The Four only began their cycle of Incarnation after a critical moment in the scale.

The scale wasn’t always full of branches and islands. In the very beginning, it was an endless pitch-black wasteland, existing parallel to the entire expanse of the universe. Nothing existed there at first but when the first signs of intelligent life started to pop up in the universe, the scale began to move and change, working to keep the balance between itself and the entire universe outside of it.

For a long time, the scale was home to only creatures with immense power——gods, demons, etc. Among those creatures, the 4 Beasts were the most active, along with the 4 Fiends. Neither the Beasts nor the Fiends were really “4” at the time though, they all existed so tightly interlinked that they were practically one. 

Other Gods and Demons were there in the scale at the same time but they weren’t quite like the Beasts and Fiends. They were like dull unmoving stars in the sky while the Beasts and Fiends were super massive binary stars orbiting around each other at high speeds.

They were born from random collective nebulas of power created by the scale and later they turned into those massive stars in the endless black of the Scale. Finally, after millions of years of orbiting each other, they collided into a massive supernova.

From the blaze, they carved defined physical forms made from the elements they brought to the endless universe with their collision.

The Fiends were odd and never fully defined in their shape, they were always changing and never clear. The Beasts on the other hand were innately interconnected. Their complex forms mimicked one another in a way. They were gorgeous and divine, creatures that would one day be called a Dragon, a Tiger, a Bird, and a Tortoise. 

The 4 Beasts and 4 Fiends were in an eternal war in the Scale. There was no inciting reason, they clashed simply because they existed. Such was fate. 

The Scale had always worked based on fate in those days. And the Gods and Demons of the Scale did not have consciousness or Souls so they could never refute fate.

The thing that changed the way the Scale operated was humans. 

Many planets and realms were created from the endless battles in the scale, but Humans were what really changed everything. 

Why? Because they learned magic—all on their own.

There was human-like life in many realms, many exactly like the humans of the ‘earth’ the 4 Beasts would come to inhabit but no realm had ever harnessed magic before. Not without divine intervention.

The other fascinating thing was that Humans weren’t just suddenly blessed with knowledge, they learned it on their own in many different ways. From Cultivation to Witchcraft to traditional spellcasting, humans carved magic from their very bones and brought it into the world. 

This caught the eye of the Fiends and they aimed to absorb the magic of humans.

This was the second act of consciousness from a creature in the scale. The first act was when Azure Dragon’s foresight predicted this and the Beasts formed a plan to be one step ahead of the Fiends.

Black tortoise, held off all 4 Fiends, with their impenetrable armor. 

White Tiger and Vermillion Bird rounded up and defeated all of the other creatures of the scale. They intended to keep the Demons and other creatures from going to war or worse– from joining the fiends while they were gone. They succeeded in this but the scale took things into its own hands from there. White Tiger and Vermillion Bird’s Subjugation of the other creatures in the scale set the stage for the inner consciousness of the scale to create Dungeons.

Meanwhile, Azure Dragon rushed to force their way through the boundary that separated the Scale and the specific world where humans had harnessed magic. They managed to break through  with an attack unlike any that 

Once Azure dragon left though, the scale began to reject the rest of the Fiends and Beasts because the balance had been ruined. As a result of this, the rest of the Beasts and Fiends were pushed through to the human realm as well. And because they were all too powerful for the human world's state at the time, only a small part of their souls made it through. 

The Fiends didn’t have souls though, so they became small mindless versions of themselves.

The Beasts became the newborn babies of similar creatures in the human realm. 

Azure Dragon was “born” to a normal dragon. With only a vague knowledge of their power, they lived as a Dragon for a while. But the Dragons around them slowly came to fear their power and eventually, they abandoned them.

Azure Dragon didn’t have an ego at this point, they were just a Dragon aimlessly living around a lake. They didn’t realize why they—and other dragons— loved the lake so much until they decided to dive into the lake. 

After diving into the lake they found a large pearl glowing at the bottom. They decided on a whim to swallow that pearl.

That’s how Azure Dragon gained an ego and became “Yi”. 

Yi was still a dragon for a while but he changed after his first contact with a human.

He scared a hunter half to death one day when the hunter stumbled into the area of the lake. He didn’t kill the hunter but rather studied him as he ran. Without even really meaning to, he copied the form of the human hunter, not quite the looks but more so the general shape. It came naturally to him, he didn’t have to think about what form he was taking.

For a few years, he stayed in that forest, mostly around the lake, not bothering to move away or join society at all. Nothing changed in that forest. 

The rumors of dragons and the otherworldly mana density in the area kept humans away… Until the 17th year after Azure Dragon’s initial appearance in the human world.

China was in the very early stages of magic and cultivation. At that moment, swordsmanship and martial arts were the main skills humans had conquered. They had only just begun to study magic in the form of cultivation. Human swordsmen and martial artists who had started to master cultivation had started to hunt the monsters they usually ran from and avoided. This was the beginning of night hunts in China.

One of these night hunts happened to be taking place right near Azure Dragon’s forest. And unfortunately, Wang Hao Yu wasn’t very good at following maps. 

While chasing a magic beast through the nearby night hunt area he unknowingly ran right into the area of the forest that he had been specifically told to avoid by his Master. He lost the magic beast for a while and was stuck anxiously walking around the forest in confusion.

“Oh no…where did it go?” Wang Hao Yu murmured to himself. 

He tried to find his way back to the creature he was chasing but as he slowed down he saw that he was completely alone with nature. There were no bugs, no signs of life—except him and the trees. He tried to use spiritual techniques to try and find anything near him but he found that he was completely surrounded by magical energy he didn’t recognize.

“...Oh no…Oh no... Am I in the Dragon’s forest?!” Wang Hao Yu whispered to himself, realizing the overwhelming presence surrounding him.

He quickly tried to make his way backward to where he had come from but as he ran through the forest he found that there was no sign of a way out of the forest or any familiar structure or marking to signal that he had left. There had been markers laid out as a warning to not enter a certain part of the forest but they were clearly nowhere in sight. 

He was going to stop but as he slowed down he was suddenly attacked. He screamed, he hadn’t been able to sense anything besides the overwhelming presence throughout the forest so he didn’t see the attack coming. 

He thrashed about, slightly relieved that he was being attacked by the monster he had been chasing earlier and not the mythical dragon that was rumored to reside in the forest. It didn’t help though, he was still struggling because he had been caught off guard.

He almost regained his composure and reached toward his blade to attack the monster when it suddenly froze. He was a little confused about why until he felt it too.

He and the monster turned almost in sync, their heads tilting back to look at what loomed above them.

For a split second, Wang Hao Yu saw a Dragon but as he blinked to process it— the Dragon completely disappeared and he instead saw something else.

What he saw was human now—or rather, Human-Shaped. It was around his age, around his height,  it had ink-black hair just like him, but with a face that was much more… “pretty” than his own. And with blue-green iridescent scales all along the side of its face and body.

It wore a blue-green robe, one that was pristine and clean despite the dirt and mud of the forest that was clearly on the creature’s feet and face. It was worn wrong, not tied nearly tight enough, and already at the point where it was not doing anything to hide most of the humanoid creature’s abdomen.

The creature reached its hand up to touch the monster.  Both the Monster and Wang Hao Yu had been frozen while watching it for a while but the monster unfroze as this was happening. You could almost see “I have to run” written on the monster’s expression but it was not nearly fast enough to act on the thought. 

The second its fingertips brushed the monster’s forehead it got launched across the forest into a tree, falling dead from the impact alone.