Chapter Sixty-Three: Wind, Rain, and Thunder, the Surging of Primordial Qi
Volume Two: The Separation of Clear and Turbid — The First Opening of Heaven and Earth
Once the alternation of day and night had stabilized, ever more complex natural phenomena began to appear between Heaven and Earth. The first of these was wind. The uneven distribution of Clear and Turbid currents created pressure differentials across Heaven and Earth, and the flow of air from high-pressure zones to low-pressure zones produced a continuous, unceasing motion. This was the origin of wind.
Wind carried water vapor with it. Pangu discovered that clear qi contained a trace aqueous element. When water vapor rose with the air currents to high altitudes and encountered cold, it condensed into clouds. The cloud-layers grew ever thicker, the water vapor ever more saturated, until at last it fell in the form of rain. This was the first rain between Heaven and Earth.
The violent friction of Clear and Turbid currents produced a yet more powerful phenomenon — thunder and lightning. When two opposing currents of air sheared against each other at high speed, the collision of Clear and Turbid forces gave off a tremendous roar and a brilliant flash. The roar was thunder; the flash was lightning. Wind, rain, thunder, and lightning appeared together, and between Heaven and Earth unfolded the first true spectacle of weather.
Pangu did not suppress these phenomena. Fierce though the wind, rain, and thunder were, they were the means by which Heaven and Earth regulated themselves. Wind carried away excess heat and moisture; rain moistened the parched Great Earth; lightning activated the primordial qi suspended in the air. These phenomena, which seemed so violent, were in truth each contributing to the equilibrium of the world.
Wind and rain and thunder — primordial qi surged. Heaven and Earth had transformed from a dead-still Chaos into a vast, vibrant machine. Pangu stood amid the wind and rain, beneath the lightning's glare, and felt the first breath of this world, its first pulse, its first heartbeat.
The first storm took shape between Heaven and Earth. Driven by the temperature difference between high altitude and low, primordial qi churned violently, forming rotating air currents. Those currents swept up fine droplets of water vapor, which condensed into clouds at high altitude. The cloud-layers grew ever thicker and heavier until they could no longer sustain their own moisture — and the rain fell. Pangu stood in the rain and was drenched for the first time. Rainwater ran along his hair, down his cheeks, tracing the contours of his body before seeping into the soil beneath his feet. Heaven and Earth were expressing themselves — not through language, but through weather.
The first great storm between Heaven and Earth arrived without the slightest warning. All Pangu felt was the Celestial Dome overhead abruptly growing far heavier than usual, and an oppressive sensation — unsettling — descending from the sky. Immediately afterward, the underside of the Celestial Dome began to churn — not the normal flow of clear qi, but a violent, boiling-like roiling. Within this churning, layer upon layer of gray-white qi-masses gathered beneath the dome, growing ever thicker, ever heavier, until they could no longer bear their own weight.
The first drop of water fell from those qi-masses. It struck the surface of the Great Earth, pitting a tiny hollow in the dust, then vanished underground. Then came the second drop, the third, and then hundreds, thousands — rain cascaded down from beneath the Celestial Dome like a curtain stitching the entirety of Heaven and Earth together. Pangu stood in the rain, feeling the sensation of the drops striking his body — cool, soft, carrying with them a faint chill brought from the dome above. A wholly new mode of connection had appeared between Heaven and Earth — not eternal support, but flowing exchange.
The rain scoured the surface of the Great Earth. Those parched drifts of dust, saturated by the rain, turned to damp soil. Rainwater gathered into rivulets, flowing downward along the contours of the land — those channels carved by the rain were the embryonic forms of the rivers that would one day cross the earth. Water would be the most active, most creative substance upon the Great Earth — it could flow, could permeate, could scour, could sculpt. Water was the softest yet most resilient force between Heaven and Earth.
After the rain ceased, Heaven and Earth underwent a thorough cleansing. Dust suspended in the air was carried down by the rainwater and deposited on the earth's surface; the remnants of Chaos were likewise scoured and purified by the rain. The air between Heaven and Earth became fresher than it had ever been. Pangu drew a deep breath of that post-rain air and tasted a washed purity — as though Heaven and Earth had given themselves a thorough spring cleaning.
