Chapter Two Hundred Seventeen: Living Balance — Life-Kinds Abound

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

A gray-brown predator lay hidden in the grass. Its body was pressed low, nearly flat against the ground, the muscles coiled tight beneath its fur. Its eyes, unblinking, were fixed on a herbivore drinking at the water's edge not far ahead. The wind was blowing from the predator toward the prey, holding its scent pinned behind it.

It waited a long time. The moment its prey dipped its entire head toward the water, its field of vision wholly blocked — the predator exploded into motion. Its hind legs drove off the earth, and its body shot forward like an arrow. Four paws hit the ground in rhythm, each stride swallowing the distance between them.

The prey heard the sound behind it. It jerked its head up, loosed a short, sharp cry of alarm, and bolted. The predator gave chase.

The pursuit ended beside a stream. The predator's claws locked onto one of the prey's hind legs; its jaws clamped around the throat. The prey thrashed a few times, then went still.

The predator panted heavily, but it did not loosen its grip. Only when that body had ceased to move entirely did it release and begin to tear at the softest part of the belly. It did not know the word "balance." It did not understand the concept of a "food chain." But it knew one thing: to live, it had to eat.

The sun sank in the west, and the clouds at the edge of the sky were stained a dark red. The light of dusk fell slantwise across the grassland, gilding every blade of grass. The wind stilled. The whole world slipped into the quietest hour of the day.

At the center of the grassland, a patch of purple flowers was in full bloom. Their flowering period lasted only three days — this was the first. The buds had just opened; traces of morning dew still clung to the petals.

The fragrance spread. It was a faint scent, but in the quiet of dusk, it carried unusually far. The insects of the grass were the first to detect it. Ants filed along the ground, climbed the flower stems, and burrowed deep into the petals to drink the nectar. Beetles came from every direction; the buzz of their wings filled the silence.

Night deepened. The insects in the flower patch grew more and more numerous. The butterflies had already returned to their resting places — they did not move at night. But the moths came, their wings shimmering with phosphorescence under the moonlight. The moths wove silently among the blossoms, drinking nectar and, in the process, completing the work of pollination.

From farther away, insect-eaters were approaching. A nocturnal lizard crept out from beneath a stone — its tongue long and slender, flicking out and back, and in that motion, a beetle perched on a petal was gone. The lizard's jaw worked, and the beetle was swallowed. Its tongue flicked again and took a second.

Deep in the grass, a rodent was busy. It did not eat the flowers directly — its food was grass seeds and plant roots. But the blooming season meant more insects; more insects meant more lizards and birds; more lizards meant fewer insects. The rodent did not grasp the logic behind these connections, but it quickened its pace of seed-gathering, hoarding more food in its burrow.

The sky had gone fully dark. The moon rose, casting silver light across the grassland. The hum of insects among the flowers never ceased.

By the next morning, more buds had opened. The number of purple blossoms had doubled. The fragrance grew thicker. The insect population surged accordingly. The nocturnal lizard had eaten its fill and returned to its hole to digest. But more lizards were arriving from farther away — drawn by the dense insect swarms in the flower patch.

On the third day, every purple flower had bloomed. The entire stretch of grassland had become a sea of purple. The insects blotted out the sky — butterflies, bees, beetles, moths, uncountable flying things wove above the blossoms, and their drone merged into a single, low chorus.

The lizards had multiplied in turn. They barely needed to hunt — a casual flick of the tongue, and an insect was caught. But the surge in lizards drew larger predators. A weasel slipped out of the underbrush; it had caught the scent of the lizards. It began to hunt them. It was not particularly hungry, but it acted on the instinctive sense of opportunity — the lizards were too many, too easy to catch. Why waste the chance?

The birds came too. Swallows, returning from the south, arrived just in time for the feast. They dove above the flower patch, and every snap of a beak returned a mouthful of insects. The explosion in the insect population let the swallows feed their nestlings in record time. The chicks in the nest grew with startling speed, their flight feathers emerging within a single week.

But flowers must, in the end, wither. On the evening of the third day, the purple blossoms began to fade. The edges of the petals curled; their color deepened from royal purple to dark red, then to brown. The fragrance thinned and scattered. The insects began to disperse. The lizards could no longer find enough food; some of them began to leave this grassland, migrating elsewhere. The weasel could no longer find lizards and returned to the underbrush. The swallows, having fed their last brood, flew away as well.

The grassland grew quiet again. Of the once-teeming flower patch, only withered stems remained. But the ground was covered in seeds. Those seeds would sleep in the soil, waiting for the coming spring to sprout, bloom, and wither once more — triggering yet another cycle from flourishing to fading.

Xiwei sat upon a hill not far away and watched the entire process unfold. She did not intervene. She watched the insects surge as the flowers bloomed, then crash as the flowers withered. She watched the lizards come and go, the weasel come and go, the swallows come and go. No one had written the rules, yet the rules were undeniably real. No one maintained the balance, yet the balance found its fulcrum on its own.

This was Dahuang. It was not perfect — but it was alive. It lived in its own rhythms.

Xiwei sat on that hill for seven days. She watched with her own eyes the whole arc of those purple flowers from full bloom to final withering. And she saw more than the blooming and the fading. That rabbit that had seemed merely to be eating grass was, in fact, reshaping the plants around it. By cropping the tops of certain grasses, it held back their overgrowth and gave the low-lying flowering plants the space to survive.

A spider had spun a great web among the flower stems. That web glittered in the morning dew, like a string of threaded pearls. The spider crouched upon it, waiting for prey. Its presence kept the flying insects from breeding without restraint — though the number it devoured seemed trivial next to the entire population of the flower patch, day after day that predation would, in the end, affect the whole.

There were also those inconspicuous parasitic wasps — they laid their eggs inside the bodies of other insects' larvae. After the eggs hatched, the wasp larvae grew within their hosts, finally consuming them from the inside out. A cruel method — yet also a subtle instrument of balance. Without the parasitic wasps, certain insects would multiply into plagues.

Every creature ate; every creature was eaten. And because this was so, no single kind could grow without limit. The numbers of each kind were held in check by other kinds. It was a vast web; every node was linked to every other. Tug one node, and the whole fabric would shudder.

At dusk, Xiwei saw an old herbivore in the grass sink quietly to the ground. It was too old; its teeth were worn down and could no longer chew the tough grass stems. Slowly it lay down, its eyes watching the sky as the light drained from it. Then it was still.

Its body would draw scavengers and insects. Its bones would be buried by the soil and become part of the earth. The nourishment within it would feed a blade of new grass breaking through the soil next spring. That grass would be eaten by another herbivore. And that new life, seemingly unconnected, would have drawn the power to grow from the old one's death.

Xiwei rose and let out a long breath. Such were the laws of Dahuang. No single life stood at the center — yet every life had ground to stand upon.