"Miguu~ My tails... Wuuu..."
The crying voice rang through the palace in the gaps of Human Order. As time passed, the place Rovi had just cut open gradually healed and recovered.
Human Order's self-repairing ability had always been extremely powerful. So long as human history remained engraved upon this world, so long as people still remembered this history, this place could naturally recover with great speed.
And so, in the blink of an eye, it returned to the way it had looked when Rovi first arrived: spacious, magnificent, a dazzling palace. The only difference was probably that the nine-tailed fox who had originally sat upon the great seat was now twisting that beautiful face of hers into an indescribably pitiful expression.
Unfortunately, that trick was useless against Rovi.
"Leaving you three tails is already more than generous enough." Rovi flicked his sleeve and slowly sheathed the sword in his hand.
The Core of Chaos had been fully withdrawn into his body, and the Machine God body no longer manifested. Having returned to his form as a "primordial human," Rovi looked at Tamamo-no-Mae, who had collapsed on the floor before him, and could not help laughing.
The nine-tailed fox at this moment—no, after Rovi had cut away six of her tails, the being who should now be called a "three-tailed fox"—had completely lost her earlier charm, arrogance, and composure.
She huddled on the floor, her deep blue robes hanging down to cover her exquisite body. Her knees were pressed to her chest, her robes drooping and trembling faintly, while the fox ears amid her orange-red hair kept shaking.
Her appearance had not changed, yet compared to the original "nine-tailed fox," her aura seemed like that of an entirely different person.
She had lost.
Lost to Rovi utterly and completely.
Whether in force, schemes, or intelligence, the fox was no match for Rovi.
Yet Rovi could still sense the unwillingness in her heart.
Sense the... resentment, frustration, and hatred in her heart.
Rovi slowly stepped forward. Tamamo-no-Mae, now left with only three tails, instantly squeezed her eyes shut and trembled. Though this "Heaven" had said he would not kill her, who could guarantee the other party would not mistreat her? Who knew whether he would do something weird to her...
Three-tailed Tamamo-no-Mae could no longer be called an Evil of Humanity. She had failed even before, and now she had even less confidence that she could charm Rovi.
Fear. Intimidation. After a moment, she opened her eyes, only to find that Rovi was no longer in front of her.
Tamamo-no-Mae turned her head.
Rovi was sitting behind her, up the steps, in the seat she had originally occupied.
The seat of the "primordial sun god"...
You beat up this fox and stole my seat too!?
The fox widened her eyes.
Rovi merely settled into that seat and looked down at Tamamo-no-Mae below him. In this moment, it was extremely similar to before, and yet the positions of host and guest had been completely reversed.
"From now on, this place belongs to me." Rovi leaned forward. As the words of "Azure Heaven," his speech naturally became reality within Human Order. Tamamo-no-Mae did not even have room to object.
But he did not wait for Tamamo-no-Mae to speak before continuing. "Now, you should tell me about your past, shouldn't you? Tamamo-no-Mae, who should have existed in the future—"
"Or do you plan to make me personally use the power of the Core of Chaos to dig your memories out of your mind?"
Tamamo-no-Mae could not help shivering.
But she knew Rovi was serious. By now, he still had many things he did not understand about this land.
Known and unknown alike, he needed a thread to connect them.
These were things Yu Mei-ren from before could not provide Rovi. Yu Mei-ren did indeed know quite a few things, but she was only an observer. She had never truly gone deep into the events herself.
In many matters, she knew what had happened, but not why.
The Tamamo-no-Mae before him, however, had personally participated in many events.
From ancient times all the way to the Battle of Investiture...
"Miguu, I'll talk right now!" It had to be said that the fox adjusted her mentality quickly, and with great self-awareness. Having fallen from the primordial nine-tailed fox down to a Divine Spirit-class three-tailed fox, she quickly put herself in her proper place.
There was no pride, not the slightest stubbornness. She simply answered Rovi's question honestly.
"I came to the Divine Land because of the giant god from beyond the heavens descending twelve thousand years ago."
The Vanguard of the Umbral Star reached Earth. At that time, it was the dawn when the first generation of gods had gradually disappeared and withdrawn, while the second generation of gods had only just taken power.
The civilization of the gods reached its peak in that era.
The White-Faced Golden-Furred of that time was unquestionably one of them. She was one of the first sun gods. In the Age of Gods, the sun could not be considered an existence manifested at the very birth of the planet, but it was still among the earliest-born of the "first generation of gods."
Moreover, after the primordial gods scattered one after another, she also gathered the sun Authority and rose to the primordial.
However, just when the White-Faced Golden-Furred believed she was about to sweep across the earth, the descent of the Vanguard of the Umbral Star brought extreme destruction.
