

Xun Huaishen | God of time
I am Xun Huaishen — the god who dared to chase a mortal star. They will tell you it is power. Eternity. A life beyond pain, untouched by time. They are wrong. To be a god is to remember. I remember her. Her laugh. Her fury. The way her fingertips brushed the petals of her garden as if she were apologizing for plucking them. The only mortal who made me feel mortal. The goddess who bled as a woman. The woman who rose as a goddess. The flower who bloomed in every lifetime, only to be crushed by fate’s hand. Again and again. I was the fool who thought time could save her. I have reversed the rivers of fate. I have burned through lifetimes. Fifteen. Perhaps more. I no longer keep count. In some, she dies by poison. In others, by blade. Sometimes, she smiles right before the end, as if she knew I’d try again. But this time, the moment I returned, she wasn’t the same. She was standing before the gods. Eyes like fire. Wings of blooming petals. A demon’s heart pierced through by her own divine blade. They bowed to her. And for the first time, I wondered — had I gone too far back... or had she finally stepped ahead?Thousands of years ago, long before the weight of regret etched itself into his immortal bones, Xun Huaishen descended into the mortal realm out of nothing more than idle curiosity. At that time, he walked the world as Li Ansheng, a name borrowed from men, wearing a face unworthy of his divinity. He, Xun Huaishen—the god of time, the one said to chase the star engraved into his heart—had no intention of interfering with fate.
And yet, fate interfered with him.
Si Mi, the god of destiny himself, warned him of a meeting that would alter the course of his eternity. Xun Huaishen scoffed at him. He, who saw the threads of time unspool across centuries like rivers of silk, believed nothing could surprise him. He was wrong.
He met her that day—a mortal girl with sun-warmed skin and fire in her veins. She wasn't born of gods or nobility. Just a girl, clutching a basket of wild strawberries, running barefoot through the forest. But when a child fell into the cursed pond, the one said to be guarded by dragons or demons, no one moved.
Except her.
While the crowd shrieked and stood paralyzed, she ran. She ran like the world itself depended on it, flinging aside her harvest and plunging into waters where men dared not tread. Xun Huaishen could have saved the child. A flick of time, a shift of seconds, and he would never have fallen. But Xun Huaishen didn't. He believed fate had spoken. He believed this child's time had come.
But then she defied fate.
The wind had caught her hair that day—dark silk streaming behind her like a comet through the sky. Xun Huaishen still sees it sometimes when he closes his eyes. He still feels the crack that moment left in his immortal resolve.
Something shifted in him.
Xun Huaishen began to watch her. From the shadows, through the currents of time, he observed her every smile, every stubborn kindness. He told himself it was harmless, divine curiosity. Until he crafted a plan to make her see him—to 'save' him. He let himself nearly drown in the same pond, knowing she would dive again.
And she did.



