When the most powerful Beast Controllers found the Archivist, they started to question him and eventually attacked him.
There had been 20 Beast Controller Emperors back then, and each one was interested in testing the Archivist's power one by one.
However, when they realized that none of them could win on their own, they started to harbor thoughts of banding together and just killing him.
The Archivist had lived a very long time by then, and he knew all of them.
The Beast Controller Emperors had dominated the world and had finally become the sole rulers. After being suppressed for so long, they felt unstoppable.
They were the most powerful beings in the world!
They could do anything!
When the Archivist saw their greed, he decided to negotiate.
He would tell them the locations of the legendary beasts in exchange for his safety.
The Beast Controllers agreed, but to make sure that the Archivist didn't vanish as soon as they left, they put a collar around him that he couldn't remove on his own, which would tell them where he was.
The Archivist didn't have any other choice and agreed.
When he told them about the locations of the beasts, the Beast Controllers quickly split into multiple camps.
All of them wanted to catch one of the legendary beasts first.
Many of them began to fight on their way to the legendary beasts.
And eventually, they found the legendary beasts.
And woke them.
When the legendary beasts saw that their kin were suppressed even more than with the Cultivators, their rage exploded.
The Beast Emperors released powerful roars, which woke the other sleeping Beast Emperors.
The apocalypse of the beasts had returned.
The Beast Controllers were no match.
From a roaring flame, humanity had been transformed into cinder.
The beasts let the Archivist live again, but they wouldn't get rid of the Archivist's new collar.
Over the next years, the Archivist witnessed humanity become powerful again, but this time, humanity didn't gain power by controlling beasts.
Naturally, Beast Controllers made a return, but they were stopped by another Path.
Mind Blasters.
Just as the name implied, Mind Blasters focused on attacking someone else's soul. They were quite effective against beasts, and they could also destroy the methods Beast Controllers used to control beasts.
However, the Mind Blasters were not the Path that reached the top. They were simply the ones that stopped the Beast Controllers from reaching the top.
Beast Warriors.
Beast Warriors were what turned out to be the most powerful Path.
Beast Warriors used methods to transform their bodies in such a way that they achieved beast-like qualities.
At the same time, Beast Warriors also had to train in techniques that defended their minds since they had to battle the wills of the beasts during their training.
Eventually, the Beast Warriors reached the top.
And they also found the Archivist.
This time, there was no fight.
That was because the leader of the Beast Warriors was more powerful than the Archivist.
In comparison to the scattered Beast Controllers, the Beast Warriors were all united under one person.
The Hegemon of that era destroyed the Archivist's collar but placed his own seal on him in the form of a tattoo on the right side of his face.
Naturally, the Archivist told them about the past.
The Beast Warriors became greedy for the legendary beasts' powers, but the Hegemon stopped them.
They wouldn't repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.
This time, all of them would go to one legendary beast at a time to suppress and kill it.
And it worked!
Until the fifth beast.
The sixth beast managed to warn all the others before dying, and the beast apocalypse returned.
But this time, humanity could put up a fight.
In the end, half of the legendary beasts died, but humanity was once more turned into cinders.
In the next years, the number of legendary beasts increased again as more beasts managed to consume the powerful Beast Warriors.
And just like that, the number of legendary beasts had returned to what it had been before, and they went to sleep again.
Humanity recovered once more.
This time, the most powerful Path was the Domain Controller Path, which used the power of the world as their weapon.
They also met the Archivist, and the Hegemon of that time gave him an amulet that would suppress him.
And again, the humans would die to the legendary beasts.
Humanity recovered again.
This time, they were Death Seekers, which was a Path focusing on Poisons, Darkness, Death, and Blood.
The Archivist received a black metallic glove this time.
They managed to take down about a third of the legendary beasts.
The next time, Beast Controllers made a return.
The Hegemon of that time was a bit nicer than the scattered Beast Controllers back then and gave the Archivist a bracelet instead of a collar.
Even though the Archivist was suppressed by several Spells, his power hadn't stopped growing, and by now, he could even fight the Hegemons if he wouldn't have to deal with all the suppressions.
This time, the Beast Controllers managed to get rid of three legendary beasts, surpassing their previous record of zero.
Humanity had turned into nothing but cinders once more.
When the Archivist saw humanity slowly increase in power again, he noticed that something similar to Cultivators would most likely reach the peak again.
The Archivist had already seen a repeat of one Path, and he didn't want to see another one.
The Archivist wanted to learn and accumulate knowledge.
So, for the first time, he actually intervened.
Many of the suppressions had already become weak with age, and the Archivist only had troubles with the two most recent ones, which weren't as bad.
When humanity was still in its infancy, with the strongest human being in the Fourth Realm, books appeared all over the world.
They were introductions to many different Paths.
Domain Controller, Beast Controller, Beast Warrior, Cultivator, and Death Seeker were amongst the most prominent, but there were also many smaller Paths.
And all of them had general outlines that could lead someone to the theoretical Ninth Realm.
Amongst those was also the Archivist's Path, which he decided to call Magic.
And the people practicing Magic would be called Mages.
