Chapter Forty: The Backlash of Chaos, the Old Order Struggles

Volume Two: The Separation of Clear and Turbid — The First Opening of Heaven and Earth

The process of Heaven and Earth's separation was advancing steadily. But Chaos had not surrendered its resistance.

Those Chaos Qi remaining in the Heaven-Earth Interlayer began to gather — not with conscious intent like Mingdun, but through an instinctive, spontaneous coalescence. As though driven by some residual memory, they sought to restore the old Chaos order.

Pangu perceived those gathering masses of Chaos Qi. They were distributed throughout the Heaven-Earth Interlayer, of varying sizes — some the size of his head, others even larger than his body. Those qi masses were slowly rotating, drawing more surrounding Chaos Qi to join them.

Chaos's counterattack was not abrupt but more like a slow disease — not a single violent assault, but a ceaseless erosion. Pangu had no spare hands to deal with those qi masses — both his hands were propping up the sky.

He could only use his own body to block them. When a mass of Chaos vortex drifted toward him, he shifted slightly, letting that vortex graze past his shoulder. The instant the edge of the vortex touched his skin, he felt a bone-piercing cold — colder than Mingdun's erosion, as though touching the deepest fears of his consciousness.

Those vortices grew ever more numerous. They surged from all directions, like a swarm of bees whose nest had been struck. Pangu's body was endlessly grazed, struck, and enveloped. Each contact left behind a thread of cold. His body's surface began to show a thin layer of white frost — traces of Chaos Qi condensing on his skin.

But even so, what he felt most deeply was not the pain brought by Chaos Qi, but something deeper — the residual Chaos instinct within those qi masses was transmitting to his consciousness an ancient, near-primal will: 'Come back'. Not language, but a direct, penetrating impact upon his consciousness. Chaos was calling him back — back to that undifferentiated state with no up or down, no left or right, no pain and no joy.

In those calls, Pangu sensed temptation — not conscious temptation, but an instinct on the bodily level. Just as he had slumbered for Eternal Ages within Chaos, his body still retained memories of that state. That omnipresent pressure, that tranquility requiring no thought, that freedom without boundaries — Chaos had given him everything, and now was trying to take it back from his hands.

But he did not yield. He knew clearly that if he withdrew from this position, the sky and earth would close together again. Chaos would exploit that brief gap to churn back together the Clear Qi and Turbid Qi that had already begun to separate. By then, everything he had done before would be in vain.

He drove his feet deeper into the Great Earth and pressed his back deathly firm against the stretch of Celestial Dome he touched — even if Chaos froze and cracked his skin, he would not move half an inch.

Resisting the chaotic qi masses required not only the endurance of his body but the perseverance of his will. Each time a qi mass struck his body, it stirred a wave of Chaos within his consciousness — those waves beat against his Spirit-Consciousness, seeking to wash away the sense of order he had only just established.

Amid those waves, Pangu seized hold of his core — his clearest memory from the Eternal Ages: that fissure that had appeared on its own. That was not something Chaos had created; it was something Chaos could not control. It was a newborn force, a force that even Chaos could not suppress. He seized the image of that fissure and made it the anchor point of his existence.

The qi masses of Chaos, under the resistance of his will, gradually dispersed. The Chaos Qi carried by those masses was, in the process of impact, captured by the Clear-Turbid gravity of Heaven and Earth, torn apart, and drawn respectively toward Heaven and Earth — becoming nourishment for them.

But Pangu knew this was not yet the end. Mingdun — that consciousness that had existed in Chaos even before him — had not yet made its move. These qi masses were merely the prelude, the automatic reaction of Chaos's remnants. The true confrontation had not yet come.

He waited in place for a while, confirming that no new qi masses were forming, before slightly relaxing his taut body. He lowered his head and looked at his arms — they were covered in fine white frost-traces, like a pale spiderweb spread across his skin.

He shook his arms, and those frost-traces fell from his skin, drifting like snowflakes toward the earth below, melting in midair into fine droplets of water. Those droplets fell upon the ground and were absorbed by the newborn earth, leaving no trace behind.

The residual Chaos Qi, under the suppression of Pangu's will, still stubbornly attempted to regather. They lacked Mingdun's intelligence, but they possessed the same instinct — the instinct to return to Chaos. In the moment before its disappearance, Chaos displayed its obstinacy one last time. Pangu spent a long time driving away the last batch of remnants, then stood within the clarified space between Heaven and Earth — the air was no longer viscous, the field of vision no longer blurred; everything had become unprecedentedly clear.

The first wave of Chaos's backlash had been suppressed. But Pangu knew — Mingdun would, in deeper darkness, await the next opportunity to strike.

Vortices continued to seep from the Chaos fragments, surging toward Pangu mass after mass. They formed around him a ceaselessly churning Chaos zone, stark against the stabilizing clear space beyond. Pangu stood at the center of that churning, like the sole still point within the eye of a storm. He had no hands to disperse them; he could only suppress them with his will — he pushed the will of his own existence outward like an invisible barrier-wall. Each time a vortex struck that will-wall, it produced a booming resonance audible only at the level of the Spirit-Soul.

Those resonances accumulated in his consciousness, like a drum being struck without cease. Each strike produced a ripple in his perception, causing brief shifts in his attention. But he never let those shifts accumulate into true wavering — each time his attention drifted, he would refocus it back upon the tension between Heaven and Earth.

Chaos's backlash was not accidental — it was bound to occur. Just as a spring compressed too long will rebound violently when released, the energy Chaos had accumulated within the egg across the Eternal Ages could not possibly dissipate in an instant. These vortices, these erosions, these struggles — all were part of that energy-release process. What he needed to do was endure this process, let the aftershocks of Chaos naturally dissipate, rather than be dragged back to the starting point by them.

He steadied his body, drew a deep breath, and slowly exhaled. That breath blasted open a brief passage through the Chaos vortices — the Chaos Qi parted before his exhalation, revealing behind it the space of Heaven and Earth that was growing clearer by the moment. Heaven and Earth were already clearer than before.

He continued to hold.

Pangu's two arms bore the weight of the Celestial Dome, but his hands were not free to disperse those vortices. He could only endure with his body — letting vortices crash against his chest, letting vortices graze past his spine, letting vortices coil around his legs. The impact of each vortex was like a cold needle piercing into his body, carrying away a thread of his faint body heat. His temperature, under those ceaseless impacts, dropped bit by bit, from his body's core to the extremities of his limbs; heat was draining outward.

His breathing grew rapid amid the churning of the chaotic qi masses. With each inhaled breath, the air was suffused with unpurified Chaos motes. Those motes, upon entering his windpipe, scraped across the membrane like fine sand, bringing a stinging, burning sensation. He suppressed the urge to cough — in this posture, any violent bodily shudder would affect his support of the Celestial Dome. He could only slow his breathing, using deeper inhalations to reduce the friction of the air current, making the motes' stay in his windpipe as brief as possible.

In the gaps between impacts, he heard a sound. It did not come from without but from the depths of his own body — an exceedingly faint, low hum. It was the resonant sound of his bones under sustained pressure. That sound was telling him: your body is approaching its limit. He did not respond to that sound; he simply kept standing, kept propping, waiting for the Chaos vortices to finally recede.