Chapter Two Hundred Thirty: Dao Grace Everlasting — Never Forgotten Through All Ages

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

In Dahuang, the grasses and trees withered and flourished again; the rivers rose and fell. Day by day, this world formed from Pangu's body settled into its own steadiness. Each morning, Xiwei rose in the east, her light spilling across the mountains and rivers; Yuanji lay still in the depths of the Earth Veins, bearing all upon his back. Sun and moon traded their watch; the Four Seasons turned in their course; the Myriad Things multiplied and grew in silence.

The minute life-forms in the water had already differentiated into different forms. Some clung to the rocks, spinning sticky threads that slowly spread into a coat of moss. Some hung suspended in the water, drifting with the currents, their bodies so transparent they were nearly invisible. In the mud along the banks, tiny segmented creatures burrowed in and out, leaving winding trails through the moist soil.

Faint stirrings sounded from the mountain forests. Not the wind, not the water — the movements of living things. A beetle no larger than a fingernail crawled out from a crack in the bark, carrying the morning dew upon its back. It paused, its antennae trembling faintly, as though sensing this brand-new world.

Xiwei hung above the Celestial Dome, looking down upon all of it. Her radiance had softened considerably, no longer the piercing blaze of the earliest days when Heaven and Earth were new. The long ages had taught her restraint. She knew that too fierce a heat would scorch these tender lives.

"Look over there," she said to Yuanji.

Yuanji rose partway from the deep earth in a half-formed presence and followed the line of Xiwei's light toward the south. Water had pooled in a low hollow, and beside it, the first clump of green had emerged. Stems straight, leaves fine, swaying faintly in the morning breeze.

"It is growing," Yuanji said.

The two watched in silence. That plant was indeed growing — at a pace nearly beyond sight it stretched upward, fraction by fraction. Its leaves uncurled from tight presses to open fans; their color shifted from tender yellow to pale green. It had come alive.

On a distant ridge, a colossal beast, something like a wild ox, lifted its head and loosed a low, rumbling bellow. The sound rolled through the valleys and startled a flock of winged insects that had only just learned to fly. They beat their wings and rose crookedly into the sky, glittering with fine-broken light under the sun.

The world was alive. More vibrant with each passing day. Pangu's breath had merged into every inch of soil, every drop of water, every thread of wind. He was gone, yet he was everywhere. Streams carved through rock and scored winding channels; seeds scattered by the wind fell into soil and put forth new shoots; predators pursued their prey, and the prey learned, in their running, to turn and to hide. All of this unfolded naturally between Heaven and Earth — no one directed it, yet every living thing followed an inner order.

At night, moonlight fell upon the water's surface in ripples of shimmering light. A fish leaped from the water and fell back, sending rings of ripples widening outward. In the grass along the banks, points of light glowed like scattered fireflies — some kind of luminous minute life-form, awakened by the earth warmed through the day.

Xiwei said, low: "He did it."

Yuanji did not answer. From the deep earth came a faint tremor, as though in answer to Xiwei's words. Pangu's Original Spirit still slumbered at the deepest core of the earth — the last fragment of himself he had left to this world, unable to speak, unable to think, stirring only faintly when Heaven and Earth had need.

Dao Grace Everlasting. It was no oath, no inscription. It was the water flowing through the mountains, the mineral veins threaded through the earth, the heartbeat of the Myriad Things, the dawn that must follow every night. This world that Pangu had purchased at the cost of himself — from this day forward, it truly belonged to itself.

The eastern horizon paled to the white of a fish's belly. Xiwei rose slowly from beneath the horizon, and her radiance spilled across the land like flowing water, washing away the darkness of the night layer by layer.

In the valley, at the mouth of a cave, a young beast opened its eyes in the dawn light.

It was very small — small enough to curl beneath the belly of a full-grown beast. Its eyes were not yet fully open; a thin membrane of birth still clung to its eyelids. It blinked, and blinked again, and its gaze gradually sharpened to clarity.

It saw light.

It was not the first time it had opened its eyes — but the light today was somehow different. Brighter. Warmer. It turned its head and looked toward the mouth of the cave. There, a circle of glowing light — it did not know what it was; it only thought that light was very beautiful.

It struggled to stand. Its four legs trembled, and it wobbled its way toward the cave entrance. After three steps, it fell. It lay panting a moment, then rose again.

High above, Xiwei saw this.

She did not draw near. She only watched from above as that young beast walked out of the cave, stood under the sunlight for the very first time, and was truly bathed in her radiance. The young beast lifted its head to the sky and let out a tiny, tentative cry.

It was the first greeting of the day.

The wind blew in from the north, threading through the mountain passes, sweeping across the plains, flowing south along the river valleys. It stirred the fresh leaves in the treetops, ruffled the surfaces of the ponds, scattered the traces of rising smoke. In the wind was the scent of soil, the fragrance of grass and trees, and the distant salt of the sea.

The same as yesterday. The same as a thousand years ago.

The water began its journey from the snow-capped crown of the Sky-Pillaring Peak, gathered into trickling threads, seeped through the crevices of rock, merged into brooks in the hollows, into rivers in the gorges, and flowed ever toward the eastern sea. Along the way, fish swam upstream, spawned, and died; their bodies sank to the riverbed and became nourishment for the water-weeds. The water-weeds grew under the sunlight and released tiny bubbles; the bubbles rose to the surface, burst, and vanished into the air.