The appearance of thunder and lightning shook Pangu even more deeply than wind and rain. When two masses of primordial qi bearing opposite charges collided between Heaven and Earth, a blinding white flash seared across the sky above his head, followed immediately by a heaven-shattering, earth-splitting roar — that white blaze tore through the darkness of the entire world, illuminating everything, for that instant, as bright as day. In that light, Pangu saw a vision between Heaven and Earth unlike anything he had ever witnessed — every detail exposed in that split-second white glare, startlingly clear. Then the light vanished, and the world plunged back into darkness, but the image of that instant was seared forever into his perception.
The force of thunder and lightning made Pangu feel the wildness of nature. It was not a force he could control, nor one the Clear-Turbid circulation could readily digest; it was an independent, primal natural force, carrying a hint of aggression. It came from the abrupt release of primordial qi under extreme conditions — when two masses of primordial qi, utterly different in temperature and nature, collided while in a state of high-speed motion, their energy would erupt in a concentrated burst within the briefest span, producing that world-rending light and sound. Heaven and Earth were not only a gentle nurturer — they could rage as well.
After the wind and rain came the rainbow. When the rays of the sun passed through the water vapor lingering in the air after the rain, a seven-colored arc of light appeared for the first time between Heaven and Earth — red, oreach, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet; the seven colors arranged themselves across the canopy of the sky into a perfect semicircular arch. Light was not singular — it was, in truth, a mixture of seven colors, mixed so seamlessly under ordinary conditions that one believed it possessed only one hue. Only when refracted under special conditions did it reveal its inner richness. Many things in the world that appeared singular on the surface contained, within, a diversity far richer than their surface suggested. Like light. Like Heaven and Earth. Like Pangu himself.
When the wind swept across his body, it brought three distinct tactile sensations — a light breeze brushed over his skin soft as a feather; a stiff wind pressed against the surface of his body like cloth pulled taut; a gale struck his torso like a fist. Winds of different intensity served entirely different functions: light breezes carried away the faint heat of the ground; stiff winds balanced temperature differences between regions; gales dispersed the buildup of energy across broad expanses. Wind was not a single, uniform weather phenomenon — it possessed its own layers and division of labor.
The forms of the clouds between Heaven and Earth stirred a deep fascination in Pangu. Those white masses, condensed from water vapor, drifted slowly at high altitude — now gathering into heaps, now dispersing into sheets, now linking into a single unbroken cloud-layer blanketing the entire vault of the sky. The thickness and color of the cloud-layers directly determined whether rain would fall — thin clouds let light through, thick clouds blocked it, dark clouds held rain. The simplest cycle of water vapor between Heaven and Earth: it evaporated from the land's surface, rose into the sky, condensed into clouds at high altitude, accumulated within the clouds to the point of saturation, then fell back to the land's surface as rain.
When the sound of thunder reverberated through the space between Heaven and Earth, Pangu felt a primal awe. That sound was like a cry rising from the deepest veins of the world — not anger, not warning, but the unavoidable expression of energy in the moment of its release. Thunder traveled through the air far more slowly than light, and so it was long after the lightning flash that he heard the thunder's voice. That time-difference split light and sound into two separate events in his perception — first, a white blaze tearing through Heaven and Earth; then, much later, the roar that followed.
After the thunder, a faint scorched scent lingered in the air — not the smell of burned matter, but the residual trace of primordial qi instantaneously ionized under extreme energy. The scent was sharp and fresh, as though Heaven and Earth had been dis-infected by the lightning strike. Pangu drew a deep breath of that thunder-tinged air and felt a faint electric current travel along his respiratory passage into his body, leaving a slight tingling numbness on the tip of his tongue — the last trace left behind by the lightning in the air, an aftertaste of the bolt he had never before experienced.
On the surface of the Great Earth after the downpour, the first true puddles appeared. These puddles were not deep — at their deepest, they barely submerged the knuckles of his toes — but scattered across the earth's surface, they formed irregular mirrors, each reflecting the faint glow cast by the Celestial Dome. Pangu looked down at the reflections in those puddles and saw a small fragment of the dome's image floating upon the surface of the water — Heaven and Earth meeting in a single drop, in another way, a miniature universe captured in microcosm.