Chapter One Hundred Forty-Two: Catastrophe Rampant — All Things Wither

Volume Four: The Dao Gives Rise to Myriad Things — Life First Sprouts

The Savage Fiends' assault did not relent. After the initial eruptions, the black miasma began to spread laterally through the soil, poisoning the earth from within. The green that had taken so many ages to appear now retreated as swiftly as it had come. Hillsides that had been carpeted in moss turned black; ponds that had teemed with the first microscopic life became pools of stagnant sludge.

Pangu fought on every front. He sealed fissures with his own fading essence. He burned away miasma with the last fires of his will. He stood as a shield between the world he had created and the darkness that sought to consume it. But with each victory, he grew weaker. His body, once so vast it spanned the distance between Heaven and Earth, now seemed diminished — not in size, but in substance, as if he were becoming a ghost of himself.

The plants died in waves. The primitive mosses, the first ferns, the early aquatic growths — all withered under the fiends' corruption. Watching this, Pangu felt a grief deeper than any he had known. These were not his children in the way Xiwei and Yuanji were, but they were the children of his world — the first fruits of eighteen thousand years of labor. To see them die was to see his life's work undone.

Yet even in the midst of catastrophe, he noticed something: some of the plants did not die. In sheltered valleys, in deep caves, in pockets of earth too remote for the miasma to reach easily — there, life clung on. The world was fighting back with its own resilience, the resilience he had built into it across eighteen thousand years.

Catastrophe rampant, all things withering. Pangu stood amid the desolation and made a choice. He would not merely defend. He would take the fight to the source.