Chapter 178: Great Qin Unifies
"Migu… my tails… boo hoo…"
Sobbing echoed through the palace hidden in the seam of human order.
As time passed, the breach Rowe had carved gradually mended. Human order's self repair was always frighteningly efficient. As long as human history remained engraved into the world, as long as people still remembered it, this place would knit itself back together.
In the blink of an eye, the hall returned to what it had been when Rowe first arrived. Vast. Resplendent. A dazzling chamber that made "magnificent" feel like an understatement.
Only one thing was different.
The fox who once sat upon the highest seat now lay on the floor, her beautiful face twisted in misery, looking so pitiful it bordered on performance.
Unfortunately for her, Rowe was not a patron of pity theater.
"Leaving you three tails is already generous," Rowe said calmly as he slid his sword back into its scabbard.
The chaos core had fully retracted into his greater self. The machina god frame no longer manifested. Rowe had returned to his primal human appearance, composed and unhurried, as if the world had not nearly been rewritten.
Tamamo no Mae, no longer a Nine Tailed Fox, could only be called a Three Tailed Fox now.
And she had lost everything that once made her unbearable.
Her charm, her arrogance, her poise. All gone.
She curled on the ground with her knees drawn to her chest, dark blue robes gathered tight to cover herself. Her body trembled in small, involuntary shakes. Fox ears twitched within orange red hair like they were trying to warn her of danger that had already arrived.
Her face had not changed.
Her temperament had.
Compared to the Nine Tailed Fox, this was another person entirely.
Rowe could still feel it, though. Beneath the fear, the indignation. Resentment. Hatred.
Not extinguished.
Merely forced to swallow itself.
Rowe took one slow step forward.
Tamamo no Mae shut her eyes at once and trembled harder.
This Heaven had said he would not kill her. That did not guarantee he would be kind. The mind could invent a thousand humiliations in the space where death had been removed as an option.
Then she opened her eyes again.
Rowe was not in front of her.
She turned her head sharply.
Rowe was sitting above her, on the steps, in the very seat she had once claimed as her own.
The throne of the Primal Sun God.
For a moment, Tamamo no Mae's eyes widened so far they looked ridiculous.
He cut my tails and stole my seat.
Even foxes had standards.
Rowe settled into the throne as if it had been waiting for him all along. He looked down at her, and the reversal of host and intruder was so perfect it felt cruel.
"From now on, this place belongs to me," he said.
In the language of human order, that was not a threat. It was a fact being written.
Tamamo no Mae had no room to argue.
Rowe did not wait for her to find words anyway.
"Now you will tell me your past. Tamamo no Mae, who should have belonged to the future."
His gaze sharpened, clinical for a heartbeat.
"Or do you want me to excavate your memories directly with the chaos core?"
Tamamo no Mae shivered.
She knew he meant it.
Even now, Rowe still lacked too many answers about this land. He had fragments and observations, but not the reasons that connected them. Consort Yu had been able to describe what happened, but not always why it happened.
Tamamo no Mae was different.
She was not merely an observer.
She had been a participant.
From ancient times to the Battle of the Gods.
"Migu. I will tell you right now."
Her adjustment was swift and shamelessly practical. The moment she understood stubbornness had no value, she threw it away without a second glance.
"I came to the Divine Land twelve thousand years ago, when the giant gods from beyond the stars descended."
She spoke of the era when the first generation of gods were fading and retreating, and the second generation had only just seized their thrones. The civilization of gods had reached its peak.
Back then, the White Faced Golden Furred Fox was unquestionably one of them. One of the earliest Sun gods.
In the Age of Gods, the Sun was not a feature that existed from the planet's first breath. It was Authority. A being. A position.
After the original gods scattered, she consolidated the Sun's Authority and stepped into the rank of primal.
She thought she was about to sweep across the world.
Then the Star Hunter arrived.
A thing that could absorb energy and convert it into the fuel for its own evolution. It descended and immediately began shooting gods out of the sky. Even though only a vanguard clone reached Earth and the main body was blocked at the Moon, it still grew rapidly by consuming divinity.
