Chapter One Hundred Seventy-Five: Blood Becomes Rivers — Surging Without End

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

Pangu's blood, which had circulated through his colossal body for eighteen thousand years, now flowed outward as the world's rivers. The great arteries became the mighty rivers that would one day carve canyons and nourish civilizations; the smaller veins became the streams and creeks that threaded through every valley.

His blood was not ordinary blood — it was Primordial Qi in liquid form, the most concentrated life-force in existence. As it flowed across the land, it infused the soil with vitality, seeded the waters with the building blocks of life, and established the hydrological cycles that would sustain the world forever.

The rivers did not flow randomly. They followed the contours his body had left in the land — tracing the paths of his meridians, pooling in the hollows where his organs had been, cascading down the slopes his limbs had become. The world's waters were a map of his former blood-courses, every river a memory of the blood that had once sustained a god.

Blood becomes rivers, surging without end. The waters that would one day quench the thirst of every living thing — they had first flowed through the heart of the creator. And in every drop, there remained some trace of the love with which he had given them.