The Heavens: A Qing, the Yue Girl at the beginning

The priestess realized that she had to do something real.

Whether it's for that unattainable promise of "salvation" or to find one's place in this vast and indifferent world.

She decided to start from the very basics. She started with "seeing," but not just "seeing," because "seeing" itself was not the goal.

She needs to "understand," to "record," and to "analyze."

She wants to establish an order for the world she sees that can be understood, spoken of, and transmitted.

If "salvation" requires knowledge, then she will first become the world's first student, and then its first teacher.

She walks.

Starting from the sunken cape of Sakhalin Island, head south, along the still-forming Rbon Archipelago, through the narrow passage of the Bering Land Bridge before it breaks, and into the vast North American continent.

Then they turned back, heading west, crossing the boundless tundra of Siberia, and penetrating deep into the heart of Eurasia. One step at a time.

She saw dragons bathing in lava during a volcanic eruption, their scales absorbing the heat from the earth's core and emitting satisfied groans—it was the refinement of fire elements, violent and chaotic.

She saw a blizzard sweep across the ice plains, with dragons spreading their wings and guiding the air currents to form low-pressure vortices—the power of wind and snow, grand yet rough, like a child wielding a giant hammer.

She saw in the deep sea trenches, ancient dragons summoning dark waves with long roars, stirring up the ocean currents—it was the ancient song of the water element, with a monotonous melody that repeated itself endlessly.

Every roar, whisper, and howl of a dragon—those sounds that dragons regard as instinctive expressions—is transformed into fragments of laws and arrangements of primal symbols under her divine vision.

She recorded the vibration frequency of each syllable, the emotional direction of each intonation, and resonated with the elements behind them.

She can trace its evolution even further: the same fire-based incantation, with subtle variations in different dragon bloodlines; the same protective incantation, with its degeneration and enhancement over tens of thousands of years of inheritance.

When observation accumulates to a certain extent, creation will naturally occur.

The priestess began to summarize, conclude, and deduce. She stripped away the redundant, bloodline-specific elements from the incantations, extracting a universal framework of rules. It was like abstracting a universal grammar from countless dialects.

The first millennium has passed.

A basalt mountain was uprooted from the earth, its impurities removed, smelted, and shaped into a towering, jet-black pillar. Then, she joined her fingers like a knife, using the condensed starlight as a blade, and carved on the pillar's surface.

The content is the world's first set of "universal dragon script".

The first systematic alchemical formula was born in this way—she took the scattered spiritual catalysis and elemental transformation techniques and conditions, and forged twelve processes of mind and matter, using the newly born dragon script and time-based coding, and inscribed them on another stone pillar.

One, two… colossal pillars stand tall in the wastelands, on the coast, and atop the mountains. They are silent, yet they attract wandering dragons. At first, they are curious, observing from afar the strange power and creation.

Gradually, some dragons tried to approach and identify the patterns—they subtly resonated with certain instincts within their own bloodline.

The priestess, however, continued her wandering.

The tools for recording have evolved over time.

Millennia after millennia.

Basalt columns were gradually replaced by more sophisticated carriers.

She extracted the essence of copper and tin from the depths of the earth's crust and cast it into a golden bronze pillar. Intricate patterns, growing naturally, appeared on the surface of the pillar—the materialization of the alchemical matrix.

She began to have followers.

Initially, only three or five dragons, drawn by knowledge, followed at a distance, like bewildered students trailing their mentor.

Then there are thirty to fifty.

Then came three hundred, five hundred, and a thousand.

They come from different elemental families, have vastly different sizes and personalities, and some have even been enemies for generations. But now, beside that silver-haired figure, they have temporarily put aside their claws.

Like a harsh winter, with thousands of miles of ice and few inhabitants, travelers carrying knives and swords meet by chance, but they light the same bonfire, let down their guard, and sleep side by side like relatives, talking all night long.

Within a shared intellectual context, hearts, separated by scales and teeth, clumsily draw closer to each other beside the flames of reason.

Embrace each other for warmth, let your chests burn, and let withered grass bloom.

For the first time, dragons discovered that life could take another form besides fighting, sleeping, and guarding territory:
To understand the world, and to make the world understood.

An unprecedented order began to emerge.

Crossing oceans, visiting islands and reefs, venturing deep into underground molten rivers, and climbing towering peaks, the silver-haired priestess always moves forward, clearing the way. Her white robes remain untouched by dust, her gaze fixed on a distant place beyond the comprehension of ordinary people.

She shared the outlines of time and soul with her followers, elucidated the framework of the world, and explained various mysterious elemental phenomena.

She spoke of formation, decay, existence, emptiness, and the overflow of the Great One; of the reversal and ascension of the upper and lower realms; of the coming together of causes and conditions, the manifestation of seeds and their influence; of the cycle of birth and death, reincarnation and nirvana; of having a firm will, tranquility and bliss; of the purity and transcendence of dreams; and of all the stars having a place to belong.

