Lin Su raised a hand, and a thread shot through the air. Forty-eight numbers appeared upon it, accurately recording the dates of the forty-eight Great Calamities of Heartlessness, precise down to the year, month, and day.
Pointing at the thread, Lin Su began his explanation. "All things between heaven and earth changed according to their own laws. The Great Calamity of Heartlessness was no exception. These may seem like merely forty-eight numbers, but they held profound mysteries. Where did the greatest mystery lie? In the interval between two calamities! That interval was not fixed; it grew shorter and shorter. From more than a hundred thousand years at the beginning to mere thousands of years later on, when people mentioned the Great Calamity of Heartlessness, they often said only one thing: its intervals ranged from a hundred thousand years to several thousand years. That was a very broad concept. But faced with a calamity concerning the life and death of every living being, we could not be broad. We had to predict it precisely. So where, exactly, was that point of precision?"
With those words, all the Saints were drawn in.
The Heavenly Dao had its laws; everyone knew that.
But where, precisely, did those laws lie?
At least, looking at the dates of those past forty-eight calamities, they were utterly bewildered.
Forty-eight points stretched across spans measured in millions of years. What pattern could possibly be found? If the intervals had been constant, they could have produced a precise timetable for how many years passed between each Great Calamity of Heartlessness. Yet those intervals were not fixed. The longest was eighty thousand years, while the shortest was just over three thousand. How could anyone predict that?
Lin Su said, "Patterns often hid behind numbers. So what pattern lay behind these