Chapter One Hundred Sixty-Three: Heaven and Earth Are Complete — My Body Shall Decay

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

Pangu stood where he was, long unmoving.

He had already lowered his hands, but his feet remained planted in the earth — his legs had grown together with the land. Across eighteen thousand years of bracing, his feet had long since become part of the Earth Veins, driving downward like roots into the deep soil.

He tried lifting one foot. It did not budge. He tried again, with more force. The bones at his ankle emitted a faint cracking sound, as if warning him — push harder, and they would break.

He did not try again.

He looked down at the place where his feet sank into the earth. The skin there had already merged with the soil; it was impossible to tell where his toes ended and the edges of rock began. Everything below his ankles had already transformed into a stone-like substance — gray-white, hard, without warmth.

This was different from the parts of him that had already dissolved into the mountains and rivers in the course of creation. That had been willing offering. This — this was decay. His body was, starting from the points where it touched the earth, slowly becoming part of the very world he had braced.

The transformation was creeping upward. His calves had grown stiff; his knees creaked when he bent them. He could feel the process advancing — not painful, exactly, but deeply strange, like watching himself turn into a statue from the feet up.

He did not resist. He had known this was coming. The world he had built was complete, and his body — the raw material of creation — was returning to the source. What he had taken from Chaos to build Heaven and Earth, he was now giving back. It was not death. It was completion.

Heaven and Earth are complete — my body shall decay. Pangu accepted this with the same quiet resolve with which he had accepted every trial before. He had spent his life building this world. Now, he would spend his death feeding it.