Chapter Forty-Seven: The Fissures of Heaven and Earth, the Aftershocks of Chaos
Volume Two: The Separation of Clear and Turbid — The First Opening of Heaven and Earth
The Celestial Dome was not flawless. During its condensation, cracks began to appear on its surface.
Those cracks were as fine as spider-silk, distributed across various positions of the vault — some straight, some branching. They were not produced by external impact but by the natural release of internal stress as the Celestial Dome cooled and contracted.
Pangu noticed those cracks. From his angle, they looked like wound-marks upon the Celestial Dome. He feared they would expand and cause the dome to shatter again. He released a portion of Primordial Qi, sending it climbing upward along the inner wall of the Celestial Dome to coat the surfaces of the cracks.
When the Primordial Qi made contact with the cracks, those cracks vanished as though filled in. But before long, near the same positions, new cracks appeared.
The contraction of the Celestial Dome was a continuous process. So long as contraction continued, cracks would ceaselessly appear. Pangu could not spend all day ceaselessly repairing them — he had to conserve his energy to hold up the heavy pressure.
He could only accept a reality: the Celestial Dome would exist with cracks for a very long time.
To Pangu, those cracks appearing on the surface of the Celestial Dome looked like strokes of some ancient script carved upon the vault. They snaked and stretched across the dome, forming patterns he could not read yet could feel held meaning. He did not know whether those cracks were merely natural or carried some message, but he recorded them all in his heart. Those cracks, over the course of years of self-healing, would slowly vanish, but their shapes had already been permanently carved into his memory — those shapes would become important clues for his future understanding of the world's principles.
Fine cracks appeared on the newly formed Celestial Dome, just like when the Chaos Egg had first shattered. Pangu watched those cracks, and in his heart there was no panic — he knew this was Heaven and Earth adjusting themselves, just as an infant's skin develops stretch marks in the process of growing. The appearance of cracks always preceded the next round of the Celestial Dome's expansion. Cracks were omens that the Celestial Dome was about to grow taller, Heaven and Earth telling him the next direction of movement.
The fissures on the Celestial Dome did not fully disappear after their first appearance. Though most of them self-healed, they left faint traces on the dome's surface, like scars left after old wounds had healed. Those traces presented slightly different colors and textures against the base tone of the Celestial Dome. Heaven and Earth too possessed memory. The traces of those fissures were the carriers of that memory, recording the labor pains Heaven and Earth had experienced at their birth. A birth without labor pains was incomplete.
Pangu stood between Heaven and Earth and raised his head to watch those cracks spreading across the Celestial Dome. The directions of those cracks were not random — most of them were distributed along the dome's arc-shaped structural lines, cracking along the lines of a skeleton. The internal stress structure of the Celestial Dome revealed itself through those directions — those arcs were the Celestial Dome's weakest directions, and the directions in which it was most likely to expand further. The distribution map of cracks was in truth the growth roadmap of the Celestial Dome. He no longer viewed cracks as wound-marks needing repair, but as the Celestial Dome telling him how it wished to grow.
He began to cooperate with the Celestial Dome's growth rather than resist it. When a new crack appeared, he would not immediately seal it but would first observe its direction and speed, judging whether it was a dangerous fissure or a normal growth-line. If it was a normal growth-line, he would release Clear Qi, infusing it along the crack's direction, letting the Celestial Dome naturally expand outward at the crack. If it was a dangerous fissure, only then would he use Primordial Qi to seal it and prevent further cracking. This wisdom of selection saved him enormous effort and Primordial Qi — no longer futilely spending energy on preventing the Celestial Dome from its normal growth.
