The final goldish red pillar of flame, especially, made Tianming connect the supersized star to the sun he was on, though he didn’t have any proof. All he could do was keep guessing. That aside, there were two other rooms within the wooden building. Nothing stopped him from entering them. He looked around and realized that there was nothing else in the outer room apart from the ink painting, so he took a deep breath before entering one of the smaller rooms inside. “Let’s hope there’s some answers.” He pushed open the small wooden door, which seemed like it would fall apart after eons of neglect.
The room seemed rather dark inside. Some light seeped through the gaps in the walls, letting him see what was within. It was a simple room with nothing more than a single wooden table. When he approached, he saw a twilight yellow-colored book that seemed like it had completely rotted away. In fact, it was more accurate to call it a bundle of yellowed papers with some text written on them.
“Perhaps this was how they recorded their history way back in antiquity. What in the world is this wooden building, for it to be able to last until today and even grant me the Sky Palace stigma?” He didn’t dare to carelessly touch it. Instead, he squatted down to inspect the cover. There were only a few simple words on it. He furrowed his brows as he read them. “Void Plundering Tome?” It was quite a weird-sounding name. He pondered it for a moment, then jumped. “Wait!”
He used the eye on his left arm to inspect the mark on his forehead, then looked at the ‘void’ character on the book. The two were identical. “That isn’t the Void Plundering Tome, it’s the Sky Plundering Tome!”
He had finally found something! The ‘void’ character on his forehead was probably how ‘sky’ was written in ancient times. The modern character for ‘sky’ was probably a corruption of the old character that represented ‘void’ in ancient times. So this was the true Sky Palace stigma that the wooden building granted! [1]
“Granny Yuan Long and the others’ stigmas usually don’t manifest, so I have no idea what theirs look like. Gan Gangan’s looks just like the character for ‘sky’, unlike mine. Maybe it has something to do with the voidheart worm. It might have come from it and never had anything to do with the Sky Palace in the first place.”
It wouldn’t be hard to test the theory. He simply had to look for records of the Sky Palace from before the arrival of the voidheart worm. There would probably be depictions of the stigma borne by previous generations of Sky Palace members. Tianming figured it would be the same as his. The ‘void’ stigma was an ancient way to write ‘sky’, and it was the true stigma given by the wooden house.
That reminded him of another issue: did the stigma have something to do with the Voidword Shrine of Orderia and Skyword Shrine of Violetglory? “Perhaps it’s just a coincidence.” The two shrines had been left behind after astral wars with Skywolf way back when. Not to mention, the Voidsky Organization that Skywolf had belonged to included the faceless specters, as in, ‘void’ of a face, which was why the mysterians liked to use ‘void’ [2] and ‘sky’ [3] in their names. The names of the two shrines thus probably originated from the Voidsky Organization, which itself probably had little to do with the ancient way the ‘sky’ character was written.
He put that line of inquiry on hold. It was just a guess, after all. More than that, he was occupied with the Sky Plundering Tome he had found. He was even more certain that the Sky Palace had something to do with the sky plunderers at this point in time. There was nothing like them across the entire astralscape of order. He took a deep breath as he flipped open the cover to search for answers. Perhaps he would even find the origins of the Sky Palace and a clue to the visions he saw in the ink painting.
He saw a thin row of words on the title page: ‘Chronicler: Li Qingwan of the sky plunderers’. Those words stood out to him like no others! More and more, he was convinced of his guesses. The Sky Palace could actually be the Sky Plundering Palace that the Archaionfiend recalled in its jumbled memories. As for Li Qingwan, that was probably an ancient ancestor of Tianming’s, though he didn’t know how far back. It was probably so far back in antiquity that it would no longer make sense to even count the years that separated them.
The sun had existed relatively untouched by outside forces for ages, allowing the celestial orderians and Myriad Solar Sects to sort of coexist for more than two million years. Anything further back beyond their origins would be considered part of myths. If they were passed down at all, word of mouth or just plain narrative corruption would blur much of the truth of what was said. Apart from the Xuanyuan Dragon Sect, who had recorded their origins all the way to the Primodragon Cave, most other factions couldn’t even trace their histories back to their origins.
Time itself wiped away all marks left on history with little exception. After long enough, even the memories of the most glorious empires would be eroded to dust. Even history books or records would rot and fade away, let alone signs of civilization.
Tianming continued flipping through pages as his fingers shook. The next page had more text, and the way it was written seemed even more ancient. It took some time for him to recognize the characters, and much guesswork was also involved.
“The ninth era… Era of Chaotic Skies… During the first year of the Myriadriver calendar… mine people were… to an imperial-class world invited… Flameyellow Imperial Star… Our purpose was naught but… the construction of the Sky Plundering Palace at the imperial star’s south pole… from which the flameyellow divinities look proudly at the rest of the universe can….” Those were the main points of that page. Tianming looked it over a few times and was sure of what it said.
Search .com for the original.
“The ninth era is also called the Era of Chaotic Skies. That and Myriadriver calendar refer to some point in time. ‘Mine people’ might refer to the sky plunderers.” What he couldn’t figure out was what ‘imperial-class’ meant, as well as what the Flameyellow Imperial Star was.
“As far as I know, there’s heliacal-, skypiercer-, and deific-class worlds…. Where does the imperial class rank? Is it better than the other three?” Ying Huo said, curious. However, it and its siblings didn’t stay long and went off to mess around.
“Imperial class?” Tianming recalled that painting from before that depicted the super sun. It did seem much larger than the Skyway Monostar in his imagination. “Is that what an imperial-class world looks like? One that’s much more powerful than all the other classes of worlds?”
1. 天 for sky, 无 for void. Fun fact: 無 is the Traditional Chinese character which has been replaced by 无 in Simplified Chinese, but 无 isn’t a recent creation either. Wiktionary speculates that 无 could be an ancient variation of a few characters, among them 天. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A0#Glyph_origin ☜
2. read: wu ☜
3. read: tian ☜
