Chronicles Of Primordial War

Prologue

Shao Xuan sat in a remodeled bus and looked at the multitudinous mountains outside the window. Summer Solstice had just passed and the mountains were brimming with greens that burst with life. Seeing such a scene after living long in the city made his mood—despondent due to failures—quite brighter. Initially, Shao Xuan planned to call up a few friends for a journey far away to unwind his heart, but he didn’t expect to come across his fellow townmate and classmate who studied archeology, Shi Qi, who then pulled him over for an archaeology trip.

Now, they were heading towards a relatively remote small mountain village. It was said that things of the Stone Age were discovered there. A batch of people had already set off for that location, and currently, they were in the second batch.

Shao Xuan listened to his classmate start from the primitive humans’ skull, to the stone tools they used, to the murals on rocks. He even took out a few pictures and explained them in detail—the researchers did this and that . . . after drilling in, it was hard to pull it back out . . . Although Shao Xuan didn’t understand a thing, he still gave face to him and listened attentively.

On the paper were murals that archaeologists had discovered. Shao Xuan glimpsed at them, and felt they were no better than his nephews’ and nieces’ who had yet to even enter kindergarten. The lines on the drawings were rather simple—for most of them, one could tell they were people who held tools for hunting, as well a few drawings of various species of animals. For the rest, however, he did not have a clue what they were.

“This is a drawing of a goat? But this goat drawing is too big,” Shao Xuan said as he pointed at a picture.

On the picture, the drawing was a goat with a very long and large curved horn. By its side, there was a person holding a bow and arrows. Yet, the ratio did not seem normal. The head of the person reached only up to the goat’s back. A few other pictures were the same: a rabbit’s body proportion was akin to a lion, and on the left, there was even a picture of a horse, though its tail was drawn perhaps a bit too short.

Of course, not every single drawing’s ratio was like that. The different era’s mural styles discovered in different provinces were all distinct. At the back, the ratios were drawn a bit more like reality. On the drawings, you could even see a group of people bringing dogs for hunting.

He continued flipping back, and found several coloured drawings, giving an even clearer look to them.

“Hoh, this drawing is even more ridiculous. The antler is too large! And this person . . . The person in the drawing just now only reached the goat’s back, yet in this drawing, the person only reaches the height of this deer’s leg! What’s that in the bottom-right corner . . . An eight-legged alligator?!” Shao Xuan could not admire the style of the primitive humans’ drawing.

“They may not have put much emphasis on things like these,” Shi Qi explained.

“You mean that when they draw, they did not have any realism in terms of proportion, and instead used exaggerated methods?” Shao Xuan asked.

“It should be like that.” Shi Qi scratched his head. “After all, in that time period, humans were not too educated in beauty. The drawings may only represent some sort of symbolic meaning. There was once a researcher who, when studying the murals, hypothesized that the reason why humans back then drew these hunting-related murals on cave walls or boulders was to let the tribe’s hunters or warriors have an idea in their hearts before heading out. Or, perhaps there was a ceremony we don’t know of—especially so for the murals drawn by those ‘shamans’.”

“Shamans huh . . .” In Shao Xuan’s mind, an image of a very odd and old swindler appeared.

“Ahh, why do you have such a face? Let me tell you this: ‘shamans’ back then did not necessarily hold low positions in human tribes. Quite oppositely, it’s very possible they held high ones.”