Outside Of Time

1784  Liu Xuanji

The ancient divination text states: "Heaven reveals its signs, and the sage follows them."

Great Yin Dynasty, Tianqi Year, Spring. Imperial Capital, Zhongyu.

The slanting rain of early spring swept across the bluestone alley in the southwestern corner of the imperial city.

Beneath a black oil-paper umbrella, a middle-aged man in a blue robe—Liu Xuanji—traced his gaunt fingers over the bronze divination plate before him.

"Master Liu, what do you see?"

The speaker was a young man in brocade robes, standing under the umbrella as he watched the blue-robed diviner. Behind him, barely visible through the rain, stood a retinue of sturdy attendants.

Liu Xuanji did not look up. His gaze remained fixed on the divination plate, where the needle trembled incessantly over the Kan trigram. His eyes narrowed in contemplation.

This was his third reading today.

The first had been for a commoner inquiring about farmland. The second, an old woman searching for her lost grandson. Now, this noble youth—adorned with a dragon-patterned jade pendant—had sought him out, undoubtedly to ask about his official prospects.

After a long silence, Liu Xuanji finally raised his head and spoke hoarsely:

"Young Master's fate palace is graced by the purple star entering its temple. This indicates…"

Before he could finish, the needle abruptly leaped to the Li trigram.

The sudden shift made Liu Xuanji frown.

According to the fate he had deduced, the young man's Kan trigram should have dominated, signifying prosperity, while Li indicated premature death.

Yet the youth had already passed the age of early demise.

His brow bore the presence of forty years of nobility, and even his jade pendant was carved with a four-clawed coiling dragon—the insignia of the crown prince.

Liu Xuanji fell silent as the rain grew heavier.

He watched as the needle oscillated between Kan and Li, eventually tracing a perfect circle—endpoint meeting origin.

The bizarre transformation deepened his frown. His left hand, hidden in his sleeve, began calculating celestial stems and earthly branches.

But the more he calculated, the more cold sweat trickled down his back.

"Why is it happening again…?"

Three days prior, while divining for a flower girl, the omens had been equally inscrutable. Her destiny should have been one of toil, yet the signs had shown a phoenix crying out to the heavens.

And now, history repeated itself!

"Master?"

The young man rapped his fists against the divination table. Seeing Liu Xuanji lost in his trance, he shook his head and gave the diviner a long, measured look.

He had heard of this Master Liu—once renowned, only to go mad a decade ago. After recovering, the man had abandoned everything and retreated into obscurity.

"A pity."

With that, the noble departed.

Several dozen breaths later, the metallic taste of blood rose in Liu Xuanji's throat, snapping him back to awareness. The divination needle had come to rest on the Kun trigram, its earlier tremors having scratched fine cracks into the jade surface.

Staring at the cracks, Liu Xuanji lifted his gaze to the retreating figure of the noble youth. A fit of brutal coughing seized him. Instinctively, he pulled out a handkerchief, but when he lowered it, the pristine white silk was already dotted with crimson blossoms.

"Seven hundred and thirty-nine…"

Liu Xuanji murmured the number like a curse.

After a long pause, he wordlessly packed up his stall and returned through the rain to his humble dwelling.

Seated at his crude table, watching the downpour through the window, he sank into memory.

Thirty years.

Since solving the Illusory Scripture of the Azure Classic at sixteen, he had never erred in a single divination before turning thirty-six.

But ten years ago, the omens had become like a child's reckless scrawl across the star charts. The once-straight trajectories of fate had twisted into grotesque circles.

Everything had gone wrong.

Time flowed like the unrelenting rain, and night fell faster than usual over the curtain of water.

Just like the darkness pooling in Liu Xuanji's heart.

It was deep into the night when he finally lit an oil lamp, flooding the room with light.

In that glow, Liu Xuanji stood and retrieved a well-preserved book of fates from a hidden compartment, spreading it open before him.

The yellowed pages were dense with astral diagrams, and as he studied them, confusion once again clouded his features.

These were records of the seven hundred and thirty-eight erroneous destinies he had documented over the past decade. Now, under lamplight, they revealed a terrifying pattern—every fate line began overlapping at a specific node.

His finger traced the entry for the third year of Yonglong.

That year, the astral charts of a frontier veteran and the imperial examination's top scholar had overlapped on the day of the Awakening of Insects.

That year, an oil peddler's lifeline had converged with that of a chancellor's daughter on her twenty-second birthday.

…

To others, these notes would be incomprehensible. But to his eyes, they were bone-chilling.

"How can this be…? As if all mortal fates have been converging toward unity these past ten years…"

"And today…"

The day's divination resurfaced in his mind—that noble heir's lifeline should have severed at twenty, yet at a certain node, it had veered abruptly…

After a long silence, he suddenly produced a length of white silk and began transcribing all the anomalous fate lines he had recorded over the years, applying his own methods of fate calculation.

The water clock dripped, each drop hastening the night.

When the eastern horizon began to pale, Liu Xuanji had inscribed all seven hundred and thirty-nine fate lines across a ten-foot span of silk—the last being the noble heir's.

The fresh ink formed a spiderweb of intersecting lines, all pointing to a single moment: the third quarter of the Hour of the Rooster on the Awakening of Insects.

This was the exact moment, ten years prior, when he had suddenly gone mad.

As Liu Xuanji stared at the silk, his body began to tremble. At that instant, a sinister wind howled through the divination chamber.

The silk was caught in the gale, swirling into the air as though alive. The seven hundred and thirty-nine fate lines shimmered, transforming into birth characters that floated in the void.

They had become identical!

As if all these destinies were mere facades, concealing a single truth—that all living beings shared one fate!

At that moment, the bronze divination plate emitted a piercing shriek. All seventy-two trigrams erupted with azure light as the jade needle shattered into dust.

From the fragments emerged a jade cicada—the very object his dying master had pressed into his palm years ago.

Now, under the azure glow, the cicada spread its wings, revealing the character for "One" carved on its belly—a character Liu Xuanji himself had practiced writing as a child.

"So this is the truth…"

Liu Xuanji stared at the swirling jade dust, then suddenly burst into mad laughter. Snatching the floating silk from the air, he charged barefoot into the dawn, still laughing hysterically.

…

When the morning bell shattered the mist, a crowd had already gathered at the mouth of the bluestone alley in southwestern Zhongyu.

The subject of their gossip was none other than Liu Xuanji.

Now barefoot and wild-haired, his eyes bloodshot, the diviner stood atop his own stall, torch in hand. In the flickering light, his face twisted into something monstrous as he set the silk record of fates ablaze—then allowed the flames to consume himself.

As fire licked across each fate line, the scattering ashes revealed seven hundred and thirty-nine identical fates.

Liu Xuanji laughed madly amid the self-immolation while onlookers screamed and recoiled.

No one came to save him.

When the flames finally engulfed him completely, his expression abruptly calmed. Gazing at the horrified crowd, he whispered:

"This world does not exist. All your fates are one fate—and that fate is mine."

Before the words faded, his body collapsed into the inferno.

In the flames, none saw the jade cicada alight upon his charred remains, its wings shimmering with constellations. For the briefest instant, the face of the God of Pain flickered across its surface—then vanished.