The same as yesterday. The same as ten thousand years ago.

Without hurry, without pause. Day and night, night and day — from the mountaintop to the sea, from rain falling to water flowing, the cycle turned without end — just as Pangu had designed it.

In the shadow of the cave, an old ape sat cross-legged. Between its fingers it held a length of bone — the rib of some beast, long since dried and bleached to white. It used a sharp-edged stone flake to scratch the bone, slowly, again and again. The marks were fine and shallow at first; as they repeated, they deepened. Something new was happening in the old ape's mind — something that was not about survival, but about making. One day in the distant future, this would be called carving, or decoration, or art. But in this moment, it was only an aged finger tracing and retracing across a length of bone.

Time flowed in silence. It was not urgent, not hurried — it simply flowed, like the river running from the Sky-Pillaring Peak to the sea, ceaseless through day and night.

The sun climbed to its zenith. The warmth on the ground rose a little. The young beast that had walked out of the cave for the first time drowsed in the sunlight, woke, ran a few circles around the cave mouth, then chased a flying insect into the grass. Its mother lifted her head and followed after it, unhurried.

This was a day of perfect ordinariness. Nothing remarkable occurred.

But it was precisely such an ordinary day — a day like yesterday, a day like tomorrow — that was what Pangu had given everything to obtain. Not a hero's epic, not an immortal legend. A young beast drowsing in the sunlight. An old ape scratching bone at a cave mouth. A leaf swaying in the wind.

That everything was as it should be.

Xiwei moved slowly across the sky. She no longer needed to shine deliberately upon anything — she only followed her fixed path, and the light naturally streamed from her body, falling where it was meant to fall. She looked down at the fine changes across the land — a flower losing a petal in the afternoon wind, a tree putting out a new root-thread in the soil, an ant carrying a seed several times larger than its own body.

Those changes were too small — so small that no being would notice. But all the changes together made the whole world.

From a distant cave came the sound of rhythmic chanting. Those apes — those beings in whom Spirit-Intelligence had first sprouted — were gathered around a fire. A young teller was reciting the ancient story with rising and falling voice. His voice still carried the raw uncertainty of youth, but not a single word of what he told was wrong. That story had been passed down unchanged — from fire to fire, from teller to teller, from generation to generation.

Pangu opened Heaven and Earth. His body became the Myriad Things. Dao Grace spread across Dahuang.

Xiwei heard those syllables. They drifted through the air, merging into the sound of the wind, the water, the rustle of leaves. Those syllables were soft — nothing more than vibrations rising from the throats of beings whose Spirit-Intelligence had just come into its first flower. But they echoed through this world and never quite faded.

She knew: these sounds would carry on.

So long as Dahuang endured, so long as there was anyone who remembered Pangu's name — he would remain. Not in the form of a body — his body had already become this entire world. But in the form of memory, in the form of story, in the form of faith. He had become the mountains, become the rivers, become the wind, become the light — and he had also become that name, spoken and respoken on the lips of the Living Beings gathered around the fire.

The sun began its descent in the west. Another day was drawing to its close.

Xiwei drifted slowly down to the old tree she had always favored. The trunk was a full ring thicker than the first time she had settled here. There were more scratches on the bark now — carved there by some living being with a stone flake, she did not know which. The marks were simple and primitive in form: a circle, a horizontal line, and a standing human figure between them.

She reached out a finger and touched the carving lightly. The lines had grown somewhat blurred, worn by wind and rain, but the shape was still recognizable. She remembered the old one who had first drawn that image in the sand. He had been dead a very long time. But his drawing had endured.

From sand to stone wall, from stone wall to tree bark. One day, it would appear on something more lasting still.

She leaned against the trunk and watched the sky shift from blue to orange, from orange to violet, from violet to deep indigo. The stars kindled one after another. The moon lifted half its face above the eastern ridge.

Yuanji's voice rose from the deep earth, low and warm: Another day.

Mm. Another day, she said.

They are well.

They are all well.

Silence. Then Yuanji's voice came again, fainter this time, as though drifting from very, very far away: He sees.

Xiwei did not answer. The corner of her mouth curved faintly upward, and she closed her eyes.

The night wind passed by her, carrying the scent of grass and trees and soil. In that scent was something exceedingly faint, beyond all description — like the smell of ancient stone warming under the sun, like the smell of the first ray of sunlight piercing the clouds after rain.

It was the scent of Pangu.

He had always been here.

The moon climbed to its zenith. Silver light flooded the land. The campfire in the cave still burned, but those Living Beings had already fallen asleep. The male keeping the night watch sat at the cave mouth, a sharpened wooden staff gripped in his hand, his eyes alert, staring out at the dark wilderness. Behind him, from the depths of the cave, came the even sound of breathing.

Across this vast land known as Dahuang, the Myriad Things had sunk into stillness.

Xiwei opened her eyes and looked once more toward the dark mountain silhouettes in the distance. The Sky-Pillaring Peak gleamed silver-white beneath the moonlight — like an enormous gravestone, and also like an eternal lighthouse.

Pangu, look.

She spoke softly.

They have all begun. And they are doing very well.

No answer came. Nor was any answer needed.

The wind still blows.

The water still flows.

The Myriad Things still grow.

And the one who created all of it has become all of it.

Dao Grace Everlasting. Never Forgotten Through All Ages.