Chapter One Hundred Sixty-One: Primordial Source Exhausted — the True Body in Its Twilight

Volume Five: Body-Perish Dao-Transformation — Myriad Realms First Born

Pangu stood between Heaven and Earth. He had held this posture for eighteen thousand years — legs driven into the earth, spine bracing the Celestial Dome, arms slightly spread, like a great tree growing from ground to sky. Once, this posture had cost him no effort; even at his most exhausted, he had only felt the weight increase by a few degrees.

But today was different.

His arms had begun to tremble — a deep tremor seeping up from the marrow of his bones, unstoppable. His fingers — the hands that had once torn Chaos apart — curled faintly in the air, as if they no longer even had the strength to make a fist.

He looked down at his own body.

The color of his skin had changed. Once, a faint golden light had radiated from every inch of him — the overflow of his Primordial Source, the mark of an innate deity. Now, that golden glow had dimmed to near invisibility. His skin had taken on a gray-white tone — like stone, like withered wood, like something in the process of losing the luster of life.

His breathing came slow and shallow. Each inhale felt like drawing water from a well that was nearly dry; each exhale carried away more than it brought back. He could feel his Primordial Source — that core of power that had sustained him since the dawn of his existence — dwindling to a point no larger than a pearl, flickering in the vast darkness of his chest.

His legs had gone numb. The sensation of the earth beneath his feet, once as familiar as his own heartbeat, had faded to a distant pressure. He knew the earth was still there — he could see it, could sense it with his Spirit-Consciousness — but his body no longer felt it. His body, after eighteen thousand years, was slowly losing its connection to the world.

Primordial Source exhausted, the true body in its twilight. Pangu, who had stood taller than mountains and endured longer than ages, was finally — quietly — beginning to fall.