"I suspect the Five Elders Council is targeting these remains," Sima Changkong said gravely.
"Remains? What would they want with bones?" Li Fan was inwardly shaken to learn that the corpses of countless ancient cultivators might lie beneath Myriad Immortals Island, where he lived. At the same time, he found Sima Changkong's answer baffling.
"That is beyond my knowledge. Perhaps the Five Elders Council can resurrect the dead? If those original Dao Imparters were to awaken and see the current state of the Myriad Immortals Alliance, they'd probably storm the Alliance headquarters themselves and fight it to the last." Sima Changkong sneered.
"Heh, mind your words, Fellow Daoist," Li Fan replied.
Rather than engaging with the remark, he changed the subject. "The shifting mountains and seas of Congyun, the original Dao Imparters, the origins of Myriad Immortals Island... these are matters of utmost secrecy. From what I know of cultivators today, I doubt even a Spirit Transformation Immortal Eminence could be as intimately acquainted with such buried truths as you are, Fellow Daoist.
"Just what is your background?" Li Fan asked, his curiosity getting the better of him.
"Background? I am an ordinary cultivator. Nothing more," Sima Changkong said dismissively.
Seeing the open disbelief on Li Fan's face, Sima Changkong straightened and declared with pride, "Let me enlighten you, Fellow Daoist. In this world, every event leaves traces. Erasing the memories of cultivators does not mean the truth of history can be buried completely."
He stood abruptly. "There is nothing I cannot speak of openly. To be frank with you, Fellow Daoist... I, Sima Changkong, am a historian."
As he spoke, the blood-qi within his entire body surged into violent motion.
Li Fan cultivated the Creation Forge Technique and knew the power of blood-qi intimately. What he sensed now astonished him. The blood-qi within Sima Changkong's body was extraordinarily complex, almost contradictory in nature. Some strands blazed with vigorous vitality, fresh as a newborn's. Others felt ancient beyond measure, as though they had existed for thousands, even tens of thousands of years.
This blood-qi erupted from Sima Changkong's body and coalesced above his head into a magnificent crimson river.
Li Fan peered closely. Within each droplet of blood, countless images and sounds flickered. The higher up the river he looked, the more ancient the recorded scenes became. The crimson river was vast and spectacular, containing so immense a volume of history that even with Li Fan's current soul strength, a few moments of observation left him dizzy.
Awe gripped him, and he looked away.
Sima Changkong, seeing Li Fan's reaction, slowly drew the phenomenon back into himself.
"This is the Bloodline Chronicles," he said, "cultivated and compiled across generations by my Sima Clan. Ever since our ancestor Sima Pei founded the Blood History technique, our clan has taken upon itself the duty of meticulously recording the history of the Xuanhuang World. We do not retreat from that duty even in death. It has now been passed down through fifty-six generations."
"Fifty-six generations?" Li Fan was momentarily stunned and began to ask more, but Sima Changkong pressed on.
"Indeed. Cultivating the Blood History technique compresses one's lifespan to no greater than a mortal's. Yet our Sima Clan has never abandoned this path. What is there to fear in death? As long as a single descendant of our clan remains alive, the Bloodline Chronicles will seek out a suitable host and awaken within them, continuing the great work of chronicling history."
Sima Changkong's face was filled with righteous conviction.
A deep respect stirred within Li Fan as he listened.
He had always held historians in high regard. Back when he was the Grand Preceptor of Great Xuan, wielding absolute power and doing as he pleased, every official in the court had groveled beneath his tyrannical authority, not daring to utter a single word of dissent.
The historians of Great Xuan had been different. They had not feared the executioner's blade. Even when he threatened the lives of their entire clans, they had insisted on faithfully recording his disruptions of the court and his oppression of the Empress Dowager in the annals. He had some of them killed, only for their successors to do the same. In the end, he had let them be.
He never expected to find historians still existing here in the Xuanhuang World.
Alongside this respect, a thought took shape in his mind: Much of the Xuanhuang World's history was shrouded in mist, and some of it had been deliberately erased. Trying to understand what truly happened through texts alone was a fool's errand. But with Sima Changkong, a living history book, things were vastly different.
Li Fan recognized immediately what this cultivator was worth and drew him back into conversation.
Sima Changkong was forthright by nature. As he grew more comfortable with Li Fan, he held nothing back.
Li Fan gradually learned that while the Sima Clan could record history through the Bloodline Chronicles, the Xuanhuang World was vast beyond measure. No single person could know everything that transpired across it.
So the Sima Clan had also mastered a divine ability called Blood Division Avatars, which allowed them to separate portions of their blood and give rise to avatars. These avatars traveled everywhere, recording history as thoroughly and faithfully as possible. This was precisely why the lifespans of Sima Clan members were generally short.
The Bloodline Chronicles contained countless pieces of information from the Xuanhuang World's past. To guard against unforeseen accidents rendering the work of dozens of generations utterly wasted, the Sima Clan's ancestors had devised, through immense ingenuity, a secret art called One is All. As Sima Changkong had mentioned, as long as the Sima Clan bloodline still existed anywhere in the world, the Bloodline Chronicles could never be extinguished.
Li Fan asked what, precisely, qualified as "Sima Clan bloodline."
Sima Changkong smiled with evident pride. As long as one's ancestors had carried Sima blood, no matter how diluted, the Bloodline Chronicles could re-manifest within them. Over thousands of years, the mortal descendants of the Sima Clan had spread throughout the Xuanhuang World. Short of slaughtering every last mortal on the continent, the Bloodline Chronicles could not be eradicated.
"The Sima Clan is truly extraordinary!" Li Fan said, unable to hold back his admiration. "What a divine ability."
He asked Sima Changkong for a communication spirit talisman and stored it solemnly in his storage ring. "Fellow Daoist Sima, we must stay in close contact from now on." He chatted with this historian of the cultivation world for a long while more before finally, reluctantly, taking his leave.
As his avatar returned to the ruins of Myriad Immortals Island, his true self, far away in Shilin Province, noticed the standard-issue Myriad Immortals Alliance communication spirit talisman flickering without pause.
Li Fan frowned. This talisman was ordinarily used only for communication between cultivators within the Myriad Immortals Alliance system. Now that the Five Elders Council had taken Myriad Immortals Island and swept up the entire administrative structure of the Congyun Sea in one motion, who could possibly be trying to reach him through this channel?
Puzzled, he took out the talisman and focused his senses upon it.
A moment later, his expression turned strange.
I'm appointed as Acting Island Master of Myriad Immortals Island, responsible for rebuilding the immortal city of Congyun Sea. It will be located directly above the former Myriad Immortals Island. The order is to be executed immediately. No errors are permitted.
He read it several times before he was certain this was not some kind of joke at his expense.