Chapter One Hundred Forty-Three: Pangu Suppresses the Fiends — Resisting with His Body

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

Pangu descended into the earth. Not in spirit — in body. He drove himself down through the strata, through the searing heat of the mantle, through the crushing pressure of the deep, until he stood at the heart of the Savage Fiends' web — a vast subterranean cavern where the black grease had pooled into a lake of concentrated malevolence.

The cavern pulsed with a darkness so absolute it seemed to swallow light itself. At its center, suspended above the black lake, hung the source: a core of pure anti-life, the Savage Fiends' equivalent of a heart. It beat with a rhythm opposite to the world's pulse — where the world expanded, it contracted; where the world gave life, it dealt death.

Pangu waded into the black lake. The corrosive miasma ate at his fading body, burning his skin, seeping into his meridians. Pain unlike any he had known — not the clean pain of battle, but the unclean agony of corruption — wracked his form. He did not stop. Step by step, he advanced toward the core.

Around him, the cavern walls shuddered. The Savage Fiends sensed his approach and threw everything they had against him. Tendrils of living darkness lashed at him; waves of miasma crashed over him; the very stone of the cavern tried to crush him. Pangu withstood it all — not with strength, for he had almost none left, but with will: the same will that had sustained him through eighteen thousand years of standing alone between Heaven and Earth.

He reached the core and laid his hands upon it. Golden light — the very last of his Primordial Source — poured from his palms into the heart of darkness. The core screamed — a soundless, psychic shriek that reverberated through the entire world. And then, slowly, it began to shrink.

Pangu suppressed the fiends with his own body, using himself as the seal that would hold them at bay. He knew this was not a permanent solution. The fiends would return. But for now — for this moment — the world was safe.