Chapter Sixty-Nine: The Primordial Source Near Its End, the Mortal Form Slowly Failing

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

The discovery of the Turbid Qi Remnants made Pangu acutely aware of the time pressure he faced. He had to resolve these problems before his Primordial Source was utterly spent, or else, once his strength was gone, Heaven and Earth would be defenseless against the eruption of these hidden perils. But his Primordial Source was truly nearing its end.

Pangu used his Spirit-Consciousness to conduct one final comprehensive inspection of his Dao Body. The star-sea in his Spirit-Platform Sea had dimmed to the verge of extinguishment; the primordial qi flowing through his Innate Bone-Network was thin as gossamer threads. His Dao Body still maintained its outward form, but its inner vitality was nearly spent.

He estimated his remaining Primordial Source: it could still sustain the daily movement of Heaven and Earth for a stretch of time. But if Heaven and Earth experienced any major upheaval, or if he needed to release a vast burst of force, his remaining Primordial Source might not suffice. He had to husband every fraction of his strength with meticulous economy.

Pangu began to adjust his energy allocation. He directed more of his Primordial Source toward sustaining the basic stability of Heaven and Earth, and reduced unnecessary perception and intervention. He pulled his Spirit-Consciousness back from blanketing the entire heavens to covering only the core regions, focusing only on the most critical areas. He was like an oil lamp burning down to its last drops — he had to conserve every drop.

The Primordial Source neared its end; the mortal form slowly failed. Pangu experienced a weakness unlike any he had known — a sensation he had not felt since first awakening in Chaos. Yet he did not surrender on account of it. In his own way, he persevered at the very limits of his endurance, like an ancient tree that still stands tall in the depths of winter.

Pangu's body, across the long ages of supporting the heavens, had undergone irreversible aging. His hair had turned from jet-black to ashen gray; his skin had gone from taut to slack; his eyes had shifted from bright to faintly clouded. Yet he had taken no spirit-elixir to forestall his decline — he allowed his body to age in step with Heaven and Earth. When Heaven and Earth grew old, they became more stable; when he grew old, he too grew more composed. Aging was not decay, but the natural state one entered after completing the greater part of one's task.

When his Primordial Source had fallen to less than half of its peak, Pangu's body began to show changes visible to the naked eye. His skin, once lustrous and smooth, became rough and dull, like the surface of a stone scoured too long by wind and sand. His hair, once raven-black, turned gray-white — not the mark of age, but the evidence of insufficient life-energy. His eyes, though still capable of seeing every corner of Heaven and Earth, now showed fine blood-vessels threading through the whites — the only visible proof, upon his face, of the exhaustion born from an eternity without rest, without recovery.

The changes in his physical form ran far deeper than what the surface revealed. Pangu could feel his muscles declining — not that they had become powerless, but that they recovered ever more slowly after each exertion. Before, his muscles could return to full strength shortly after a single intense exertion; now, they needed much longer to regain their normal state. His bones, too, issued silent complaints — the joints that bore the pressure of the Celestial Dome from dawn to dusk had begun to emit dry, grinding sounds, like bodily parts starved of lubrication.

The most disquieting change came from the energy circulation within his body. Before, energy had flowed through his meridian channels like a great rushing river — abundant, forceful. Now that great river had shrunk to a stream, and at certain narrow passages along the meridians, the flow even broke. Each break in the flow brought Pangu a brief spell of dizziness — as though he had nearly lost consciousness before pulling back at the very last instant. The energy within his body could no longer sustain a complete circuit.

His height, too, had stopped increasing. Before, he had grown in synchrony with Heaven and Earth — for every zhang the Celestial Dome rose, he grew one zhang taller. But now, though the dome still rose, he grew no more. In that stasis, he clearly perceived the divergence between himself and Heaven and Earth — the world was still growing, but he could no longer keep pace with it.

The exhaustion of his Primordial Source triggered a chain reaction within Pangu's body. As energy grew scarce, his body began to of its own accord shut down certain non-essential functions — first among them, those functions connected to world-perception. He found that his perception of distant corners was growing ever more blurred; in some of the marginal regions of Heaven and Earth, he could only sense their rough state, and could no longer see every detail as before. Next came the functions connected to bodily repair — he discovered that the tiny wounds on his skin were healing more slowly; those minute injuries that had once vanished in the blink of an eye now lingered on the surface of his skin for longer stretches.

Among the signs of his physical decline, the change that unsettled Pangu most came from his eyes. His vision was deteriorating — not to the point of blindness, but the most minute gradations of light and shadow that he had once been able to see were now vanishing from his field of view. The alternation of brightness and dimness, the layered gradations of color, the subtle shifts in the outlines of distant, hazy forms — those rich layers that had once composed his visual world were being stripped away, one by one, leaving only the most basic outlines and contrasts of light and dark.

At the same time, Pangu's hearing underwent an uncanny compensatory phenomenon. The subtle observational capacities his eyes had lost seemed to have transferred to his ears — he began to hear sounds he had never before heard. These sounds came from the deepest interior of Heaven and Earth: the faint cracking sounds of the Great Earth's solid layers expanding and contracting with heat and cold; the extremely low, deep vibrations generated when the membrane of the Celestial Dome was buffeted by air currents; the compression-sounds of the turbid qi masses deep underground, slowly contracting under pressure. These sounds were like a silent symphony no one had ever heard, playing for him in his final days the breathing of Heaven and Earth. When one thing is lost, another is often gained in compensation.

The tips of his fingers began to register a faint coolness he could not dispel from his awareness — not a coolness caused by the external temperature, but a coolness generated from within his fingers, belonging to him alone. This coolness spread gradually upward from his fingertips, like winter cold rising from the ground, creeping slowly, inexorably, across the furthest reaches of his body. This was the result of his blood slowing — the blood still flowed, but its pace was no longer what it had been, and the extremities were the first to register the temperature-change caused by that slowing.

Endurance had become his sole remaining reliance. He could no longer count on explosive bursts of strength to handle emergencies — his body could no longer release great quantities of energy in a short span to meet a crisis. He could only rely on sustained endurance, on that capacity to maintain his existing state without requiring large energy expenditures. His body was like charcoal after a long burn — no longer bearing bright flames, but the red-hot core could still radiate warmth for a long, long while. Endurance was that final red glow, providing him with sustained warmth when he needed it most.

His sense of taste, too, had undergone a kind of transference — he no longer relied solely on vision and touch to feel the world, but had gained a capacity to taste the world through breathing. When he drew a deep breath, he could 'taste' the flavors of the different gases in the air — the faint sweetness of clear qi, the faint bitterness of turbid qi, the bland nothingness of primordial qi, and the fresh, clean moisture of the air after rain. These flavors layered together, composing the unique savor of Heaven and Earth.

After his physical strength had waned, he discovered for the first time that simply looking at the Celestial Dome with his own eyes was a pleasure in itself — requiring no expenditure of energy, only lifting his head, letting light enter his pupils, and the image of the dome would naturally form upon his retinas. This was the least energy-consuming mode of perception his body possessed — vision did not require the expenditure of Spirit-Consciousness as perception did, did not require focused attention as hearing did; it merely passively received the light-signals arriving from the Celestial Dome. In this mode of visual observation, whose energy cost was nearly zero, he found a new way to sustain his perception of Heaven and Earth — it turned out that he did not need to use his Spirit-Consciousness to scan every corner; merely looking with his eyes was enough to gather much crucial information.