The Mesopotamian gods fled in disorder.
Zeus of Atlantis gathered the powers of his pantheon, lost, yet did not die.
Odin of the Norse feigned death, then stole a remnant discarded by the Star Hunter before its evolution, using it to rebuild.
Tamamo no Mae, one of the gods of that age, met that giant god soldier that split open the dawn of the Age of Gods.
She fought.
She lost.
Her nine tails, the manifestation of the Primal Sun, were scattered directly.
And she fell to the Divine Land.
"Before I arrived," she said quietly, voice thick with old bitterness, "I believed that because I held the Authority of the Primal Sun, I was the strongest in the era after the primal gods disappeared."
She looked down, lips tightening.
"But after I reached this land… I understood I was only a frog in a well, migu."
Before coming here, there were only a handful of primal gods across various regions.
In the Divine Land, there were dozens of primal manifestations alone, and several existences of an even higher tier.
The ancestral gods of China. The ancient sages. Their presence shattered her arrogance like glass.
Exiled to the Divine Land with only one tail left, the White Faced Golden Furred Fox was weak. She was taken in by one of the great demon sages of the land, and in that shelter she adapted, localized, and became the representative of the fox clan.
In that process, she found her other tails.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
As she recovered them, she discovered what she did not want to know.
Each tail had met a tragic fate.
Each manifested existence was a demon, not a god.
Denounced by the ancestral gods. Shunned by the immortals.
The White Faced Golden Furred Fox had reached primal not through pure inheritance, but through usurpation. The resentment of other Sun gods she had defeated had wrapped around her like a curse.
When she was strong, it could not touch her.
When she was scattered and weak, each tail became vulnerable.
Resentment gnawed at them.
Step by step, each tail degenerated into a demon.
"I prayed for the ancestral gods' help," she said, and her eyes hardened. "They told me it was my calamity."
Her jaw clenched.
"They were deceiving me. What calamity? They simply would not help. They looked down on me."
Her voice sharpened into something almost childish with spite.
"So I decided I would rely on myself to become a true Sun manifestation."
"I refuse to accept it."
She had yearned for them. Gazed at their power from afar. Their spirits and will were so bright even the solar corona felt pale.
Precisely because of that yearning, rejection became humiliation.
Rowe listened without interruption, then spoke with quiet certainty.
"So after the Battle of the Gods, after the immortals departed, you gathered your nine tails. You disturbed the Divine Land's boundary. You released the Heavens Ancient Ghosts."
"All to prove you could do it."
Tamamo no Mae's silence was an answer.
Rowe connected the last threads.
Why was she called Tamamo no Mae?
Because Tamamo no Mae was the end point of the Nine Tailed Fox. From Qingqiu, Mei Xi, Daji, Huayangtian, and the other fragments.
Nine tails, finally converging into a name that would appear in the future, in the land not yet risen in the east, Higashi no Kuni.
Tamamo no Mae represented the White Faced Golden Furred Fox's future after regaining Sun Authority.
Only that name could push her further.
Only that name could let her chase the steps of the ancestral gods and say, I can do it too.
"But your method was wrong," Rowe said.
He stood, posture controlled, voice even.
"Using the Heavens Ancient Ghosts as a lever would never complete you. It would only feed an Outer God."
Tamamo no Mae's ears twitched, but she did not interrupt.
Rowe's expression softened, not into gentleness, but into something closer to certainty.
"And you were wrong about something else."
"The ancestral gods never abandoned you."
He turned and walked away, his footsteps fading into the hall's depth. In the language of human order, distance was not measured by meters, and presence could vanish like a thought released.
A breeze passed.
Tamamo no Mae blinked, and realized Rowe was already gone.
Only his voice remained, lingering in the air like a verdict.
"Your calamity has passed."
Tamamo no Mae stood motionless.
She examined herself, and felt it.
The resentment that had clung to her, the hatred born from other Sun gods, the poison that had pushed her into madness.
It was gone.
Cleanly removed.
As if it had never existed.
She understood then, too late, and with the bitterness of someone who had run in circles for centuries.
