Odin's branches trembled, and from their depths, light began to emerge. Not the gentle illumination of his single eye, not the soft glow of runes that marked his bark—but something else. Something older. Something terrible.
Images formed in the air between them.
Nicholas watched as the crimson runes wove themselves into a tapestry of ancient memory. He saw mountains—vast, towering peaks that dwarfed anything on the modern Earth—crumbling like sandcastles before a tide. He saw cracks splitting the earth, deeper than oceans, wider than continents, from which poured rivers of molten stone that glowed with the heat of the world's core. He saw figures—gigantic, terrible, wreathed in power so immense that even their shadows seemed to burn—clashing in the heavens, their every blow sending shockwaves across the planet.
And beneath them, he saw the people. Millions upon millions of tiny figures, fleeing, dying, burning, drowning in the chaos that gods had unleashed.
"This," Odin said, his voice barely a whisper, "is what you do not know. What none of you know. What we—all of us, every pantheon that existed at the time—agreed must never be known."
Nicholas stared at the images, his stars dimming with the weight of what he was seeing. "The science of my world... the mortals believe the continents formed over millions of years. Plate tectonics. Continental drift. A slow, gradual process of geological time."
"A lie." Odin's voice was flat. "A necessary lie. The world as you know it—the world as it exists today—was shaped in less than a decade. By war."
Nicholas's dome pulsed with something that might have been shock. "That's impossible. The forces required—"
"Were exactly what you are seeing." Odin gestured with a branch toward the images. "Three thousand years ago, your world did not look like this. There was no Atlantic Ocean. No separate Americas. No divided Europe and Africa and Asia. There was only one landmass—Pangea, your scientists call it, though they believe it broke apart millions of years ago. They are wrong. It broke apart three thousand years ago. In this war."
The images shifted, showing the single continent—vast, unbroken, stretching from pole to pole. Then the cracks began. The same cracks Nicholas had seen forming under the blows of divine combat, spreading, widening, until the single landmass shattered like a dropped plate.
"The war you are about to witness," Odin continued, "was the largest conflict this world has ever seen. Larger than your World Wars. Larger than the Titanomachy. Larger than anything the West has produced. And when it ended, the gods of every pantheon—East and West, North and South, every being who called this world home—came together in desperation."
Nicholas understood before Odin spoke the words.
"They cast a spell."
"The greatest working of collective divine will ever attempted," Odin confirmed. "An omnipresent enchantment that washed over every mortal mind on Earth. It erased the war. It erased the event from the memory of the world. It implanted a false history of slow geological time, of gradual separation, of millions of years of peaceful drift. It was so powerful, so all-encompassing, that even the world itself and we—the gods who cast it—struggled to remember the truth in the centuries that followed."
A pause.
"But the war was too vast to erase completely. Traces remained. Fragments. Memories that slipped through the cracks of the spell and lodged themselves in the human unconscious. They became myths. Legends. Stories of Atlantis, of Lemuria, of sunken continents and lost civilizations, of the floods that came and went. Your mortals remembered, without knowing they remembered. The truth bled through in symbols and dreams."
Nicholas was silent for a long moment, processing. Then: "The scale of this war... you said it lasted decades?"
"Decades," Odin confirmed. "And the destruction caused even by the disciples—the ones who would become the gods—was devastating. Millions died. Cities were erased. Kingdoms vanished from history. And this was with Nuwa and Fuxi expending their creative authorities constantly, working without rest to protect the common people, to shield them from the worst of the devastation."
The images showed the sibling immortals—vast forms of jade and light—stretching their power across entire regions, creating barriers that deflected divine blows, healing wounds that would have been fatal, resurrecting those who fell when they could. Their faces, even in the ancient memory, showed exhaustion. Desperation. Grief.
"They could not save everyone," Odin said quietly. "No one could. The war was too large, too chaotic, too terrible. They did what they could. But it was never enough."
Nicholas watched as the images shifted again, focusing now not on the destruction, but on the combatants. Three figures dominated the sky, their power so immense that even the memory of them made Odin's branches shudder.
Laozi. Yuanshi. Tongtian.
The Three Pure Ones.
"The disciples of Tongtian," Odin said, and his voice carried a weight of ancient sorrow, "were the most numerous. He had gathered them from the common people—from farmers and craftsmen, from merchants and laborers, from the millions who toiled in the fields and worked the rivers. He saw potential everywhere, in every soul, regardless of birth. And he trained them. He taught them. He loved them as a father loves his children."
The images showed them—thousands upon thousands of cultivators, their faces young and eager, their eyes bright with the promise of immortality. They trained in courtyards and mountain peaks. They meditated in caves and forests. They grew strong under their master's patient guidance.
"The disciples of Laozi and Yuanshi," Odin continued, "were different. They came from the noble families—the ancient clans that had preserved the blood of their divine ancestors through careful marriage, through generations of selective breeding. They were talented, yes. Powerful, certainly. But they were also... fewer. Prouder. More concerned with lineage than with potential."
