Chapter Two Hundred Twenty: Yin-Yang in Harmony — Wuxing in Concert

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

Xiwei sat in a long reverie. Then she changed direction and flew west. Yuanji was slumbering deep beneath the earth there — when he stirred awake, he would sometimes send up an extremely low pulse, like a sigh filtered through a thousand cliffs and ten thousand ravines. Xiwei flew above him, landed on the ground directly over him, and patted the earth.

"Hey."

No answer. But she knew he had heard.

"Daytime is mine. Nighttime is yours. Below the ground is yours. Above is mine."

Silence. Then a deep, muffled tremor rose from beneath — as though to say, "All right."

She smiled and leaned against the rock beside her, closing her eyes. In the distance, the sun was sinking behind the treetops, dyeing the whole forest a deepening orange-red. Heaven and Earth lay in perfect peace.

But that peace did not last.

One day, as was her custom, Xiwei took wing at dawn and began her habitual patrol from east to west. When she reached the central region, she caught a hint of something wrong — the air was charged with a dryness that should not have been there. She descended onto the hillside she knew best and found the grass already withered. It was not the natural yellowing of autumn's arrival — it was a sickly, scorched brown, the withering starting at the roots. She touched the ground with her hand, and the heat that met her palm startled her — the earth's warmth was far higher than usual.

She followed the trail of desiccation westward and flew the whole day through. The farther west she went, the worse the conditions became. The grasses and shrubs were wilting; the streams had run dry; the riverbeds were cracked open to their baked mud floors. The animals she had once seen drinking at those stream banks were nowhere to be found. A deer lay stiff on the fractured mudflat, already lifeless. Xiwei landed beside it, crouched down, and reached out to close its half-open eyes.

She stood and looked up at the sky. The sun shone as bright as ever, but Xiwei understood, now — it was not the sun blazing too fiercely. Something had shifted in the Earth Veins beneath this land. Deep underground, the earth-fire heat that should have been evenly spread had for some reason gathered beneath this area. The excess heat had surged upward from below, making this place far hotter than the surrounding regions. The plants had been scorched from their roots; the water sources had been boiled away. This was the consequence of an excess of Fire Qi among the Wuxing.

Xiwei stood there on the ground for a long time. Balance was not static — it moved, it shifted. None of this was her concern. Her duty was only to patrol and watch over, not to intervene. Yuanji governed the world below; changes in the Earth Veins were his to address.

She waited. One day. Then another. She no longer flew in that direction at her usual hour to let forth her radiance; instead, she took a circuitous route. But conditions in that zone continued to worsen. On the third day, she saw wildfire erupt from the dead forest, and thick smoke blotted out half the sky. The creatures that could not flee in time thrashed in the flames, loosing terrible, piercing cries. Xiwei hovered midair, watching it all, her fists clenched tight.

She could wait no longer.

She flew above that region. And then she did something she had never done before — she altered her own trajectory. She had always maintained a fixed altitude and path, allowing her radiance to fall evenly across the land. But now, of her own will, she shifted her flight path slightly southward, so that the light would slant down upon that region at a more oblique angle. At the same time, she drew in a portion of the heat she normally radiated, weakening the light that reached that ground.

When it was done, she came to rest on the crown of a half-charred dead tree, breathing heavily. Altering her own trajectory had cost far more of her energy than she had foreseen — she felt something inside her had been stretched. But she did not stop. She flew higher and caused clouds to gather above that region. The thick cloud cover blocked part of the sunlight, casting a broad cool shadow across the land below.

Three days later, the wildfire died. Five days later, the first tender shoot pushed up through the blackened soil. Ten days later, a long-overdue rain finally fell upon that land. Xiwei stood in the rain and let it wash over her face. She felt exhaustion — and a strange satisfaction. Not because she had done something grand, but because she had discovered that she could change things.

From far beneath her feet, Yuanji sent up a pulse of inquiry — he had sensed the fluctuations in her energy, sensed the deviation in her trajectory. He did not understand. He had never interfered with anything on the surface.

Xiwei bent down and pressed one hand to the ground, feeling that faint tremor rising from below. She did not answer. She simply kept her hand there, letting him feel her presence, letting him know that she was still here.

After a long while, she withdrew her hand, straightened, and gazed toward the distance. That land was recovering. From the rain-washed valley drifted the faint sound of running water. A few small birds flew out from the distant woods and settled, tentatively, on the still-damp branches.

Xiwei suddenly understood: balance was not born unchanging. It had to be maintained. Pangu had left this world its skeleton — but it was the duty of the living to tend its flesh.

She lifted her head and looked toward the true sun in the sky. It did not know what had happened, and it never would. That was all right. She knew. That was enough.

But balance was never won once and for all. She soon discovered that her single intervention had brought new problems in its wake. Because she had gathered the clouds over the western region, rain that should have fallen elsewhere had fallen where it should not. A stretch of highland to the east had gone without rain for days on end, and the vegetation there had begun to wilt. She had not only shifted light and heat — she had shifted the delicate equilibrium of wind, water, and warmth. Every part of this world was connected; pull one thread, and the entire weave would move.

She had no choice but to adjust again. This time, she flew east and guided the moist air currents blowing in from the sea to replenish that highland's moisture. For three days she worked the currents, shifting their direction inch by inch, as though weaving an invisible net. Her energy drained swiftly in the process, but she did not stop. She had to compensate for the deviation her earlier intervention had caused.

This taught her a truth: true harmony was never still. It was an unending negotiation; every intervention would trigger new changes, and every new change demanded new adjustments. Like a river — it never flowed in a perfectly straight channel. It always wound and meandered, finding its balance in its own swaying course. And her duty and Yuanji's was to guard that winding thread, to keep it from swinging too far.

Deep underground, Yuanji sensed her every adjustment. He did not speak — he never offered his opinion unbidden. But he answered her actions in his own way. She felt the warmth of the Earth Veins beneath her feet begin to even out; the anomalously active heat was being diverted by Yuanji toward other places. He was using his own power to match her adjustments, and all of this without a single word exchanged between them.

Xiwei stood on the hillside where the grass had greened again and looked at the distant rainbow left by the rain. She suddenly felt that perhaps this was what Pangu had meant by harmony — not that you happened to be there doing nothing, but that when you needed to act, there was another being acting alongside you.

She no longer feared change. For change itself was the way balance was kept.