For their literature project, the problem wasn’t finding something to work on. Rather, the problem was determining, from the overwhelming, immense profundity of everything, ever what to choose. They’d gone into the decision-making process full of naive hope, ready to grab a topic and start working. How foolish they’d been…

He’d known, always, that Aurelia was an old world. His parents had told him the stories of their ancestors that called back to ages long past, so many thousands of years ago that the oldest were more myth and religion than anything concrete. In Fenfeng, as a kid, he’d learnt that the Empire— always a terrifying threat over the horizon, that southern dragon coiling in place for so long that the presence of it had wormed its way into their entire society for generations, was a young power in the course of things. He’d learnt that some of the sects could trace their history back ten immortal generations or more, to the empire before the empire, whose dominion was so impossibly vast as to defy understanding.

He’d learnt that some sects, in the north, were so old that they traced their lineage back before even that empire.

Naturally, in all that time, a huge amount of stuff had been written. Entire languages had risen and fallen, and been forgotten, but even restricting their search to only the intelligible stuff, they were tragically unprepared to sort through the huge amount of history

to even so much as choose a topic.

Luckily, he knew someone who could help! Unluckily— “you probably understand Aurelian history more than I do.” He glanced despairingly at Mingtian, who just shrugged at his plight. “You understand my specialties, but I’m not the most… well versed in the history of this planet.”

“But…” he sighed. “Alright. Do you have any advice?”

Mingtian tapped his chin for a moment, affecting contemplation. His hair— a strange golden color not common in the slightest in East Saffron— flopped over his face like a particularly unruly rug. “Maybe. Walk with me?”

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“I have to go back to grab lunch before—”

Mingtian just smiled mysteriously— he was very good at doing that, for whatever reason— and reached under his table. When he pulled his hands back, he was holding a slab of meat. His incredulity at how Mingtian had even gotten

that warred with his hunger for a second, but… it was a particularly delicious looking slab of meat.

Anyways. A few minutes later, he was walking through the park beside his favorite, and most mysterious librarian, quietly. A pair of birds flitted through the distance, their double-paired azure wings catching the sunlight and glinting, as they flitted from branch to branch. It was cooler, now, that fall was falling to winter— a reminder that he’d have to figure out something for dealing with how cold it could get up in East Saffron… “history,” Mingtian finally said, “is somewhat of an illusion. It means different things depending on how you look about it. Same with literature. If you were to ask an Immortal… Ascension cultivator what they thought of history, they’d speak of eons and generations. The Empire of Twelve Constellations, to their ilk, was only four generations back; to mortals, that was twenty thousand years ago. More than enough time for the entire face of the world to change.”

“That’s the problem,” he mewled, not at all plaintively. Okay, maybe a bit plaintive… “how can we possibly choose just one bit of history?”

“It should be easy. If you were to ask an Immortal, someone who’d seen Aurelia from the moment of its creation, would they not pick out the point in time it was habitable and say— there, that, that is history?”

“But… to them, history extends much further, right?”

“Exactly. They can still point out something and say— this— but that doesn’t separate it from the whole, right? It’s merely two parts of an indivisible whole.” Mingtian didn’t speak any further after that, and Avyr didn’t prompt him to… and, later, in class, he thought over what the librarian had said, and the implications of it and found himself…

Troubled.

At least they managed to get to work on their project, though…