The images shifted. The disciples of Laozi and Yuanshi moved through halls of jade and crystal, their robes immaculate, their bearing haughty. They looked down upon the common-born cultivators with something that might have been disdain.
"When the Confferment of Gods was proposed," Odin said, "a disagreement arose. A terrible, fundamental disagreement that would shatter everything."
The images showed the Three Pure Ones in council, their vast forms filling a space beyond mortal comprehension.
"Laozi and Yuanshi looked upon Tongtian's disciples and saw the solution. They argued that the common-born cultivators should be the ones to fill the three hundred and sixty-five positions. To them, it was not a punishment—it was a reward. These disciples, they reasoned, would never achieve true immortality anyway. Their blood was too thin, their lineage too diluted. The path of the god would give them something they could never otherwise attain: eternal life. Albeit in a diminished form."
Nicholas understood the logic, cold as it was. "They saw it as charity."
"Yes." Odin's voice was grim. "And they expected Tongtian to agree. To thank them, even, for providing his beloved disciples with a fate they could not achieve on their own."
"But Tongtian did not agree."
"No." The images showed the third Pure One—Tongtian, his form wreathed in the authority of weapons, of combat, of the endless clash between forces—rising from his seat, his expression one of barely contained fury. "He saw it for what it was. Not charity. Condescension. A judgment that his disciples were lesser, were unworthy of the immortal path, were fit only for the degraded existence of godhood. He refused."
The council chamber erupted. Arguments flew like blades. Accusations were hurled. And in the end, Laozi and Yuanshi made a decision that would echo through eternity.
"They acted together," Odin said quietly. "Laozi and Yuanshi, the eldest and wisest of the Three Pure Ones, combined their power and moved against their brother. They did not kill him—they could not, even together—but they held him. They bound him. They trapped him in a cage of combined authority while the war that would decide the fate of his disciples played out below."
Nicholas watched as the images showed Tongtian straining against his bonds, his rage incandescent, his power lashing out in waves that shook the very foundations of reality. But Laozi's wisdom and Yuanshi's primordial authority held firm. He could not break free.
And below, his disciples died.
The images were terrible. The common-born cultivators, outnumbered and outmatched, fought with desperate courage against the noble-born disciples of Laozi and Yuanshi. They knew they were losing. They knew they were dying. But they fought anyway, because their master had taught them to never surrender, to never yield, to never accept a fate they had not chosen.
One by one, they fell. Their souls—bright with cultivation, strong with years of patient refinement—were harvested and shaped into the three hundred and sixty-five grand gods. Their mortal bodies, broken and bleeding, were left to rot on battlefields soaked with the blood of millions.
And Tongtian watched.
For decades, he watched. Trapped in his cage of combined authority, unable to move, unable to act, unable to save a single one of his beloved disciples. He watched them die. He watched their souls taken. He watched them transformed into the very thing he had refused to let them become.
And his rage grew.
It grew beyond measure. Beyond reason. Beyond anything the world had ever seen. Tongtian, the Lord of Weapons, the Master of Combat, the God of Endless War—he had always been powerful. But rage, true rage, pure and undiluted, transformed him into something else. Something terrible.
His authority over weapons—already absolute—expanded. It reached into the very concept of conflict, of opposition, of forces in opposition. It touched the fundamental nature of Qi itself, that energy that permeated all existence, and it bent. It twisted. It became something new.
And when, at last, the war ended and Laozi and Yuanshi released their binding, Tongtian acted.
The images showed it—a single moment, frozen in time. Tongtian, freed from his cage, his form blazing with power beyond anything the world had ever seen. In his hands, his swords—the four legendary blades that had slain countless enemies over countless ages—began to glow.
He did not strike at his brothers. He did not seek revenge against those who had wronged him. Instead, he struck at the world itself.
The swords fell.
And the continents cracked.
Nicholas watched, his stars frozen, as the images showed the impossible. The land—that vast, unbroken expanse of Pangea, the single continent that had existed since before memory—split. Cracks raced across its surface, faster than sight, deeper than any ocean. They widened, spread, multiplied, until the single landmass was no longer single.
It shattered.
Pieces broke away, drifting, spinning, colliding. Oceans rushed into the gaps, filling them with water that boiled and steamed and then cooled. Mountains rose where none had been. New coastlines formed in moments. The very face of the Earth rearranged itself under the force of Tongtian's wrath.
And beneath it all, beneath the breaking continents and the boiling seas and the crumbling mountains, millions still lived. Still died. Still screamed as the world they had known ended around them.
Tongtian's rage had not been aimed at them. It had not been aimed at anyone. It had simply been—a force of nature, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, that shattered everything it touched.
The world teetered on the edge of annihilation.
And then—
To be continued...
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