"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."
"The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."
"And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."
"God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness."
"God called the light 'day,' and the darkness He called 'night.' There was evening, and there was morning—the first day."
——Genesis
...
"Another year."
On the barren land, Laine awoke from his slumber.
Looking around, the familiar yet strange land seemed as if it had never changed.
Many years had passed since he came to this world, but Laine still wasn't used to the emptiness and desolation.
Unlike the divine creation recorded in the Bible, Chaos evolved from chaos, which he had witnessed with his own eyes.
Therefore, it didn't become complete in a mere seven days; instead, it still seemed desolate and broken.
But today was different because as Laine was awakened, he could clearly sense that a new deity was about to be born.
"The twelve Titans, finally, the day has come..."
Feeling the rhythm of the laws and the waves of the Origin Sea, Laine looked up.
At the far horizon, magnificent ribbons of color danced in the sky, and the tremors of the laws became more intense.
That was the sign of the birth of a new god.
This was not the first time. In the newly born Chaos World, Laine had witnessed the birth of many gods—one of them was just seven hundred years ago.
Of course, in the newly opened world, "year" was an inappropriate term because there was no sun and moon, no changing of seasons, and naturally, there was no concept of "year."
But Laine liked to use it, so chaotic Chaos got its second term for counting time, "year."
It is worth mentioning that the first term "day" was also created by Laine after he witnessed the birth of the sovereign of the night, the triune ancient god Nyx.
Therefore, he acquired the power of chronology.
But unfortunately, power isn't authority, this was only a nascent form of godhood, so Laine remained the God of Spirituality.
"Cronus and Rhea, the true masters of time, are about to be born."
With a long sigh, Laine leaned against the excavated cave, gazing at the transforming spectacle between heaven and earth.
Even with a deity's perception, across the boundless land that knew no borders, he could not sense the origin of everything.
But Laine didn't need to 'see' because the sky and the earth were coming together.
Regardless of which corner of the world, atop hills, beneath the oceans, the breath of desire was ascending, and new life was being conceived.
For thousands of years, in Laine's observation, the newborn Chaos World differed from later myths, but the birth of the deities seemed essentially the same.
All things originated from the dark void, and the vast land was born alongside Mother Earth.
Before the sky existed, the Lady of the Night dominated the infinite void, while chaos-filled Tartarus appeared in his sleep below all things.
As the first being in the world with self-awareness, Laine witnessed the birth of the Primordial Gods, and thus Chaos welcomed its first batch of creatures.
Latterly, under the world's calling and Mother Earth's gestation, the sky, the ocean, and the mountains appeared in succession. Uranus, Pontus, and Ourea were born from it, pushing Chaos closer to a complete world.
Now, one thousand three hundred 'years' since Laine began marking time, Gaia's eldest son, the Heavenly Father Uranus, married his nurturer, and the twelve Titan gods were about to come into this world.
Of course, at this time, there were no "Titans".
They were the great primordial gods, born of the Heavenly Father and Mother Earth, supreme beings who possessed mighty powers from birth.
The laws of the world would become perfected with their birth, and the throne of the Divine King would crown the ruler of the sky due to the manifestation of paternity.
Aside from Laine, there may or may not have been Eros, who seemed to have died momentarily upon birth, he would be the first Divine King.
"But this has nothing to do with me."
Shaking his head, under Laine's divinely inspired eyes, the laws of the world leaped forward towards completion.
The barren Chaos was gaining color with the birth of the new gods, becoming more prosperous and thriving.
However, the bustle was theirs; Laine had nothing.
As a weak transmigrated spirit god, his power didn't even compare to a single hair of the sky's ruler.
Thousands of years ago, when he first arrived at the beginning of heaven and earth, Laine was very confused.
Other transmigrators might be reborn or seize a body, or perhaps return to life in a corpse with soul fusion, but at least they all had a body to claim.
But when Laine arrived, Chaos had just begun, and the primordial gods were still gestating; he didn't even have an object to possess.
Fortunately, as the first existence of this world, Laine's original soul transformed into the origin of spirituality and a faint temporal divinity.
Leveraging this, Laine crafted a divine body for himself and avoided the fate of soul dispersal.
Later on, the power of chronology also relied heavily on this—not just anyone could create a new concept and gain power from it.
The existence of temporal divinity allowed Laine to take a shortcut; he barely made the world acknowledge the existence of "year" and "day", earning the weakest of chronologies.
But power is not authority; the latter is the essence of godhood, while the former is merely an extension of the dominion.
If one wants to elevate power to authority, to obtain the status of the God of Time, one must still follow one of those two paths.
Either directly, with great force inscribe the concept into the world or let the law's representatives, a sufficient number of deities, recognize him as the "creator", and then gradually gain that godhood over a long period.
Unfortunately, Laine could do neither.
He neither had the tremendous force to shake the world nor the ability to gain the recognition of the gods.
So Laine could only wait patiently, waiting for a proper opportunity.
For example, the time when this Divine King was about to be born.
"Hum—"
The humming sound suddenly rose, without a source yet seeming to come from everywhere. The sound was clear but not piercing, it was the agitation of the law.
The next moment, endless light, limitless water, sprang into existence in the void.
In the newborn Chaos World, the earth rested in the center, with the ocean wrapping around the land. But at that moment, in places where the ocean could not reach, on the land, in the sky, new water appeared out of nowhere and began to form streams.
Oceanus, also known as Oceans, the eldest of the twelve Titans, lord of the great seas, Circumterrestrial River, was finally born in the Chaos World.
At that time, Laine could clearly feel that part of the authority originally belonging to Pontus, the primordial Sea God, was being split in two, with one part hurtling straight towards the global currents.
The world was carving out his power.
The ocean and water rose greatly, but Pontus suffered a severe blow to his vital essence.
He still controlled the sea depths, coastal waters, and saline waters, but the emblem of fresh water and currents was taken by the newly born deity.
In Laine's perception, the once-powerful presence in the ocean weakened in an instant.
If we were to get more specific, it would be a fall from "Great Divine Power" to "Moderate Divine Power".