[Godhood for All + Civilizational Evolution + Racial Wars + Epic Ensemble Cast]
During the godhood trials, everyone is trying to extend the lifespan of their starting race.
Elves live for a thousand years, dragons are nearly immortal, and mechanical life forms don’t even age.
Lin Yue, however, creates humans with a lifespan of just eighty-two years, deliberately giving them irreversible aging and natural death.
His teacher urges him to give up.
His classmates are convinced that humans won’t even survive the first trial.
After all, over the six hundred years of divine-domain time, other people’s heroes can live to the end, while humanity will have to pass the torch at least seven times.
Lin Yue doesn’t argue.
He simply leaves all the potential returned by death to those who come after.
And so, the first generation of humans learns to preserve fire.
The second learns to record the experience of the dead.
The third builds cities and makes weapons.
They grow old, fail, forget, and pay dearly again and again.
But whenever someone falls, another person takes up the tools they left behind and carries on.
Many years later, the long-lived races are still ruled by their original heroes.
Humanity, meanwhile, has left the divine domain, spreading the flames of civilization throughout the heavens.
Only then do the gods finally understand:
Death is not humanity’s greatest gift.
The greatest gift is daring to entrust everything left unfinished to those who come after.
It's well written and has a sense of age.