She depicted a beautiful future that could be possessed and reached, filling the emptiness in the hearts of countless dragons. The voices of discussion and debate grew louder, and the hierarchy of thought built a temple.

She never looked back, yet she knew that new footprints would appear behind her—footprints covered in scales, feathers, or cracks of lava, but all of them followed her direction.

Transform the wasteland into a grand road, and the grand road into a magnificent chapter.

She never asked for faith, but faith came naturally.

She never demanded submission, but reverence was ever-present in her.

She never demanded power, but wherever she went, strife ceased, desolation arose, barbarity faded, and order took root.

She became the "White Priestess"—not because she wore white, but because her very existence, like a soft glow, illuminated a hidden side of herself that the dragons had never seen before.

The young dragons inscribed her maxims on their shed teeth, while the older dragons incorporated the alchemical formulas she taught into their nests: they began to name their children with the dragon script she created, to use the laws of words she taught to ward off death, and to learn cocooning.

With the spread and promotion of alchemy, the rudiments of handicrafts also began, and primitive trade by barter crossed the ocean.

When millions of vertical pupils lowered their heads during the funeral ceremony; when the shadows of bronze pillars lined up like sundials on the wasteland, pointing to the same circle of stars, the dragons shed their savage habits, glimpsed the dawn of unity, and the entire race flourished and grew strong.

They began to measure the world, rather than merely possess it.

……

Of course, there are always some old-fashioned entities that resist the development of new things and harbor deep hostility towards the priestess who brings about this change.

The dragon, envious of her, whispered in the shadows:

"Non-my family, its heart must be different."

"She taught us to hold fire in our palms, but who held her heartbeat for her?"

"Dragons are born to conquer, plunder, and burn! That's our nature! But she allows even the weakest dragons to survive and even gain the upper hand in verbal battles with the strong! Those without power should be eliminated."

The dragons who worship her openly proclaim:

"She is the messenger of the gods, the teacher of ten thousand dragons!"

"Her wisdom turns rocks into steps and storms into songs; she herself is a miracle."

She listened without offering any explanation or thanks.

Keep going, keep telling the story, keep recording.

Only on the night each new pillar is completed, I sit alone atop it, watching my shadow cast by the moonlight onto the clouds—

The shadow was thin and tiny, like a rootless feather that had mistakenly wandered into the dragon's kingdom in the vast and desolate world.

During her tens of thousands of years of wandering and spreading of the Dharma, the witch's gaze swept over the human tribes she passed through, stopping countless times for short periods, watching those primitive human settlements struggling to survive in the gaps between dragon activities, in remote river valleys and coastal caves.

Looking at his former kinsmen, his own past path and origins.

She would think of the tribe's huts and straw mats, the lullabies her mother sang, and her homeland swallowed by lava.

Those memories were incredibly vivid, chewed over countless times, reminding the priestess that she was an anomaly, somewhere between the two. Neither human nor dragon, she wandered alone in the gods' experiments.

She doesn't truly feel a sense of belonging.

What worried her more was Nidhogg's attitude.

God's will is as deep and unfathomable as the ocean. Perhaps in the next moment, He will feel bored and dull, suddenly withdraw everything, or end this game in a more cruel way.

Maybe.

She remains the sacrifice against her will.

It seems they never truly left that old reef.

What bound her was no longer the cold river and ropes, but a much larger, invisible shackle of fate; from the tribe's altar to the dragon's temple and the pact with Nidhogg.

She had to be extremely cautious and proceed with extreme care.

There should be no unnecessary complications or weaknesses.

Integrating the dragons was a way to accumulate power and leverage, and to continuously increase one's "value" in Nidhogg's eyes.

In order to survive in that perhaps never-ending promise of "salvation," and... truly qualify to sit at the poker table.

She clearly realized that:
Human beings are fragile, short-lived, have limited perception, are few in number, and face communication barriers caused by geographical isolation and fragmented languages.

On a very, very long timescale, the path she is to walk and the race that gave birth to her will be two trajectories that occasionally gaze at each other from afar, but almost never intersect.

……

"It's truly... magnificent."

Shi Yiguang sighed softly.

She gazed at the scroll of civilization, flowing for millennia and accumulating profound wisdom, in the pool of blood, and a silent, overwhelming sense of awe welled up within her.

"From language to technology, from cosmology to ethics, from individual cultivation to social organization... she almost single-handedly completed the 'enlightenment' of the entire dragon race." Shi Yiguang sincerely commented:

"But what touched me most about this story was the gradual transformation and growth of the priestess herself beneath this magnificent epic."

"She shouldered a very, very heavy burden."

“It’s also very light,” the king replied calmly, “because she has almost nothing left but this burden.”

