Chapter One Hundred Seventy-Seven: Hair and Beard Become Stars — Body Hair Becomes Grasses and Trees

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

Pangu's hair and beard — vast beyond measure, streaming across the sky for eighteen thousand years — detached strand by strand and rose upward through the Celestial Dome. Each strand, as it passed through the firmament, ignited with a cold, silver fire and fixed itself in the darkness beyond, becoming a star.

His beard became the dense star clusters near the center of the sky — the bright knots of stars that future astronomers would call galaxies. His hair became the scattered stars that filled the rest of the firmament — some bright, some faint, all of them burning with the last light of the creator's body.

Meanwhile, the finer hair on his body — his body hair, his eyebrows, the soft down that had covered his skin — fell to the earth and took root. Each hair became a blade of grass, a fern frond, a tree seedling. The forests that would one day cover the world were, in their deepest origin, the body hair of the creator, transformed.

Hair and beard become stars, body hair becomes grasses and trees. Pangu looked up at the sky and down at the earth and saw himself everywhere — in the stars that glittered overhead, in the grass that softened the ground underfoot. The great world and the small world, both made from him.