The Immortal of Blackwater

At the end of the Primordial Era, the Immortal Realm collapsed.

Three thousand immortals disembodied beneath the firmament. Their bones and blood rained down across the mountains and rivers of the Nine Provinces. The world believed it was a gift from the immortals: those who obtained immortal bones could live forever and ascend to immortality.

They were wrong.

The day immortal bones entered their bodies, mortals did indeed stop aging and dying of illness. But they could never die again, either.

Wounds healed, severed limbs grew back, and their souls were nailed fast inside their bodies. They could not even find the gateway to reincarnation. Three thousand years passed, and the first generation to receive the bones had long since gone mad. They buried themselves in snowy mountains, sank to the bottom of the sea, and sealed themselves in stone coffins, but their bodies still crawled back to the human world on their own, like corpses pulled along by strings.

Later generations gave this a name: the Calamity of Eternal Life.

The truth behind that rain of fallen immortals was carved on a broken stele. The writing had long since faded, and only two lines remained legible:

The bones of three thousand immortals, the dead live forever.

No one knew who had written them.

No one knew how immortals had died, either.