Chapter Forty-Five: The Celestial Dome Gradually Rises, the Earth Veins Gradually Sink

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

The Celestial Dome rose higher with each passing day. Pangu raised his head and gauged the height of the dome's bottom — it was rising at a constant, irreversible speed. At first, the Celestial Dome was only a few body-lengths away; he could touch it by reaching out his hand. Slowly, it rose to one body-length, two body-lengths, three body-lengths distant.

The height of the ground was also changing — not growing higher, but growing thicker. Turbid Qi kept compacting at the bottom, transforming from loose dust-mist into soft mud, from mud into hard rock. The Great Earth was transforming from a thin layer of gaseous sediment into an existence with mass, weight, and structure.

Pangu felt the changes beneath his feet. The Great Earth was slowly sinking under him, lifting him ever higher. His line of sight was rising — he could see farther now.

With each zhang the Celestial Dome rose, Pangu's body felt an upward pull; with each zhang the Great Earth sank, his body felt a downward tug. He stood between Heaven and Earth bearing two diametrically opposed forces. Those two forces, far from tearing him apart, instead made his body tougher and more upright through constant stretching. His spine, under the action of the upward and downward forces, slowly extended and straightened; he had transformed from a curled-up existence in Chaos into an existence standing between Heaven and Earth.

The rising of the Celestial Dome was not a smooth straight line — it was sometimes fast, sometimes slow, and at times even briefly stagnated. During those stagnant periods, the pressure between Heaven and Earth would sharply increase, forcing Pangu to use more strength to maintain balance. There was a linkage between the rising of the Celestial Dome and the sinking of the Earth Veins — when the Celestial Dome stopped rising, the sinking of the Earth Veins would correspondingly slow, like two connected vessels seeking a common liquid level. Heaven and Earth were a single whole, not two independent parts.

As the Celestial Dome rose, it would occasionally emit low reverberations, like the sound of a great drumhead being struck. Those reverberations, traveling along the air to reach Pangu, made his bones resonate together with the air. Through those reverberations, he judged whether the Celestial Dome's rising was smooth — round reverberations meant steady rising; hoarse ones meant resistance had been encountered. He had already learned to judge the movement state of the Celestial Dome through his body's resonance — more sensitive than using his eyes, more accurate.

Pangu lowered his head and looked at his feet. They stood on the surface of the Great Earth, but that surface was slowly changing — at first he had stood on loose dust-mist, then on moist mud, and later on hard rock strata. His footprints were deeply imprinted upon the ground; the ground around those footprints rose faintly under the heavy pressure, forming rings of fine patterns. Those patterns were not left intentionally, yet they became the first marks on the surface of the Great Earth. Each pattern represented one period of his standing, recording the years of his existence within this Heaven and Earth.

The expansion of his field of vision brought Pangu new sensations. When his line of sight covered only a few zhang around the Celestial Dome, he could see every detail of the dome clearly. But as the Celestial Dome rose and the Great Earth sank, his field of vision expanded from several zhang to dozens, from dozens to over a hundred. The things he saw grew ever more numerous, but the detail of each thing diminished. The relationship between 'the whole' and 'the parts' gradually became clear — viewed from nearby, the Celestial Dome was a surface covered in creases and cracks; viewed from afar, it was a smooth, rounded arched dome. The same thing presented entirely different appearances at different distances. The essence of things would not reveal itself on a single scale; one must switch observation between different scales to approach the truth.

The daily growth of the Celestial Dome was nearly constant. Pangu began to use the rising of the Celestial Dome as a measure of time — not the vague, undifferentiated 'long' of the Chaos Era, but concrete time measured in units of how many zhang the Celestial Dome had risen. In the Chaos Era, time had been static, without direction, without progress, only an infinitely extended present; now time was flowing, and it had a clear direction — forward, upward, advancing toward a more complete state of Heaven and Earth.

The Celestial Dome grew ever higher; the horizon of the Great Earth grew ever more distant. Pangu's field of vision already covered the full extent of the Heaven and Earth he guarded — from east to west, from south to north. What he saw was an ever-expanding scroll, each day adding one new edge more than the day before. In those newly appearing marginal zones, Clear and Turbid had not yet fully separated; they were in a transitional state, half-Chaos and half-order. Those transitional zones were the growth points of Heaven and Earth; all future expansion would occur from these places.

He spread his arms, feeling the stretching sensation that the rising Celestial Dome brought to his body. That stretching was not a painful tearing but a sustained, gentle extension — like an elastic band slowly drawn longer, growing ever tougher in the process. His fascia, under the stretching, continuously tore and regenerated; each tearing and regeneration made them longer and stronger. His body slowly grew through such cycles, not in explosive expansion, but like a plant, growing only a little each day, accumulating over time.

His ears captured a new sound — coming from the depths of the Great Earth. It was not the crawling sound of Chaos remnants but the fracturing sound of rock under pressure. Those fracturing sounds were extremely distant, as though transmitted from the earth's depths through hundreds of rock strata to reach the surface. By the time the sound reached his ears, it had weakened into an almost unrecognizable whisper, but he still discerned its source: the rock strata at the bottom of the Great Earth were forming. When new rock strata formed under immense pressure, they produced a series of fine cracking sounds; those sounds traveled up through the fissures in the strata, telling him how the Great Earth was growing.

The temperature transmitted up from the ground beneath his feet was also changing. At first, the surface of the Great Earth had been cool, carrying the cold of settled Turbid Qi. But as the Great Earth continued to thicken, the heat accumulated deep underground began to conduct upward, and the surface of the Great Earth gradually gained a trace of warmth. That warmth rose from beneath his feet, spreading upward along his leg bones, like a warm current directly injected into his body from the heart of the Great Earth. The Great Earth was no longer dead, inert accumulation of matter; it had its own thermal activity within — that heat came from the friction and pressure produced when Turbid Qi continuously settled; it was the vital sign of the Great Earth.

As the Celestial Dome rose, it produced a certain resonance with his body — when the cadence of his breathing matched the speed of the Celestial Dome's rising, he could feel the dome seeming to grow outward from the top of his head on its own, rather than being propped up by him. He had found the optimal way to collaborate with the Celestial Dome — not forcefully lifting it, but making his own breath into the channel through which the Celestial Dome rose. Each breath provided a faint pushing force for the dome's ascent. His breathing was the sail of the Celestial Dome.

His eyes, through observation, felt a kind of fatigue — not the fatigue of needing to close his eyes, but the visual fatigue of staring into the distance for too long. His eyes, under sustained unceasing use, grew tense, and faint spots of light occasionally appeared at the edges of his field of vision. That was not hallucination but signals emitted by his sight under great strain. He blinked, moistening the dry surface of his eyeballs with tears, then continued watching the boundary of the Celestial Dome. He could not stop observing — every change in the Celestial Dome required his constant grasp.

The air drawn into his nostrils grew thinner and cooler as the Celestial Dome rose higher. That cool air, upon entering his windpipe, carried a distinctive crispness unique to the top of the Celestial Dome — like water flowing down from great heights, pure and faintly cold. The higher the Celestial Dome, the thinner the air, and the purer. That thinness required his breathing to be deeper and stronger to draw in enough air, but that effort was not a burden — it let him feel more directly that the Celestial Dome was rising toward ever higher and farther places.