Chapter Two Hundred Six: The Spirits of Dahuang — Gradually Revealing Themselves

Volume Six: Spirit-Life in Dahuang — Dao Grace Everlasting

Xiwei had noticed the changes.

At first, she thought it was merely the reflection of light on water — tiny, fragmented particles floating upon the surface, glinting under the sun. But then she realized those particles were moving. They did not drift with the current; they moved against it — pushing upstream beneath the water, slow and deliberate.

They were not dead matter. They were alive.

She descended to the water's surface, bringing her face close to observe. Her light pierced through to illuminate the world below. There she saw something she had never encountered before — minute, translucent spheres suspended in the water, rotating slowly.

When her radiance touched them, they seemed to pause for a moment, then began moving away from the light source.

"They're hiding from me," Xiwei murmured. They had reactions. They did not want to be touched by the light. The discovery stirred a strange excitement within her — she was no longer alone. Between Heaven and Earth, besides herself and Yuanji, there were other living things.

She lifted her gaze toward Yuanji's direction. He had not emerged, but she knew he must have sensed it as well. Those faint pulses deep within the earth — he would have noticed them even before she did.

"Have you seen?" she asked the earth softly.

After a brief silence, Yuanji's voice rose from the soil beneath her feet, deep and low as though echoing from the bottom of a well: "They are very small."

"But they are alive."

"Yes."

A smile spread across Xiwei's face — the first in a very long time.

The longest period of silence since Pangu's departure had passed. The earth was finally beginning to answer Pangu's sacrifice in its own way.

Those infinitesimal beings in the water were only the beginning. In the days that followed, more signs began to emerge across every corner of Dahuang.

In the low-lying marshlands of the east, a pale green bloom spread across a stretch of swamp. It was neither fallen leaves nor silt, but countless microscopic plants floating on the water's surface, dyeing the entire expanse a faint green. Viewed from a distance, the marsh resembled a vast green mirror, reflecting the drifting clouds above. Flying over it, Xiwei saw dense colonies of minute life-forms — they crowded together in layer upon layer upon the water, like a living membrane stretched over the surface. When the wind blew, that membrane rippled with minute undulations, as though the water had grown a second skin.

On the rocky slopes of the south, a different transformation was underway. The surface of the stones had begun to flake — not the shattering of weathering, but a thin layer of some substance peeling free from the rock. Xiwei landed upon the slope and picked up one of the shed fragments. It was thin as paper: one side bore the rough grain of stone, the other was coated with a dark green, slick substance. She held it before her eyes and examined it closely. That dark green layer was composed of countless infinitesimal granules, packed tightly together like a silent army that had seized the surface of the stone.

In the frozen earth of the north, change came more slowly. The degrees of heat there were lower, the moisture scarcer — life's footsteps seemed to have not yet arrived. But upon closer observation, Xiwei discovered that beneath the layer of ice, within the soil, minute life-forms were stirring just the same. They were smaller than their counterparts elsewhere, and they moved more slowly — but they were undeniably present. In the extreme cold, they lived in a state of near-suspension, barely dividing, barely moving, merely sustaining the faintest pulse of vitality, waiting for the day the warmth would rise.

She stood upon the frozen northern earth, stooping to touch the soil beneath the ice. Through the ice, she could dimly perceive those microbes — creeping through the spaces between soil particles with agonizing slowness, like creatures in hibernation.

"You are waiting too," she said.

She straightened and gazed across the boundless icy plain. Every corner of this land — warm or cold, wet or dry — had been touched by life. Pangu's Essence-Blood had overlooked not a single place.

Xiwei soared back into the air, surveying the earth from a higher vantage point. She saw the green bloom in the marsh, the dark green coating on the mountain slopes, the drifting colonies of minute life-forms in the rivers, the settling of algae at the bottoms of the lakes — she saw the earth changing color, shade by shade. After Pangu's passing, the land had known only earthen yellow, ash gray, and stone white. But now, green was beginning to appear. From east to west, from south to north, green was spreading, soundless and unstoppable.

This was not a change she had brought about. She had planted nothing, scattered no seeds. She was only light — the presence that illuminated the Myriad Things. The true creator was gone, but what he had left behind was growing in its own way.

She looked again toward Yuanji's direction. The guardian in the deep earth must surely be sensing all of this, she thought. Those tiny lives writhing around him, the new green sprouting from the earth above his head, the first food chains silently forming beneath the water's surface — he must have known, earlier and more clearly than anyone, that a new era had begun.

"He is watching," Xiwei whispered.

This vast wilderness was no longer a place of absolute stillness.

The early signs of Spirit-Nature did not exist only in water or on the surface. Xiwei discovered that in the mud beside those marshes where green blooms had first appeared, faint stirrings had also begun. She parted the surface silt with her hand and saw slender white threads winding through the soil below — some form of primitive segmented creature, its body composed of a chain of similar rings, each segment bristling with minute hairs that helped it crawl through the mud. They needed no sunlight, no leaves. They fed on decaying decaying matter in the soil, transforming the remnants Pangu had left behind into their own flesh and blood.

They fed in darkness, grew in dampness, tunneling ceaselessly through the deep earth. The soil grew looser; air and moisture seeped in more readily. The earth was being reshaped, bit by bit, by invisible hands of life — not according to any grand design, but through every tiny action life took simply to survive. Yet it was the accumulation of those tiny actions that was transforming the very texture of the land.

In the arid regions far from any water source, change arrived with excruciating slowness. The ground there was still covered in gravel and yellow sand, with no trace of green to be seen. But on one of her descents, Xiwei noticed the shaded sides of some stones bearing the faintest gray speckles. She scraped away at one — and beneath the spot, there was an exceedingly thin, gray-green substance bonded tightly to the rock. It was the primal form of lichen: the earliest attempt at life in the dry zones. They needed no moist soil, no abundant rain — only a trace of moisture from the air and minerals from the stone to cling to bare rock and survive.

They grew with such slowness that growth itself was nearly imperceptible. But they were the first pioneers to root themselves in desolation. When the wind raged, they pressed tight against the rock, refusing to be torn away. When rain fell, they absorbed every drop with desperate greed. When the sun scorched them, they sank into dormancy, waiting for the next spell of moisture.

"You labor the hardest of all," Xiwei said, crouching before a stone and touching the lichen with her fingertips. It was faintly damp beneath her touch.

That day, Xiwei flew for a long, long time. She examined every corner where change was stirring. What had begun as a blank emptiness had become scattered dots; the dots had joined into lines; the lines had fused into surfaces; and those surfaces were now stretching into complete forms. The spirits of Dahuang were revealing themselves, step by step, in a manner no one could have foreseen.