attacked him in the valley, gathered outside the royal city that day.
They saw the barefoot figure standing alone atop the ruins, sword in hand. Dark golden flames suddenly shot dozens of zhang into the air around him, turning the entire ruins into a sea of fire.
At the center of the flames, the man threw back his head and let out a long cry.
His cry was like a dragon's roar, like a peal of thunder, like the sigh of gods above the nine heavens.
Then the flames abruptly contracted and burst apart, becoming countless tiny points of light that scattered across the sky before finally fading into the dusk.
No one saw clearly what happened in the flames,
They knew only that when the flames vanished, all that remained at the center of the ruins was a broken wooden sword and a pair of cloth shoes with the soles worn through.
From that day on, no one under heaven ever saw that barefoot figure carrying a sword again.
Gouwa, the "Immortal of Wrath," had perished in the ruins of the Yan Kingdom's royal city. All under heaven knew it!
Twenty years later, at the former site of Qinghe Village in the Zhao Kingdom.
The village that the Yan Kingdom's cavalry had burned to ashes years ago had long since been abandoned. An old man gathering herbs walked beneath a tree with a bamboo basket on his back, his conical hat pulled low over most of his face.
That old man was Chen Du in disguise.
He slowly walked out of the village and crossed the mountain ridge.
He saw a youth covered in blood lying beside the road. Someone had slashed him twice across the back, and blood was still seeping from the wounds.
The youth struggled to raise his head, his eyes full of terror, and stammered:
"I escaped from the front. The Zhao Kingdom is at war with another country again.
I was seized and forced into the army. I barely managed to escape. I don't want to die on the battlefield."
The youth's explanation was feeble. There were simply too many people like him, and others could tell at a glance.
The old man crouched down, tore a strip from the front of his robe, and bandaged the youth.
The youth's lips trembled, and he suddenly asked, "Mister, when will this war end? When will there be peace under heaven?"
The old man was silent for quite a while before raising his eyes. Beneath his conical hat, those eyes were calm as water, yet unfathomably deep.
"Soon. Twenty years, perhaps thirty. I'm waiting for someone. When he comes, there will be peace under heaven."
"Who are you waiting for?"
The old man did not answer.
He lifted the youth onto his back and turned toward a small village in the distance, where cooking smoke curled into the air, leaving a trail of shallow footprints along the ridge between the fields.