.7 million years.The Mage God had ascended only a bit more than 300,000 years ago!For every living being, the world basically started existing 300,000 years ago.Anything that happened before then wasn't relevant.Back then, the methods of comprehending things were very primitive.

People basically only looked at something and tried to build some kind of connection with it.A big part of comprehension back then was faith and belief.

Many people believed that the Elements and natural forces were sentient and that they only told their secrets to worthy people.Some people even sacrificed others to appease the Elements so that they may share their secrets with them.Naturally, that didn't really work, but it didn't stop people from trying.The book talked about all the different kinds of ways the people managed to achieve power, and some of the things Shang read reminded him of what the God had said when they had first met."There are innumerable ways to supreme power.

You can use the inherent energy in the air to increase the power of your mind.

This strengthens your soul, and the more powerful your soul gets, the more powerful your mental abilities become.

You can crush elephants with just your mind or move the energy of the world in such a way that it creates powerful destructive forces.""However, you can also focus on strengthening your body.

By absorbing the energy in the atmosphere and fusing it with your body, you can become so fast and so powerful that the other person that trains their mind wouldn't even be able to react to an attack of yours.""You can also fuse with some ethereal concepts and summon them.""You can also concentrate on weapons, which allows you to sunder reality with a move of your weapon.""You can also comprehend the concepts of how the world works and manipulate the energy in such a way that it imitates these concepts.

You would gain control over fire, gravity, time, space, water, metal, life, and so on.""You can even just purely absorb Energy without end, becoming a walking bomb that could unleash many years of accumulated power in a single strike."Shang had to pause after reading this.The reason was that the book basically explained all these things in a very similar way.It used similar words, and the structure of the sentences was similar, albeit more professional.Of course, the book went into more detail.All of this created a suspicion in Shang's mind.Why was this so similar to the God's words?Shang's first thought was that the God might actually just be the Archivist.However, Shang very quickly dismissed that theory.Lucius left the Archivist alive back then.

It would make no sense for Lucius to die to the Archivist after ascending.Additionally, if the Archivist could just walk around and kill Queen Primordium, the Lightning Emperor would have considered the Archivist as the perpetrator.Yet, since the Lightning Emperor didn't even consider that possibility, this probably meant that the Archivist couldn't just walk around and randomly kill powerful people.The Archivist and the God couldn't possibly be the same person.Additionally, the God had created the universe where Earth was, which was beyond the power of a Mage Emperor.Mage Emperors could create separate spaces, and they could maybe even create something like Shang's inner world.However, creating such a huge universe with its own laws of physics was probably way beyond their ability.Shang's next suspicion was that the Archivist might have talked to or knew of the existence of the God.

But that also didn't make much sense.

After all, the Archivist had lived through these times.

It would make no sense for the God to tell the Archivist how the world worked while the Archivist could literally see everything for himself.So, did the God actually reference the Archivist's work?But why would he need to do that?He should have seen everything for himself.Unless...The Archivist's work was how the God knew about these things.This opened several questions.How could the God not know about these things?Wasn't he the creator of this world?Was the Archivist actually older than the God?As soon as Shang came up with that question, he stopped thinking for a moment.Younger than the Archivist?Shang decided to continue reading the book for answers.The Archivist talked about many different Paths, and the times they had been at their most powerful.Back when the Archivist had still been young, people called Cultivators were the most powerful.These Cultivators comprehended many different Concepts, which they called Laws back then, and combined them.

With these combined Concepts, they elevated their own beings.The Archivist called them the first iteration of Mages.Cultivators essentially advanced very similar to Mages, but they did it in an all-encompassing way, which distributed their power over all aspects, making them jack-of-all-trades but masters of none.However, the Cultivators were eventually suppressed by the beasts.Ancient Beast Emperors appeared in the world, and they ate every powerful being they could find.Only the weakest humans were left since they weren't strong enough to interest the beasts.At that point, only one powerful human remained, which was the Archivist.The Archivist was powerful enough to threaten most of the beasts, and they decided to refrain from attacking him as long as he didn't attack them.

There were still some beasts that were more powerful than him, but they didn't attack.However, the beasts wouldn't have done that if the Archivist had been a Cultivator.The beasts had been angry at the Cultivators for suppressing them, which was why they had killed so many people.Meanwhile, the Archivist had been born with a frail body that couldn't support the Elevation of the Elements, making him essentially a cripple that couldn't possibly become a Cultivator.So, he focused on training his mind, which proved to be very effective.Just like Shang, the Archivist had created his own Path.Eventually, the Beast Emperors became so bored that they retreated from the world and went into slumber in the core of the world and the deepest oceans.Somewhere during that time, the Abominations also began to show up for the first time, but they were barely an inconvenience.

The strongest Abominations were just in the First Realm.Humanity slowly achieved power again, and they invented new Paths.That was when the Beast Controller Path started to become dominant.The world was filled with incredibly powerful beasts, and the humans used their superior minds to create techniques to manipulate beasts.Some of them controlled the beasts' minds.Some of them created hallucinations.Some of them created powerful curses that would hurt the beast if it didn't follow orders.And some of them straight up just befriended beasts.Eventually, humans regained control of the world.However, legends spoke of beasts that could destroy the entire world.Sadly, humans couldn't find them.But they found something else.The Archivist.