Character Chronicles: How I Became the Ruler of All Books

Zhang Renxing was known to everyone as Old Zhang. He looked like a twenty-four-year-old young man, with a relaxed expression. Sitting beside a tea table, he was no different from an ordinary person tending flowers and plants in an alley. No one could say how long he had lived. No one could even be sure that “Zhang Renxing” was his real name. All anyone knew was that he had already existed in the primordial chaos, when all things first took shape. He did not stand at the peak of the laws, but on a level beyond their reach. All the rules of the Myriad Worlds, every written record of their rise and fall, every predetermined thread of narration, could not stir the slightest ripple before him. He had passed through a thousand lifetimes. He had been an emperor who ruled over mountains and rivers, a mercenary who crossed the sea of stars, and even a man sweeping dusty leaves beneath a magic tower. No one knew what he had sought in those thousand lives. All they knew was that, when he awoke in the servant quarters of the cultivation world during his final life, he raised a hand and erased a calamity that should have destroyed an entire world. Later, he founded the Epoch Guild. Some said he wanted to preserve the balance of the multiverse; others said he was waiting for a promise he himself could no longer remember. No one had ever seen him truly act. They only knew that whenever he raised his eyes, even the folds of space and time quietly smoothed themselves out. He always smiled and said there were no heroes born that way. But no one knew that he had long since stepped outside the stories of all heroes.