Chapter Two Hundred Thirteen: The Myriad Things Reproduce — Life Abounds

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

Spring arrived. From a burrow at the foot of a hillside came faint, high cries.

It was the first spring of this new epoch of life — the season when ice and snow melted beneath the warming sun, when all that had lain dormant stirred awake. The burrow belonged to a creature of strong forelimbs and coarse fur, a burrowing animal. Before winter had set in, it had dug its den deep and stored up roots and grass seeds in the farthest recesses; those provisions had carried it through the coldest days.

Now, deep within the burrow, several warm little bodies had appeared. Their eyes were still shut; their bodies bore only sparse, fine down. They curled together against their mother's belly, rising and falling with the rhythm of her breathing.

They were the first litter of suckling young to be born upon this land.

The mother's tongue passed over the tops of their heads. Her licking was light and patient, and it slowly soothed the small creatures into stillness. Outside the burrow, sunlight fell right at the entrance, illuminating the soft fetal fur upon their bodies.

In a river nearby, fish were spawning. Their eggs clung to the stones at the bottom, transparent as tiny dewdrops, shimmering faintly in the sunlight. The larger fish circled the clutch, driving off any predator that tried to draw near. They did not know why they protected those eggs — it was only an instinct inscribed into their blood a million years before.

On the plains beyond, the grass grew in a frenzy. Roots crisscrossed and intertwined beneath the soil, binding the earth together. Seeds underground stirred to life in the spring rain; fresh root-threads drove into ever-deeper strata.

Reproduction — the simplest, the most fundamental impulse — was happening at once in every corner of the land. No one needed to teach it; no one needed to summon it. Every living thing, in its own way, was doing the same thing.

In the depths of the marshes, frogs laid their eggs in warm shallows. Clusters of transparent jelly studded with countless black specks hung among the water-weeds. Those eggs quivered faintly under the sunlight, like living beads. Days later, the jelly split, and tiny tadpoles wriggled free. They swam trailing their tails, so numerous they darkled the shallow water. Before long, they grew hind legs, then forelegs; their tails shrank by degrees. By the time the tail had vanished entirely, they leaped onto the bank and vanished into the grass. The first generation of frogs had completed its metamorphosis.

On a cliff face, a pair of fledgling birds nested in a crevice in the rock. The female crouched in the nest, sheltering five speckled eggs beneath her. Those eggs were smaller than a human finger, their shells so thin that a curled shadow could be seen within. The female scarcely left the nest, flying out to feed only briefly at dawn and dusk. The male shuttled between the nest and the woodland, returning with insects in his beak and feeding them into the female's open mouth. They took turns brooding, took turns keeping watch. A little over half a month later, the first shell cracked. The hatchling was naked, its eyes shut tight, but its beak gaped astonishingly wide. Feeling the vibration of its mother's return, it threw its head back and opened its mouth, loosing a thin, begging cry. The female fed chewed morsels into that gaping beak. One. Two. Five hatchlings broke free of their shells in succession. From that moment on, the nest knew no peace — from sunrise to sunset, the parents foraged, fed, and cleaned without rest. The chicks changed day by day. First, fine feather-sheaths sprouted from their wings; then the sheaths split and down emerged. More days passed, and flight feathers grew in. One day, the strongest chick stepped onto the rim of the nest, hesitated for a moment, spread its wings, and leaped. It flapped a few times in the air and, wobbling and skewed, landed on a nearby branch. Its first flight was complete.

Deep in the forest, a fallen log was silently nurturing new life. A beetle had bored a hole beneath its bark and laid its eggs in the soft wood. Each egg was no larger than the point of a needle, white to near-transparency. After they hatched, the larvae burrowed out. They had no legs — only plump white bodies and a pair of hard mandibles. They wormed their way through the wood, gnawing the fibers. Inside the fallen log, they carved a labyrinth of tunnels. In that world of darkness they grew, day by day, larger and larger. When the larvae had reached the thickness of a fingertip, they stopped eating and, at the ends of their tunnels, transformed into pupae. The pupae lay there utterly motionless, outwardly seeming dead — but within, a furious transformation was underway. Old tissues dissolved; new organs took shape. Weeks later, the pupal case split, and an adult beetle crawled out. Its wing-cases were still soft, its color still wrong — but after a few hours of drying in the sunlight, the cases hardened and took on a metallic sheen. It beat its wings and flew away. It would seek another fallen log and repeat what its mother had done.

On the grassland, a few young herbivores were learning to stand. They were newly born, their legs long and soft, their knees bowed outward, unable to hold steady. Their mother stood by, patiently licking away the birth membrane from their bodies. One young one struggled to its feet, its four legs trembling like twigs in the wind. It took a step forward — its knees buckled, and it collapsed. The mother did not help; she only waited nearby. The young one tried again, pushing its snout into the ground, propping up its forelegs, then its hind legs. This time, it stood for a few breaths longer. Then it took one step, then another. On the third step, it fell again. But it already knew how it was done.

In the water, shoals of fish were spawning. The females released their eggs into the silt and sand; the males followed close behind, spraying white milt over them. The eggs, intermingled with the grains of sand, were nearly indistinguishable. The current would sweep most of them away; only a few, caught in the crevices of stones, would survive. The adults did not guard them — this was a different strategy of reproduction: lay many, let few live. The odds of a single egg hatching, the fry surviving, and that fry growing to adulthood were perhaps one in ten thousand. But precisely because they laid so many, a few were always bound to endure and swim toward distant waters.

In the air, countless flying insects mated. The males gathered above the water at twilight, forming swirling clouds. The females flew in from every side, entering the clouds and coupling with the males mid-flight. After mating, the males, their lives spent, fell onto the water and died. The females flew to the banks and laid their fertilized eggs in the damp earth at the water's edge. None of them would survive the summer. But their offspring already lay quiet in the soil, waiting for the coming of the next spring.

An old tree was bearing fruit. Green, hard as stone, the fruits hung heavy on the branches. But the flesh was swelling, the sugars accumulating. When the fruit ripened and reddened, birds would come to peck at it, carrying the seeds to distant places. Some seeds would land on bare stone and never sprout. Some would fall into fertile soil and, the following spring, put forth tender shoots. Every seed was a wager — a bet that it would land upon good ground.

Deepest underground, minute life-forms were dividing. They had no eyes, no limbs, not even a meaningful sense of being an "individual" — they merely divided and multiplied, one becoming two, two becoming four. In the unseen darkness, they multiplied in uncountable numbers, forming the most fundamental layer of the entire living order.

The Myriad Things reproduced. Great or small, high or low — life, in ten thousand forms, was doing the same thing: copying itself, extending its bloodline, ensuring that the flame of its kind would never be extinguished.

Those newborn young would one day grow, leave their mothers, seek mates, and bear their own young. The frogs that had once been tadpoles would one day leap back into the water and, the following spring, lay new eggs. The beetles, the birds, the fish, the reptiles — every one of them would, in the span of its brief life, fulfill its purpose: to pass life on.

Generation after generation. Life without end.

A day would come when some of these creatures would go extinct, and others would transform into new kinds. But reproduction itself would never cease. So long as the earth remained, so long as the sunlight endured, life would continue to exist in its own way — never pausing, never looking back.