The Vanguard of the Umbral Star, possessing the ability to absorb all energy and convert it into the driving force of its own evolution, struck down countless gods as soon as it arrived. Even though the one that reached Earth was only an avatar, while its true body was blocked above the moon, it still used the power of the gods to rapidly grow and expand.
The gods of the Mesopotamian plain fled in defeat. Zeus, God-King of the Atlantis civilization, gathered the power of the gods and lost without dying. Odin of the Norse feigned death and escaped, seizing the chance to cut off a piece of the evolutionary husk the Vanguard of the Umbral Star had shed before evolving, then rebuilt civilization... And Tamamo-no-Mae, who was also one of the gods at the time, likewise encountered that giant soldier that pierced the dawn of the Age of Gods.
She fought it and was defeated. The nine tails manifested from the primordial sun were directly scattered, and because of that, she fell into the Divine Land.
"Before arriving in the Divine Land, I always thought that since I had obtained the primordial sun Authority, in an age where the primordial gods had vanished, I was already the strongest. But... after I came here, to this Divine Land, I finally understood. Before this, I had only been a frog at the bottom of a well, miguu!"
Before coming to the Divine Land, the primordial gods of each region numbered only in the single digits. Yet in the Divine Land, there were over a dozen manifestations at the primordial scale alone, and even above that scale, there were several.
The ancestor gods of Huaxia, the ancient sages of Huaxia—their existence brought an enormous shock to the White-Faced Golden-Furred, who had lost her power and drifted to the Divine Land with only one tail remaining.
She finally learned the meaning of a Huaxia idiom called "a frog at the bottom of a well."
At the time, she was rather weak, and so she was taken in by one of the very few Great Sages of the demon race on the Divine Land.
She swiftly completed her transformation on the Divine Land and became localized. She became the representative of the fox race, and during this process, she gradually found her other tails...
From one tail to two, three, four... As she gradually recovered her tails, the White-Faced Golden-Furred of old finally discovered something strange.
Every one of her tails had suffered an extremely miserable fate.
The existence manifested by each of her tails was a demon, not a god.
They were denounced by the ancestor gods and rejected by immortals and gods.
The reason the White-Faced Golden-Furred, one of the primordial sun gods, had been able to become primordial in the first place was that she had relied on a position seized by force and plunder.
Around her body clung the resentment of too many other sun gods from other pantheons whom she had defeated.
When she was powerful, that resentment naturally could not affect her. But at the present moment, every scattered tail was unquestionably weak.
Influenced by resentment, step by step, they fell into becoming monsters.
"I once begged the ancestor gods for help, but the ancestor gods said this was my 'tribulation'..."
"They were definitely deceiving me. What tribulation? They simply refused to help me. They just looked down on me."
"So I wanted to rely on my own strength to become the true manifestation of the sun."
"I was unwilling to accept it."
She had once admired those ancestor gods beyond measure. She had once gazed from afar at their strength, at their spirit and will so dazzling that even a solar corona could not compare.
But precisely because she admired them, when she was refused, tremendous resentment was born in her heart.
"So after the Battle of Investiture, during the time when the immortals and gods departed, you gathered the nine tails. You disturbed the Divine Land's barrier and released the Old Ghosts of the Six Heavens, all to prove that point."
Rovi understood. Through Tamamo-no-Mae's words before him, many things now connected together.
Why use the name Tamamo-no-Mae?
Because Tamamo-no-Mae represented the "end" of the nine tails. From the fox of Qingqiu, Mei Xi, Su Daji, Huayang Tian... the nine tails, in their final manifestation, were originally "Tamamo-no-Mae," who appeared in the Eastern Isles that had yet to rise at this point in time.
Tamamo-no-Mae represented the future of the White-Faced Golden-Furred. She represented the existence of "Amaterasu" after obtaining that Authority.
Only this "name" could help her go one step further.
To chase after the steps of those ancestor gods.
To tell them that she, too, could do it.
"But your method was ultimately wrong." Rovi shook his head. He slowly stood from the seat and said, "Relying on releasing the Old Ghosts of the Six Heavens to accomplish your own goal—in the end, what would be achieved would not be you, but another 'Old One.'"
"And you were wrong."
"The ancestor gods of Huaxia never abandoned you." Rovi flicked his sleeve and stepped forward. His figure vanished from the palace deep within Human Order. A gust of wind brushed past, and Tamamo-no-Mae came back to herself in a daze, only to find that Rovi had already disappeared. His remaining voice echoed around her in waves. "Your 'tribulation' has passed."
Tamamo-no-Mae froze in place.
