Chapter One Hundred Eighty-Four: Sweat Becomes Rain and Dew — Nourishing Myriad Things

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

Pangu's sweat — the moisture that had beaded on his skin during eighteen thousand years of exertion, the physical evidence of his labor and his strain — now fell from his dissolving body as the first true rain. It was not the thin mist of earlier ages, but a proper downpour, soaking the earth, filling the rivers, and bringing life to every corner of the world.

The rain that fell from Pangu's sweat was not ordinary water. It carried minute traces of his being — minerals from his bones, essence from his blood, spirit from his consciousness. Every drop was a small world of the creator, a faint measure of divine energy dissolved in water. When that rain soaked into the soil, it fertilized the earth in ways that no ordinary water ever could. When it ran into the rivers and seas, it seeded the waters with the potential for life.

The dew that formed on leaves in the quiet hours before dawn — that, too, was Pangu's sweat, condensed from the air where his breath still lingered. Every dewdrop that sparkled in the first light of morning was a tear of the creator, shed not from grief but from the profound release of a burden finally laid down.

Sweat becomes rain and dew, nourishing the Myriad Things. The world's water cycle, which would sustain all life forever, had been primed by the body of the creator. And in every rainstorm, in every morning dew, the world received a blessing it would never fully understand — the last bodily gift of the god who had made it all.