Chapter Two Hundred Twenty-Two: The Creation Legend — Passed Down Through Generations

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

The first campfire was kindled on an autumn evening.

The ancient apes, who could now walk upright, had found a sheltered corner at the edge of the forest. They struck flint against stone, and the sparks that flew landed on a bed of dry moss.

The firelight lit the faces gathered around it. As the warmth of the flame reached them, they made low, contented grunts.

Beside the fire, the oldest ape began to produce a rhythmic sequence of sounds — not ordinary calls, but a patterned series with rises and falls. It was telling a story.

The story was simple: a very, very long time ago, Heaven and Earth were joined together. A giant split them apart. He used both his hands to hold up the falling Celestial Dome, and he held it up for a very long time. Then he turned his own body into the mountains, the rivers, the sun, and the moon.

The apes gathered around the fire listened in silence. They could not understand every syllable, but they could feel the emotion in the story — reverence, remembrance, gratitude.

It was the first creation story ever told upon this land. It would pass from mouth to mouth through countless generations, and with every telling it would gain some details and lose others — but the core would never change. A giant had created this world.

The campfire blazed in the night, keeping the beasts at bay and lighting the faint dawn of a civilization. But the story did not end on that night. It was retold on every night when a fire burned.

The oldest ape did not know what it was doing — it was simply repeating those syllables that surfaced from the depths of memory. The syllables came from things it had seen: the parting of Heaven and Earth, the dividing of light and darkness, a vast body toppling and becoming mountains and rivers. It had no words to describe these things, so it used gestures. It spread its arms wide and slowly lifted them, mimicking the moment Heaven and Earth were pulled apart. It clenched both fists, then flung them open, mimicking light bursting from darkness. It let itself fall slowly, heavily, to the ground, mimicking the collapse of that enormous body.

The young apes seated around the fire watched in silence. They did not understand everything, but they could feel the gravity of the emotion in the old ape's body. It was not fear, not sorrow — it was something they had never seen before, something they could not name. It was reverence.

When the old ape finished, a long silence hung over the fire. Then the youngest ape stood, walked before the elder, and spread its own arms wide, slowly lifting them — in imitation. It got it wrong. It reversed the order, doing the falling before the separating. The others seated around the fire made low, huffing sounds of amusement. But the old ape did not laugh. It reached out and gently corrected the young one's movements, raising its arms again, then showed the correct sequence — fall first itself, then gesture for the young one to follow.

The young ape did it again. This time, the order was right.

That was how it worked — a story was never passed down through words alone. It was passed through gesture, through emotion, through the look exchanged in the firelight. What the young learned from the old was not the story itself, but the feeling the story brought. That feeling, repeated countless times, absorbing each teller's own understanding, shifted without anyone noticing.

By the third generation, the story had already changed greatly from its first telling.

The old ape was dead. Its bones were buried beneath a great tree at the forest's edge. The new storyteller was a middle-aged ape — it had been one of the young ones seated around that first campfire, a child of the old ape. Its memory had blurred. It remembered the gestures and the emotion of its father's telling, but the specific details had already begun to mingle with its own imagination.

In its version, the being that had parted Heaven and Earth was no longer a vague presence. It now had a rough outline — tall, with luminous eyes, arms very long. It had not fallen; it had lain itself down by choice, and then transformed its body into the Myriad Things. The middle-aged ape added a new gesture to the telling — it pointed to the sky, toward the distant high mountains, toward the river flowing at their feet, showing that all of it had come from that being's body.

This version circulated through the troop for many years. No one questioned its truth, because questioning required another version to compare it against — and they had only one: the one they had heard from their elders.

Many more generations passed.

The troop had multiplied into a sprawling community. They had learned more syllables and could express more complex ideas. By now, the creation story had grown far richer — and the teller was no longer a random elder, but an individual within the community specially charged with remembering and transmitting knowledge. They had no names — this age had not yet produced the act of naming — but their status within the troop was singular, for they alone remembered "the things of long ago."

In this newest version, the creator-being had a name. No — to be precise, a syllable: "Gu." It was the sound the ancient apes made deep in their throats at moments of greatest awe. It was not a name so much as a vocal gesture — a vibration rising from the depths of the chest that must accompany any mention of that being. Whenever the teller voiced that syllable, it would lower its head and place both hands upon its chest — the only ritual they preserved for that being.

The details of the story had grown ever more specific. The being was no longer simply "very tall" — it was described as "head holding up the sky, feet planted upon the earth." The time it had spent holding Heaven and Earth apart was no longer a vague "very long" — it was "until Heaven and Earth could no longer close together." The Myriad Things it transformed into were no longer only mountains and rivers, but also the wind, the rain, thunder, and the turning of the seasons.

Not one of these details was true. But together, they formed the seed of faith.

And across all the versions and all the changes, one element alone had never been altered — after that being had created the world, it was gone. No teller knew why it preserved this detail. The old apes had not taught it; no rule demanded it. Yet every teller, facing the faces gathered breathless around the fire, would unfailingly add the same ending: "He finished everything. Then he left."

It was the only part of the story that had never been distorted, never embellished, never forgotten. Perhaps it was because those ancient apes felt something in the depths of their being — that this world's perfection and harmony had not come from nowhere. Someone had once arranged it with care. And the one who had arranged it, having finished, had chosen to withdraw.

Where it had gone — no story ever said.

Campfires were kindled on autumn evening after autumn evening, and quenched before dawn after dawn. The faces gathered around the fire changed, batch after batch; the story was told, time after time. With every telling, that creator-being grew more distant — and more sacred. It was no longer a blurred, touchable memory. It was becoming a belief — something that did not need to be seen, only needed to be believed.

This was the seed of civilization. And a seed, once dropped, will root.

Many more generations passed. Those ancient apes had learned to make simple tools and to use animal hides against the cold. Their brains had grown slightly larger than those of their ancestors, and the syllables they could produce had grown richer. The creation story, by this generation, had become a complete narrative order, with a fixed sequence of telling and ritualized gestures. Before the teller could open its mouth, it must first face east, raise both hands above its head, then slowly lower them — a gesture symbolizing the whole process from the separation of Heaven and Earth to their final settling. No one knew who had set this rule, but it was observed with strict fidelity, generation after generation.

And the young ones who listened to the story — every time they finished, they would, without fail, look toward the distant mountains. In their young hearts, those peaks rising into the clouds were no longer ordinary mountains — they were that being's spine. Those rivers rushing without end were no longer ordinary water — they were that being's blood. Every thunderclap, every flash of lightning, every downpour of rain would be understood as that being moving somewhere in the world.

Thus did faith take root. It required no temple, no statue, no scripture. It required only a campfire, a teller, and a circle of listeners willing to believe. And so long as there remained in this world a single creature that could tell a story, Pangu would never truly die.

He lived in every story. In the mountain shadows drawn long by the setting sun. In the light that met a newborn's eyes when they opened for the very first time.