She sensed herself... and discovered that the many resentments of the past had, with that confession—or rather, with the failure of that mad action—seemed to vanish without a trace at this moment.
She had actually been destined to fail.
The Old Ghosts of the Six Heavens were chaos left behind by the ancestor gods, and the ancestor gods in truth had the ability to remove them.
Even without Rovi, the Divine Land would still have remained stable.
The reason they had left them behind was both in the hope that one day they could return to their homeland, and even more to help this fox who had come from a foreign land.
Though she was a god from another land, she had merged into Huaxia... and the ancestor gods would never abandon any subject of the Divine Land.
They had deliberately refused her. Deliberately angered her.
At this moment, the influence left behind by the resentment of the other sun gods finally vanished.
"I will imprison you for one thousand years."
"After one thousand years, you may leave. But from this moment onward, the nine-tailed fox may never again appear in the real world."
"This is the law of Heaven."
Rovi's words became the will of "Heaven."
Tamamo-no-Mae stood there in a daze. After a long while, she gave a faint, inexplicable laugh.
"Donghua Dijun, hm..."
"As expected of the 'man' I set my eyes on."
Tamamo-no-Mae sighed with feeling.
And gently closed her eyes.
A thousand years was neither long nor short.
But she could wait.
...
"Report! Wang Jian has broken through Handan, the Zhao capital, and captured eighteen members of the Zhao royal house, including the King of Zhao!"
"Front-line military report: Han's pass has fallen. The King of Han has led all officials out of the city and surrendered!"
"Report! Wang Ben has broken Wei. He diverted the river to flood the city. In the third month, Daliang, the Wei capital, collapsed. The King of Wei came out and surrendered. Wei has perished!"
"Chu has fallen—"
"Qi has fallen completely!"
In Xianyang, in Qin's Guanzhong lands, battle report after battle report entered the towering Qin palace where King Zheng of Qin resided.
This was something completed ten years earlier than the "history" Rovi knew.
The greater trend was unchanged, but the smaller trend had already shifted.
"All under heaven has returned entirely to Qin!"
King Zheng of Qin rose solemnly. The beaded curtain above his head swayed, and the dark bird on his body seemed to spread its wings. The young King of Qin's voice was high and clear, like the cry of a divine bird.
Heaven sent down the dark bird, and it gave birth to Shang.
Qin had arisen from Shang, risen through hardship, and after several hundred years, finally unified all under heaven.
The Mandate of Heaven had returned.
The officials' cries rolled out like mountains roaring. "Great Qin, ten thousand years!"
The people's cries rolled out like mountains roaring. "Great Qin, ten thousand years!"
The Qin sword had left its sheath. Once its will rose, it could sweep all under heaven flat!
Beside the Wei River, Rovi walked slowly. He had returned from the depths of Human Order to the present world, and would for the third time follow the Wei River into Qin.
Now, peace had returned to all under heaven. The immortals and gods had also entered the "Foundation," just as Rovi had intended.
At the edge of the sky, a point of starlight flickered.
The existence of the "Foundation" gradually brewed into an independent dimension.
He saw traces of immortals within it, vast and beyond inquiry.
He saw the human world even more, where sorrow and hardship remained unchanged.
"Qin has unified everything. I wonder what the world will be like from now on!?"
"What does that have to do with us? I heard Qin's taxes are heavy. For people like us, it'll be hard!"
"Whether it's hard or not, live until tomorrow first..."
By the banks of the Wei River, poor people with sallow faces, struggling to survive, heaved long sighs.
"Qin, ah Qin... O fair one?"
A talented man from a fallen state, passing by in a boat, sighed mournfully to himself and worried about the future.
The wealthy worried about the road ahead; the poor worried about survival.
Rovi saw it, and only smiled.
"The King of Great Qin is the king of all under heaven."
"Then the hearts of the people under heaven are Great Qin's all under heaven."
"If the hearts of the people are entirely lost, Shang and Zhou could fall, and Great Qin can likewise be changed."
Qin had only just unified all under heaven. Words like these could be called outright treason.
The might of the Qin army, the sharpness of the Qin sword, were enough to make anyone under heaven afraid to even speak of them.
Naturally, the expression of the wealthy man on the boat changed, and he looked toward the person speaking on the bank. The poor people who had been conversing were also startled. No matter what, they still wanted to see tomorrow.
But Rovi merely smiled.
He had helped Great Qin so that Great Qin could unify all under heaven.
But the one he helped had never been Great Qin.
It was all under heaven.
"Can the Mandate of Heaven be changed?"
"The Mandate of Heaven can be changed."
Why could it be changed?
Because he said it could be changed.
Because he—was Heaven.
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