Chapter One Hundred Seventy-One: Dao-Transformation Begins — Form Gradually Dissolves

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

The moment came without warning — or perhaps with every warning, for Pangu had felt it approaching for a thousand years. His body, which had held its shape through eighteen millennia, began to unravel.

It started at the edges. His fingertips grew translucent, then transparent, then dissolved into motes of golden light that drifted upward like sparks from a dying fire. The light did not vanish — it spread outward, thinning, dispersing, becoming part of the air itself.

His hair loosened from his scalp strand by strand. Each strand, as it detached, floated upward and outward, bleaching from silver-white to pure light, then scattering into the darkness above the Celestial Dome. Where each strand settled, a new star flickered into being.

Pangu felt no pain. The sensation was not of being torn apart but of being opened — as if his body were a vessel that had held light for eighteen thousand years and was now, at last, releasing it. Every part of him that dissolved felt like a held breath finally exhaled.

He did not try to hold himself together. He had spent his whole existence holding things together — Heaven and Earth, order and chaos, life and extinction. Now, at the end, he let go completely. And in letting go, he found not destruction but release.

Dao-Transformation begins, form gradually dissolving. The great dissolution had started, and nothing in Heaven or Earth could stop it. Nothing wanted to. This was not tragedy. This was completion.