The manuscript recorded neither ancient magic nor lost treasure. In fact, it was a rough, highly compressed log—something Vivian had recorded intermittently over the past several thousand years. Its main contents were each of her periods of sleep and awakening, along with some of the memorable things she had seen and experienced while active in the world. Since part of the beginning had been reconstructed from memory, the record could actually be traced back more than ten thousand years—or even farther. The opening contained scenes from the end of the Fourth Era Ice Age, after all, so ten thousand years was merely a conservative estimate.
Yet Vivian herself had completely forgotten about it. If she had not been lucky enough to reunite with Paul, this irreplaceable trove of precious information might have been lost forever. Even Hao Ren felt a chill at the thought: this girl's memory was truly unsettling.
One sleep, one awakening after another, with these pivotal events as markers, the manuscript recorded the experiences and observations of an immortal over the past ten thousand years along a vague timeline. The primordial wilderness of Earth could be glimpsed through those ancient words, while the ancient gods and demons that had vanished with the end of the Mythical Era appeared repeatedly between the lines.
Hao Ren's thoughts seemed to drift back along with Vivian's voice to humanity's ignorant beginnings—a time that had occurred only recently by Earth's standards, but was already an unverifiable antiquity to humankind. Back then, humans were savage creatures who lived in dugout caves. The land was ruled by ancient beasts and the boundless power of nature, while ancient beings with godlike strength reigned over the entire world. Most of them had not even thought of establishing divine authority among human society yet. Their activities, however,