Chapter Forty-One: Using His Body as a Pillar, Propping Heaven and Standing Upon Earth

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

The shattered Chaos Egg did not give up just because it was broken. The torn Void Shell writhed at its edges; those broken cross-sections, like living things, sought to reconnect. Pangu clearly perceived those writhing edges drawing closer to one another. He could not let them close — once they closed, Clear Qi and Turbid Qi would be sealed once more within Chaos.

He made a decision driven by intuition. He stood at the very center of the crack and used his body to block the two approaching edges. His head pressed against the remnant fragments of the Void Shell above; his feet rested upon the shattered shell-base below; his spine arched, like a wooden wedge driven into a crevice.

The heavy pressure of the Celestial Dome transmitted through the edge of the Void Shell onto his body. The uplifting force of the earth's depths also surged from beneath his feet. He had become a load-bearing pillar caught between them. The sensation was utterly strange. He had never before borne dual pressure from above and below. Before, in the Chaos Egg, pressure had come evenly from all directions; he had not needed to resist any single direction. Now it was different. Pressure came from two directions, above and below; his body had to simultaneously resist these two entirely different forces — both holding up the sky to keep it from falling, and pressing down the earth to keep it from rising.

His bones creaked under the compression of those two forces. His spine, under the pressure, bent slightly and then straightened, finding the most most fitting angle of support. His legs of its own accord spread apart, stepping onto a broader area of ground to distribute the weight he bore. He found that posture — legs spread, spine straight, both hands pushing upward. It was the posture he would not change again for the next eighteen thousand years.

Pangu's body emitted low creaking sounds under the heavy pressure; his muscle fibers, in sustained resistance, were stretched and strengthened one by one. His body was transforming from that soft, malleable state of Chaos into a hard, stable state. His bones were the frame, his muscles the ropes, his meridians the conduits. That pain came with a kind of satisfaction — his body was becoming a structure truly capable of supporting Heaven and Earth.

Pangu's legs began to tremble faintly under the immense pressure, but he did not let his knees bend. Once the knees bent, the force-transmission chain would break, and the Celestial Dome would instantly plummet a great distance. He learned how to use bone rather than muscle to bear weight — the skeleton was a natural structural support; given the right angle, bones could bear a hundred times more weight than muscles without fatigue. He adjusted his body's posture from muscle-exertion to skeletal-support. Pangu's legs sank deeper into the settled layer of Turbid Qi — that mud-like substance not yet fully solidified parted to both sides under his weight, letting his body settle into a more stable support position. His shinbones made direct contact with the hardening bedrock below — a hard touch that would never deform further. He had at last found hard bottom to stand upon.

The pressure of the Celestial Dome transmitted down from above without pause. That pressure was unlike the uniform squeeze from all directions in Chaos — it was directional, sustained, possessing weight. The true meaning of the concept of 'heavy' — not surrounded pressure, but force applied from above downward, sustained, never weakening. His neck emitted faint cracking sounds under the load; the muscles between his shoulder blades grew stiff from sustained resistance. He had no experience to draw upon — no existence in the Eternal Ages had ever borne the weight of Heaven and Earth.

But his body, in handling this pressure, displayed an unexpectedly keen sensitivity. The body would adjust by instinct posture, fine-tune its center of gravity, and distribute the load, as though some innate instinct were at work. This body was far stronger and more exact than he had recognized in Chaos. It was innately designed to support Heaven and Earth.

He adjusted his stance, shifting his center of gravity from his heels to the front half of his feet, making the force-transmission path more direct. His spine bent slightly into an arc — not from yielding, but because an arched structure can bear vertical pressure better than a straight line. Endurance was not resistance; endurance was compliance. Complying with the direction of force, letting force flow naturally through the body, rather than rigidly pushing back.

The relationship between Pangu and this Heaven and Earth was clear — he was not the master of this Heaven and Earth but its pillar. He would keep standing until this Heaven and Earth no longer needed him.

Pangu's low breathing echoed between Heaven and Earth. With each exhaled breath, the space around him grew one measure clearer. His very existence was becoming the stabilizing force of Heaven and Earth — not because of what he was doing, but because he was there. His mere presence, standing there, was itself an unmoving constancy, giving this still-turbulent world a fixed reference point. The Celestial Dome rose with him as its fixed point; the Great Earth settled with him as its anchor. So long as he did not move, Heaven and Earth would not deviate from the order they were forming.

The membrane at the bottom of the Celestial Dome still trembled faintly, like a great flag shaken by the wind. That trembling passed from his fingertips to his palms, traveled along his arms to his shoulders, and from his shoulders spread through his whole body. He was not resisting this trembling — he was absorbing it. He transformed each pulse of the Celestial Dome into the rhythm of his own body, synchronizing his rhythm with the rhythm of the Celestial Dome. Once synchronized, the pressure was no longer a burden but became a force he could borrow.

Once found, that posture would never change. Pangu's body solidified in that stance into an eternal sculpture; the forces from the Celestial Dome to the Great Earth formed within his body an unbroken transmission path. However much the Celestial Dome wished to descend, his body resisted that much; however much the Great Earth wished to rise, his body suppressed that much. His very existence was itself a silent persistence.

His neck grew stiff from the prolonged upward gaze. The height of the Celestial Dome changed with each passing day, and his line of sight needed daily adjustment to see the highest reaches of the dome. That sustained upward gaze kept his neck muscles in a state of permanent tension; the muscle fibers, in continuous stretching, grew ever harder, finally becoming nearly unbendable hard cords. Frequently turning his head would make his cervical spine vulnerable under the weight of the Celestial Dome. He would rather let his neck stiffen than let a single crack appear in his cervical spine.

Sweat slid from his temples, following the groove of his nose bridge to the tip of his nose, hanging there a moment before falling. That drop of sweat passed through the air of the Heaven-Earth Interlayer; in the process of falling, the clear wind carried away some of its moisture, making it a smaller, denser droplet, which at last fell upon the surface of the Great Earth and smashed a nearly imperceptible tiny pit in the dust. He watched the process of that drop of sweat falling to the ground, watching a part of his own body merging into this Heaven and Earth — not in the manner of sacrifice, but in the most natural manner.

His ears captured the sound of air currents passing beneath the Celestial Dome. It was a sustained low hum, like wind-sound arriving from the distance. That sound was not constant — the higher the Celestial Dome, the deeper the sound; the lower the dome, the sharper the sound. He used the changes in pitch of that sound to judge the movement state of the Celestial Dome, just as a sailor uses the howl of the wind to judge the coming of a storm. The voice of the Celestial Dome was the signal this Heaven and Earth gave him.

His fingertips felt the undulations of that membrane at the bottom of the Celestial Dome. Those undulations were not disordered — they possessed a fixed rhythm; after every seven faint undulations, there would be one wave of slightly larger amplitude. Seven was the small cycle, and also the miniature of the great cycle. He silently recorded this number and carved it deep into his consciousness. The number Seven, perhaps, would appear again and again in the future Heaven and Earth.

His knees, from prolonged standing, transmitted a sore, swelling ache. Not sharp pain, but a dull, heavy, sustained soreness, as though something inside the joints were expanding, about to burst the joint capsule from within. It was the reaction of joint fluid squeezed out of its normal position under prolonged high pressure. He did not relieve it — any adjustment of posture could affect the balance of the Celestial Dome. He simply overlaid that soreness with his will, transforming it into part of his body, making it a background note of his existence, and ignored it.