A notebook left behind in the Scalegorge Waterscape by a young scholar of Vidyadhara heritage. It details his fantasies about the history of the Vidyadhara.
A Vidyadhara Youth's Notes
My teacher says, if people don't remember where they come from, then they'll be similarly confused about which direction they should go.
School's out, so I've come to the Scalegorge Waterscape to find out about the history of us Vidyadhara.
In our textbooks, we came out of a primordial ocean, a Roiling Deep just like this one — but far vaster than the tiny reaches of these Lunarescent Depths. There is an ocean as far as the eye can see — covering up the entire planetary surface.
Our ancestors lived a carefree life together in the Roiling Deep with countless other living things.
Back then, we could still use the power gifted to us by our dragon ancestor, Long. As the prime species among sea life in the Roiling Deep, everything was under our control. If a fish species was too bony, we'd remove the bones from inside their body. If a sea beast was too small, we'd fatten it up and make it proliferate. And if a seaweed was too bitter, we'd sweeten it until it was delicious.
My teacher says that back then, we could use our powers derived from Long to change the form of any creature, as easily as children playing with modeling clay. Our ancestors could modify fish into a thick mountain of meat and gouge meat from this mountainous mass whenever they wanted a bite to eat. Back then, crabs could have thousands of legs, each leg filled with delicious crab meat.
I wish that we could go back to those days, but my teacher says that we can never return.
One day, when we could no longer control the powers of our dragon ancestor, all of the creatures in the entire ocean became our enemies. The fish were toxic, the sea beasts hostile, and even the seaweed could prey upon us. Later on, even the microscopic creatures in the Roiling Deep became dangerous. They multiplied until the oceans were no longer fit for our survival.
Even later on, we became a member of the Xianzhou Alliance. Life is good aboard the Xianzhou, but the freedom of the ocean is something we will never know again.
But my teacher also says that people should live with the future in mind, and we shouldn't suffocate ourselves with nostalgia. So I believe that even though we'll never be able to go back to our ocean home, so long as I can become an adult of adequate merit, then I will definitely build a more beautiful future than the past.