In a small room, there was no sound or light, only utter silence. It was as if the room lay in an eternal, frigid, airless void.
A man sat cross-legged in the small room, perfectly still and without a trace of breath. He was like a stone amid the passage of time, blending into the darkness—seeming not to exist, yet somehow existing eternally.
If there had been light in the room, one could have seen that the man looked no older than twenty. Yet his calm gaze bore an incomparable weight of history, as though the changes of the ages and the vicissitudes of time could be seen in his eyes.
No one knew who he was. The world had no tales of him. He was like a grain of sand in the river of time: inconspicuous and unnoticed, yet undeniably there.
Before him stood a wooden table, on which lay two ancient hides. Simple lines and writing had been traced across them in the blood of some unknown beast.
His gaze was vacant, but fixed on the two ancient hides. He remained motionless in that pose, and had held it for an age beyond reckoning.
Who knew how much time had passed in that dark room? Faint points of light began to flicker, appearing and vanishing like fireflies in the night sky.
There were nine points of light, arranged without any apparent pattern. Even if someone had seen them, they would have been unable to make sense of their arrangement.
On closer inspection, one would have noticed that the nine points were moving at an extremely slow pace. They were like the points where a brush first touched paper, tracing lines.
But the lines traced by the nine points vanished before extending two centimeters. Then the points returned to