Chapter Two Hundred Nine: Forests Lush and Verdant — The Myriad Things Flourish

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

Those small plants grew more and more numerous. They spread from the stream banks to the hillsides, from the hollows to the plains, like a carpet slowly rolling out across the land. But the carpet was still too thin. The soil remained bare in many places; sunlight struck the ground directly, sucking away its moisture. The first plants grew in isolation, like scattered soldiers lacking a commander.

Then the first tree appeared.

It rose beside a river — not far from the stretch of riverbank where Xiwei often descended to rest. Its stem was not soft like grass; it grew thicker and harder from the root upward, like a finger of the earth thickening as it reached toward the sky. Its bark was gray-brown, rough, lined with vertical cracks.

When the first tree reached the height of Xiwei's knees, she noticed it.

"You are different," she said. Every other plant grew pressed against the ground. Only this one was reaching toward the heights.

The tree could not hear her, but it kept growing upward. A year later, it stood taller than Xiwei. Broad leaves unfolded within its canopy, and sunlight filtering through the gaps between them cast dappled shadows upon the ground.

Beneath the great tree, new plants began to appear — those grasses and ferns that had struggled under the unshielded blaze of the open sun. In the damp earth sheltered by the tree's shade, they spread rapidly, forming a low, dense layer of vegetation. The great tree gave them shelter; they conserved moisture for the great tree.

Thus the forest was born — not designed, but self-propagating from that first tree outward, expanding inch by inch, drawing ever more ground beneath its green shade.

After the first tree had anchored itself firmly, more trees followed.

They were not all the same kind. Along the riverbanks grew trees with smooth bark and supple branches — their leaves were small and dense, their canopies umbrella-shaped, like open green parasols lining the river's edge. Half their roots drove into the soil, half reached into the water, drawing moisture and nourishment directly from the river. Their branches drooped toward the water's surface, their tips grazing the flowing current as though in conversation with the river.

On the mountain slopes, an entirely different tree emerged. Their trunks were thick and powerful, their bark deep and fissured, as though clad in armor. Their roots were extraordinarily strong, driving deep into the crevices of rock, anchoring the whole tree firmly to the steep incline. Even when mountain winds battered them with fury, they swayed only slightly and never toppled. They grew very slowly — gaining only a little height each year — but every increment of growth was matched by roots driving deeper still, as though their purpose was not to grow taller but to stand more steadfastly.

In the deeper valleys, a kind of towering tree began its rise. Their trunks were straight and unbranched, soaring high before their canopies spread. Their canopy layer was so elevated that sunlight could barely penetrate; only scattered flecks of light fell upon the ground. Beneath these great trees, a dim, humid world emerged — a place that never knew direct sunlight, only points of light that slipped through the gaps between leaves, like fallen stars scattered across the earth.

The layer of fallen leaves on the ground grew ever thicker. Dead leaves, broken twigs, spent blossoms — they accumulated in layers upon the forest floor, rotting slowly in the damp surroundings. The decay released vast quantities of nourishment, which were then absorbed by the trees' roots and drawn back into their bodies. In this way, the forest achieved a closed cycle — it needed nothing from outside; it was its own source of nourishment. The original nourishment Pangu had left behind were cycled through the forest again and again, and each cycle brought forth new life.

Within the rotting leaf litter, more creatures appeared. Tiny yet visible insect-like beings crawled among the fallen leaves, their bodies divided into distinct segments, each segment bearing a pair of small legs. They gnawed at the dead leaves, shredding them into fragments, accelerating the process of decay. After them came larger creatures — beings with many pairs of slender legs, slow-moving, feeding on smaller insects and decaying decaying matter. They crawled across the ground, foraging, mating, laying their eggs beneath the leaf litter. Upon the forest floor, the first complete terrestrial food chain was taking shape.

The forest began to spread across a wider range. Starting from that first small tree beside the river, the woodland stretched upstream and downstream along the river valley, climbed upward onto the slopes, and radiated outward through the basins. Every tree was the nucleus of a new patch of forest — their seeds, borne by the wind, landed in distant places, germinated, grew, and became the starting point of the next grove. The forest did not spring up as a single contiguous whole; it was formed by countless independent growth points linking together — like a green net being woven, its threads emerging from every direction at once, then connecting, until they finally fused into a seamless expanse.

At the forest's edges, the low grasses and ferns that had appeared first began to retreat — they could not compete with shade-tolerant plants beneath the canopy. The world under the trees belonged to plants of deeper green, kinds capable of surviving in low light. Their leaves were broader and larger, to capture more of the diffuse light. Their stems were softer, less tough than the grasses of the open wilds, for they no longer needed to resist the battering of strong winds — the canopy of the great trees had already shielded them from storm and gale.

The first insects to grow wings also emerged from the water and took flight. They buzzed through the air, threading between the canopies, alighting on leaves to rest. Their wings glittered under the sunlight like floating jewels. They landed on flowers, their bodies dusted with pollen, then flew to another blossom, unwittingly completing the work of pollination. The forest began to have sound — no longer only the sigh of the wind, the murmur of water, and the rustle of falling leaves, but also the hum of insect wings beating in the air.

Xiwei stood at the heart of that earliest patch of forest and looked up at the sky. The towering canopies nearly blocked her view; only stray threads of light fell through the gaps between the leaves. Those shafts of light fell like slender golden wires, slanting through the air of the forest to land upon the thick mat of leaf litter below. The air was heavy with the mingled scents of soil and vegetation — damp, fresh, brimming with the breath of life.

"Do you see?" she murmured. She did not look toward Yuanji's direction. She simply gazed up at the fragments of sky visible between the canopies. "You did all of this, Pangu."

The forest stood silent as before. But as the wind moved through the canopy, it stirred a deep, rustling murmur — the sound of countless leaves brushing against one another, like the forest answering in a low voice. It was not Pangu's voice, nor Xiwei's, nor Yuanji's. It was the voice of the forest itself — for the first time upon this land, there was sound that belonged to the Myriad Things themselves.

The earliest vines had also begun their climb. Lacking thick stems of their own, they could not stand independently. But their tendrils wound around the trunks of the great trees, climbing along the branches toward the heights, unfurling their leaves in the canopy layer to compete for every precious thread of sunlight. Tree and vine depended on each other yet secretly competed — the tree provided a scaffold for climbing, while the vine's dense foliage covered the tree's surface and blotted out its own leaves. This was the forest's first symbiosis and hidden struggle, silent and soundless, yet waged in every inch of space.

And beneath the ground, the alliance between root and fungus had already been quietly established. Those all-but-invisible white hyphae wrapped around the tips of the tree roots, helping them absorb water and minerals from the soil. In return, the roots delivered the sweetness the leaves had brewed from sunlight to the fungal threads. In that unseen subterranean world, the most ancient and crucial cooperation of all was taking place — the union of plant and fungus, allowing every tree in the forest to draw upon nourishment far beyond the reach of its own roots.

Xiwei walked through the forest for a long, long time. She passed through one woodland after another — the soft willows along the river, the hardwoods on the slopes, the giant trees in the valleys. Each forest had its own face, its own scent. She discovered that within the same forest, different kinds lived at different heights — the canopy layer was the realm of flying insects, the trunk layer the kingdom of climbing creatures, the ground layer the domain of crawling life and fungus, and the subterranean layer a network of roots and hyphae. The forest wasted not a single inch of space; from the crown of the canopy to the deepest root, every stratum was brimming with life.

Far in the distance, the wind swept across the forest ocean covering the land, producing an unbroken, rolling murmur like waves upon a vast sea. A boundless green was claiming the last patch of bare soil upon the earth.