The manner in which Chaos Qi seeped in through cracks also varied. Some cracks admitted dense, active Chaos Qi; the moment that qi entered Heaven and Earth, it began condensing into masses, attempting to form new Chaos strongholds within Heaven and Earth. Other cracks admitted thin, inert residue; that residue, upon entering Heaven and Earth, quickly lost itself in the Clear-Turbid circulation, unable to pose any substantive threat. Pangu learned to rapidly judge their threat levels by sensing the temperature and thickness of the seeping Chaos Qi — hot, dense, malice-bearing ones required immediate handling; cool, thin, unconscious ones could be temporarily ignored. His judgment grew ever more exact with each handling.
The cracks on the Celestial Dome, under Pangu's patient observation, revealed another property — self-healing. Those shallow, fine cracks, in the absence of continued external tension, would gradually close on the dome's surface. Not sealed by external force, but the Celestial Dome's own material would slowly flow at the crack site, like the skin at the edge of a wound growing back on its own. Chaos could not self-repair; it had only ceaseless homogenization. But Heaven and Earth, after sustaining damage, possessed the capacity for self-healing; they could recover from trauma and become stronger and tougher.
As time passed, Pangu's attitude toward the cracks shifted from worry to acceptance, and from acceptance to understanding. He no longer viewed every crack as a flaw needing repair but as normal creases produced when Heaven and Earth breathed. The Celestial Dome would not shatter just because it had cracks — it was far tougher than it appeared. Those cracks even had a positive function: they provided a release channel for excess pressure between Heaven and Earth, preventing energy from accumulating excessively in some local spot and causing greater destruction.
From the cracks on the Celestial Dome, there occasionally seeped a thread of exceedingly faint cool wind. That cool wind blew from the cracks and brushed past his cheeks, carrying a breath that did not belong to this Heaven and Earth — it was the residual breath of the Chaos Era, ancient, deep, carrying the sedimentary flavor of endless ages. He let those winds brush past his face without frowning. Though the Chaos Era had already ended, the breath it left behind was not something to be despised — it was the place of his birth, the homeland where he had existed for the Eternal Ages. Even if that homeland had shattered into fragments, its breath was still worth feeling one last time.
The cracks, in the process of self-healing, would emit for an instant an exceedingly faint warmth — not a rise in temperature, but a sensation of heat produced when energy flow accelerated. Pangu pressed his palm above a crack that was self-healing, feeling that warmth seep in through his palm. The self-healing process of those cracks was the process by which the Celestial Dome remade itself — after old cracks closed, new material would form at the crack site, tougher and denser than the original. Each self-healing was a reinforcement, making the Celestial Dome ever sturdier. Cracks were not flaws of the Celestial Dome — they were the channels through which Heaven and Earth perfected themselves.
When the cracks on the Celestial Dome healed, they released threads of fine energy currents. Those energy currents dispersed through the air and converged with those released from other cracks, weaving a complex energy web along the inner wall of the Celestial Dome. The energy of that web was extremely weak — so weak that he could barely feel it without focusing his full attention — yet it undoubtedly existed. The structure of the web highly overlapped with the distribution of the Celestial Dome's cracks, like another form of expression of those cracks. Energy originated from fissures; order emerged from disorder — an important law of Heaven and Earth's operation.
Sometimes he would see faint light passing through not-yet-fully-healed fissures on the Celestial Dome, casting thin pillars of light between Heaven and Earth. Those pillars of light moved slowly through the air; wherever they shone, a bright patch appeared on the ground. The minute dust floating in the light-pillars showed their outlines — that dust slowly rotated within the beams of light, like tiny stars dancing in the radiance. The greatest fissure could not block the penetration of light; the deepest wound would heal within the light.
There was one relatively large crack at the very center of the Celestial Dome, running from east to west across more than half the vault. Unlike the other fine cracks, it could not fully self-heal — its two ends had closed, but the middle segment always retained a nearly invisible shallow scar. The width of that scar was less than the diameter of a single strand of hair, yet it drew a clear line across the dark background of the Celestial Dome. Pangu lightly traced along that line with the pad of his finger, feeling a faint depression at the scar on the dome's surface — not a dangerous fissure, merely a memory-line left after time had filled it in.