The Source Seed was something truly precious. It had appeared in altered guises in almost every ancient legend.
Its disguises had been so successful that no one who saw it would ever suspect that the object was actually a Source Seed.
More importantly, few people still knew about Source Seeds.
One of the most widely known Source Seeds might have appeared in Journey to the West, a novel shaped by countless Folk Customs legends.
Journey to the West had not been written in a single stroke.
It had passed through countless oral retellings before finally being compiled into a novel. During its transmission, it had contained episodes that "the people loved," as well as language unsuitable for wide circulation or polite company. In the end, all these elements were gathered, cut, and supplemented to become the Ming Dynasty version of Journey to the West.
The Gold-Banded Cudgel, one of the Dragon Palace's treasures, had been an instrument used to measure river depths when Yu the Great tamed the floods.
Such instruments had existed from antiquity to the present, now called hydrological staff gauges. Everyone had their own opinion on whether it or Zhu Bajie's Nine-Toothed Rake was superior, but the Gold-Banded Cudgel had indeed originally been used for hydrological measurements.
It could grow longer or shorter, lighter or heavier. Such utter defiance of ordinary common sense was part of the allure of immortal cultivation.
No one knew that the Gold-Banded Cudgel they described—weighing a hundred and eight thousand jin, large enough to support the heavens and small enough to clean an ear—was also a kind of Source Seed.
And it was not just Source Seeds.
Many things that existed would always leave traces, in all sorts of ways.
The myths of different nations, for instance.
The Three Sovereigns and Five