Chapter One Hundred Forty-Six: Xiwei Grants Light — Yuanji Suppresses the Fiends

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

In the long war against the Savage Fiends, Pangu did not fight alone. Xiwei and Yuanji, the two firstborn spirits of the world, had grown strong enough to join the battle.

Xiwei's light had developed a purifying quality. Where its radiance fell upon miasma-tainted land, the corruption receded; where it shone into the deep fissures, the fiends recoiled. Xiwei could not destroy the source, but it could cleanse the surface, healing the wounds the fiends inflicted on the living world. It became the world's cleansing light — the radiance that burned away corruption.

Yuanji worked in the depths. Its dark, still presence had an affinity with the underground that the Savage Fiends could not match. Where the fiends sought to spread through the Earth Veins, Yuanji's patient, silent pressure pushed back. It could not match the fiends' violence with violence of its own — that was not its nature. Instead, it smothered them with stillness, wrapped around their channels like a blanket of absolute quiet, slowing their spread to a crawl.

Light and darkness, working together. Pangu watched his two firstborn children — one blazing, one silent — defend the world he had made, and for the first time in a very long time, he allowed himself to feel something close to pride. Not pride in himself, but pride in them — in what they had become, in what they would continue to be long after he was gone.