She was always destined to fail.
The Heavens Ancient Ghosts were chaos left behind by the ancestral gods.
And the ancestral gods had always possessed the means to remove them.
Even without Rowe, Shenzhou would have remained stable.
So why were those remnants left behind?
A hope for return.
And a path for a foreign fox to be saved.
Because even if she was a foreign god, she had integrated into Divine Land.
And the ancestral gods of Divine Land did not abandon those who belonged to it.
Deliberate rejection.
Deliberate provocation.
A harsh teaching method.
At this moment, the last influence of those old resentments finally dissolved.
Then the will of Heaven descended again, not as lightning, but as a clause written into reality.
"Imprisonment for one thousand years."
"After one thousand years, you may break free."
"But from then on, in the real world, the Nine Tailed Fox must not appear again."
"This is Heavenly Law."
Tamamo no Mae remained frozen.
After a long time, she let out a soft laugh, strange and unreadable.
"Great Monarch…"
She sighed, the sound carrying equal parts exhaustion and something like admiration.
"As expected of the man this concubine fancied."
One thousand years was neither long nor short.
She could wait.
…
Military reports flooded into Xianyang, into the majestic Qin palace where King Zheng resided.
'Report. Wang Jian has breached Handan, captured the King of Zhao and eighteen members of the Zhao royal clan.'
'Front line report. Han's pass has fallen. King Han has led his officials out of the city to surrender.'
'Report. Wang Ben has defeated Wei by flooding Daliang. After three months, the capital was ruined. King Wei surrendered. Wei is annihilated.'
'Chu is destroyed.'
'Qi is completely overthrown.'
It was accomplished ten years earlier than the history Rowe remembered.
The trend remained unchanged.
The details shifted.
"The world belongs to Qin," King Zheng declared.
He rose solemnly. The pearl curtain on his crown swayed. The Xuanbird embroidered upon his robes seemed to lift and cry.
The Xuanbird of Mandate descended, and Shang was born.
Qin traced its origin back to Shang, rose through hardship, and after centuries finally achieved unification.
The Mandate returned.
Officials cheered in unison.
"Long live Great Qin!"
The people echoed.
"Long live Great Qin!"
The Qin sword was drawn for one purpose.
To pacify the world.
By the Wei River, Rowe walked slowly.
He had returned from the depth of human order to the present world. This would be the third time he entered Qin by following the Wei River's flow.
Today, the world had returned to peace.
And as Rowe expected, the immortals and gods had returned to Pan.
A faint star twinkled above.
Pan was gradually condensing into an independent dimension, stabilizing into something that could carry divinity without tearing reality.
Rowe saw countless traces of immortals within it, beyond doubt.
He also saw the human world below.
The suffering and toil of the people had not changed.
Along the riverbank, poor people with sallow faces and thin bodies spoke in weary voices.
"Great Qin is unified. What will the future be like?"
"What does that have to do with us? I heard Qin's taxes are heavy. People like us will suffer."
"Hard or not, worry about it after we survive tomorrow…"
A scholar from a fallen kingdom drifted past in a small boat, sighing mournfully toward the shore, worried for what came next.
Even the wealthy worried about prospects.
The poor worried about food.
Rowe watched, then smiled.
Not a pleased smile.
A calm one.
"The King of Great Qin is the king of the world," he said.
"Then the hearts of the people are Great Qin's world."
"If the people's hearts are lost, Shang fell. Zhou fell. Qin can change too."
Such words, in this moment, could be called treason.
The boat's owner stiffened immediately and stared at the man on the shore. The poor people flinched as well. Whatever their grievances, they still wanted to live to see tomorrow.
Rowe only smiled again.
He had helped Great Qin unify the world.
But Great Qin was never the true object of his help.
It was the world itself.
"Can the Mandate of Heaven be changed?" someone asked, voice tight.
Rowe answered without hesitation.
"It can."
"Why?"
Rowe's gaze lifted, not toward the palace, but toward something deeper, something that sat behind kings and dynasties.
"Because I say it can."
"Because I am Heaven."
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