Morning in the Spirit Pagoda city was always alive with noise. Merchants shouted, carriages rattled over cobblestone, and spirit masters in training sparred in open courtyards. To most, it was just another day. To Bai Chen, it was a stage. Every laugh, every whisper, every transaction was a thread that could carry a myth forward if nudged in the right way.
He walked through the crowd with his shoulders hunched, a bundle of scrolls strapped across his back. To anyone watching, he was just another errand boy delivering supplies for minor shops. No one noticed his gaze flickering toward the Spirit Pagoda's great tower, gleaming like a spear of glass and jade. Its scholars prided themselves on cataloging every anomaly in soul spirits. That arrogance was both a danger and a gift.
Inside the tower, hidden from his view, meetings were already being held. In the past month, strange reports had reached the researchers: a rabbit spirit that displayed unusual agility at night, as if blessed by moonlight; river serpents with shimmering jewel-like scales that resisted detection; even rumors of winged shadows gliding across the clouds. The phenomena were scattered, inconsistent, but the Pagoda catalogued everything.
Bai Chen had expected this. In fact, he needed it. Myths could only take root if given attention, if belief spread naturally. The Spirit Pagoda, with all its obsession for order, would unknowingly act as his greatest amplifier.
That night, Bai Chen returned to his abandoned shack. The walls were cracked, the floor damp, but it was his haven. He sat cross-legged and summoned the loom of threads within his mind. The hum of reality surrounded him. Tonight, he chose not to weave something new but to strengthen what already existed. He pulled gently on the silver thread of the rabbit myth, reinforcing the idea that moonlight nourished them, that they had always been creatures of dusk.
Across the city, a girl with a rabbit spirit suddenly felt her cultivation speed increase during the night. She gasped, ecstatic, unaware that her "ancestral bloodline" had just been rewritten. Her family believed it was a rare mutation. The Pagoda recorded it as an anomaly worth studying. Bai Chen smiled faintly in the dark. Another ripple.
Over the following weeks, more such ripples emerged. A fisherman swore he saw a serpent rise from the river, shimmering like emerald fire. His story spread across taverns, gaining more color with each retelling. In the mountains, hunters spoke of a giant bird whose wings eclipsed the sun. No one could prove anything, but the Pagoda scribes wrote furiously, theorizing about undiscovered species of soul beasts.
Bai Chen never took credit, never intervened. He was content to sit in corners, listening to stories grow on their own. Each retelling added strength to the threads. Each belief etched the myths deeper into the bones of the world.
Yet, for all his subtlety, Bai Chen knew the danger. The loom was vast, and the threads he pulled were not empty. When he spoke of Garuda, he sometimes felt the rush of great wings beating in the void. When he whispered of Nagas, he dreamed of jeweled eyes staring from beneath waters too deep to fathom. He had not created them entirely. He had only called fragments of something older, something that might have been waiting.
One evening, as he walked through a crowded plaza, he overheard two Pagoda scholars debating fiercely.
"—unprecedented! Soul spirits are evolving without external triggers."
"Evolution? You call random mutations evolution?"
"Then explain the silver rabbit case! Or the serpent sightings! There must be an underlying mythos—"
The word struck Bai Chen's ears like thunder. Mythos. They were closer to the truth than they realized.
He quickened his steps and melted into the crowd. A faint smile tugged at his lips. The Pagoda's hunger for answers would push them deeper, further than they should go. And in doing so, they would unknowingly legitimize his myths, embedding them into the continent's collective knowledge. Scholars would chase anomalies, people would whisper legends, and soon myths would feel as real as mountains.
Still, he had to be careful. If the Pagoda traced too much too quickly, suspicion might stir. Bai Chen's existence had to remain a ghost story—unseen, unspoken. The true myth of Soul Land must never be "the boy with the loom."
That night, he whispered a new thread—not of creatures, but of history itself. A faint idea of an ancient empire by the sea, proud and radiant, swallowed by waves in a single day. A city of knowledge and technology, long lost but never forgotten. He called it Atlantis.
In the morning, a sailor at the docks awoke with a dream he could not explain. He told his companions of a sunken city beneath the waves, where golden towers gleamed through the depths. The sailors laughed, but the tale spread anyway. In taverns, it became a rumor of a drowned kingdom. By the week's end, the Pagoda had received reports of "possible ruins beneath the western seas."
Bai Chen sat in his shack, alone, and whispered to himself.
"Another seed planted."
The loom hummed, threads vibrating with unseen resonance. The world was shifting, layer by layer, history by history. And all the while, he remained just another nameless boy, drifting through the streets, carrying crates, unnoticed.
But in silence, he was already rewriting the destiny of Soul Land.
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✅ Chapter 5 complete.