Day 29—Heaven’s Dominion

And on that day, the sons and daughters of Heaven’s Dominion walked the earth. And they deigned to be righteous in their deeds and verily sought with their hearts. In a tiny town, Sage Xifu sat, copying the works of the ancient sages. They were manifold, and written in a daunting style. Xifu would sometimes spend long hours in the evening trying to decipher the stylized handwriting, now made confusing and less-decipherable by the instruction of the Islamic schools. The old system had served them well enough, but Xifu knew better than to try to resist the tides of time. His brow furrowed and there were permanent lines etched in his face.

Sage Xifu guarded the world’s largest library. It was greater than the library at Alexandria, but somehow he suspected that this statistic would not go down in history. Things would go well until the occasion that somebody desired a text from the library. Then, it was not so much an inconvenience to retrieve the text, but a physically arduous task for the old sage. But he supposed that this kept his body alive.

The library was daunting. The records were daunting, assuredly. And he was disallowed from beholding most of the texts with his own eyes besides those he was assigned to copy. There were some that existed for general consumption, and, though being a sage, he was not a level above. It kept him humbled and a little somber.

By protocol, he was only to use the abacus of bones in his space. This helped him keep track of every text that he copied. He knew it was no easy task, but he also knew that he had been incarnated from Heaven’s Dominion to perform this work. Sweat would roll down his sparse pate and into his braid as he focused on a piece of the great work.

Often all he had to illuminate him were the candles sent by Heaven’s Dominion. Occasionally the Angels of Light would fill the room with their byproduct, but it was only granted by request and Sage Xifu did not feel comfortable requesting repeatedly in a tennight.