"Her origins are destroyed, her return is uncertain, and she is not at home. All she has is this path that she was forced to choose, but which she has no choice but to walk to the end."

Shi Yiguang nodded, indicating his understanding.

A wandering priestess.

This title is fitting, yet carries an endless sense of melancholy.

She brought fire to the dragon race, but she herself remained in the cold wind.

She depicted a home for the dragons, but she herself was forever on the road.

"Her starting point was the perspective and power bestowed upon her by the Black King, the perspective of a deity. Therefore, the order she established from the very beginning possessed a precision and grandeur akin to 'dimensional reduction.' Moving mountains and refining pillars, gathering earthly fire and celestial gold..."

"This lays the foundation for a higher level of civilization, skipping the period of groping and trial and error. Unlike the early stages of human civilization, we did not have to struggle to gain experience and wisdom under conditions of low productivity."

“But beneath this foundation,” Shi Yiguang shifted her tone, touching on the core issue, “is her perpetually precarious situation, the root of her 'wandering' nature. She may have become the center of civilization, but she remains the most unstable link in the power system.”

"Her authority depends entirely on the Black King's 'interests.' What exactly does everything she promotes appear to him in his eyes?"

“A 'drama'... on a larger scale and spanning a longer period of time?” she concluded aptly.

“Indeed, Nidhogg has been watching, with eyes that have long since healed, with the patience of billions of years,” the other replied slowly.
"He watched from the horizon, watching how this 'witch' ant carried grains of knowledge, wove threads of rules, attracted more ants, and finally built an increasingly complex and dazzling anthill at his feet."

“He is learning.” Shi Yiguang immediately understood. “The witch is analyzing the dragon race, while the Black King is analyzing the phenomenon of ‘civilization’ itself, which He has never seen before, through the witch’s actions. He is analyzing how to gather scattered sand into a tower, how to guide instinct towards order, and how to make lonely individuals have the illusion and power of a ‘community’.”

“Indeed.” The king nodded. “And the ultimate goal of learning is usually… mastery.”
-
The scene of the blood pool suddenly sped up and then abruptly froze.

Ten thousand years passed.

The fruits of civilization have ripened and are dazzling.

Regardless of their motives—whether it was exclusion or awe—almost all dragons were swept up by this irreversible torrent and forced to integrate into the entirely new dragon social system.

They learn common dragon script, use standard alchemical formulas, participate in construction, and debate doctrines—even if only to better understand this changed world, or to secure a favorable position in the new order and avoid being marginalized.

The wasteland where the priestess once erected the first basalt pillar has now been transformed into a magnificent bronze city.

The city was built according to a complex sacred geometry, with towering towers and rainbow-like covered bridges. The radiance inspired by fire and wind elements replaced the sun and moon, flowing endlessly in the core of the alchemical furnace.

Between the sky and the earth, there are countless dragon shadows, no longer scattered in their nests, but arranged in an orderly fashion.

Dragons of different attributes circle and guard each other in a certain coordinated rhythm, just like a living, breathing giant organism.

Then, the Black King descended.

It is not in the form of a destroyer.

Instead, it is the ultimate authority, the origin of everything.

At a grand ceremony where ten thousand dragons gathered, He, who had disappeared for more than twenty thousand years, suddenly appeared, like a master of the harvest season, naturally coming to inspect his own fields.

Nidhogg was much larger than when it slept under the sacred tree, its wingspan covering the entire sky.

But more importantly, it is His "presence"—not the oppressive force of power, but something more essential:

It was as if the axis of the entire world had suddenly appeared, forcing everything to reconfirm its position, or else fall into illusion.

At that moment, all dragons—regardless of their lineage or the power they wield—have their most primal instincts awakened deep within their bloodline.

That is the majesty of the creator, the call of the source to the tributaries.

It is an irresistible and absolute domination.

When the domain of the Word of Power - Emperor unfolds naturally.

They involuntarily lowered their heads, their wings touching the ground, paying homage to the black emperor in the sky with the most ancient etiquette.

The priestess stood on the city's highest stargazing platform, gazing up at Him.

Still dressed in white, with a calm expression, she seemed to have expected this, or perhaps she knew she was powerless to change it.

She felt the Eye of God was slightly burning.

Nidhogg landed on the central obelisk, a thousand feet high and built of gold and silver, and began to speak.

It uses the purest, oldest, and most authoritative dragon script—the source of the "universal dragon script" deduced by the priestess.

It is the true mother tongue.

The Divine Scale.

He first praised the glorious achievements of this civilization.

He praised the grandeur and precision of the bronze city, the ingenuity and practicality of alchemy, the convenience of communication and knowledge transmission brought about by the universal dragon script, and the cooperative spirit and thirst for knowledge displayed by the dragons—a sight never before seen in His long life.

Wanlong listened with awe, feeling a sense of pride: their achievements had been recognized by the Creator, the Source. (End of Chapter)