I suppose introductions are necessary, though names are often the least truthful thing about a person.
Still, for the sake of your fragile curiosity:
I am called Xu Shenyao.
That is all you will get—no grand titles, no flowery histories, no tedious lists of achievements to bore you. If you wish to know who I am, then look at the world around you… and look at everything that is wrong with it. For centuries, that has been my truest mirror.
I walk a realm far above the Four Continents of mortals—a silent place between cause and consequence, where even the laws of the heavens hesitate before moving. Here time cannot touch me; it stretches helplessly like a wounded beast, constantly trying to catch up, never succeeding.
From this vantage point, I watch civilizations rise like proud towers and collapse like soggy rice paper.
I watch emperors claim divine right while trembling before their own shadows.
I watch sects hoard truth like misers clutching rotten copper.
I watch mortals cry for justice while sharpening knives behind their backs.
You call this cultivation.
I call it a comedy performed by corpses who haven't realized they're dead yet.
And oh, the heavens—don't get me started on them. Those "immortal laws," those "cosmic decrees"… how grand they sound, how utterly nonsensical they are when examined up close. A child with chalk could draw straighter principles on the side of a wall.
Sometimes I wonder if creation itself was made by an idiot, or perhaps worse—by someone like me, bored and experimenting.
For five eras, I watched the world.
For six eras, I intervened.
Each time I descended, I left behind what scholars later praised as miracles, what priests worshipped as omens, what emperors feared as rebellion, and what sects condemned as heresy.
Fools. All of them. If they saw even a fragment of the truth, their minds would disintegrate like wet ash.
You might be expecting a noble immortal, a benevolent sage, some lantern-holding guardian of humanity.
You will be disappointed.
I am simply someone who has watched the world commit the same sins so consistently that I began to wonder:
Has sin become the essence of this world?
Or is this world the essence of sin?
There is a difference.
A very inconvenient one.
For centuries, I observed the Seven Corridors of Fate shifting beneath mortal feet like traps in a hunter's maze. I watched dynasties built on the backs of butchered ideals. I watched sects preach purity while practicing corruption. I watched kings label massacre as "righteous cleansing", and peasants call theft "survival".
Sometimes the heavens punished them.
More often, the heavens applauded.
A farce.
A cosmic joke.
One I am thoroughly tired of.
And now?
Now the world has rotted into a new shape—one I do not recognize, yet one I expected.
Greed is no longer a vice; it is a currency.
Cruelty is no longer hidden; it is celebrated.
Justice is no longer blind; it is sold to the highest bidder.
Mortals believe things are changing.
I, Xu Shenyao, know better.
The world has merely become honest about its filth.
It is almost refreshing.
Almost.
But I suppose this is the point where a story begins, isn't it?
Where the observer becomes the participant.
Where the chronicler becomes the actor.
Where the sin-eater must once again taste the sickness he tried to cure.
Because the cycle has turned.
Because the earth cries out again.
Because corruption has ripened enough to choke even the heavens.
And because…
I am returning for the seventh time.
Not as a god.
Not as a judge.
Not as a savior.
But as a reminder of what happens when the world forgets to fear the one who watches it.
Let the diary begin.