Chapter Eighty-Seven: Dead Chaos Qi, the Dying Embers Rekindle
Volume Three: Supporting the Cosmos Across Eternal Ages — Heaven and Earth Take Fixed Form
Just as Pangu worried over the depletion of his Primordial Source, ominous signals arrived from beyond the boundaries of Heaven and Earth. The dead Chaos Qi that had been sealed beyond the world's edge, dormant for so many years, was beginning to stir once more. As though sensing Pangu's weakness, they were waking from their slumber.
The dead Chaos Qi coalesced at the boundaries of Heaven and Earth into masses of gray mist, then violently rammed against the Celestial Dome and the Great Earth. Each impact triggered tremors throughout the world. Probing with his remaining Spirit-Consciousness, Pangu discovered that this dead qi was even more ferocious, more invasive than before. It carried the rancor of Chaos's old order, seeking to drag this newborn world back into Chaos.
Worse still, this dead qi had begun to penetrate Heaven and Earth's defenses. It bored holes at the weak points of the Void Shell, like insects gnawing through timber — boring inward, bit by bit. Once it had infiltrated, it would contaminate the Clear and Turbid Qi, disrupt the balance of Yin-Yang.
Pangu was forced to divert precious strength to reinforce the boundaries of Heaven and Earth. He used his own primordial qi to fill the weak points of the Void Shell and force the infiltrating dead qi back out. Each reinforcement consumed vast quantities of Primordial Qi — and what he lacked most was precisely primordial qi.
Dead Chaos Qi — the dying embers rekindled. Amid the crisis of his depleting Primordial Source, Pangu faced a new challenge. He could not allow dead Chaos Qi to erode Heaven and Earth, yet he had no surplus strength to eliminate it completely. He could only barely hold the line, trading the smallest possible cost for the greatest possible time.
The remnants of Chaos, after several thousand years of dormancy, were stirring into renewed activity. That dead qi had already been diluted by the Clear-Turbid circulation to a nearly imperceptible degree, but it had gathered in the depths of the earth, finding, in the crevices of the Earth Veins, a corner where it could re-coalesce. It had no consciousness, no objective — only an instinctual impulse: to return to Chaos. The rekindling of dead Chaos Qi was something Pangu had not anticipated. He had thought that, after the long purification of the second volume, the Chaos remnants had been thoroughly diluted to harmlessness by the Clear-Turbid circulation. But across these years of sustained suppression, he discovered that those remnants had not vanished — they had, within the blind spots of his perception — the most remote edges of Heaven and Earth, the deepest bottoms of the turbid qi sedimentation layers — regathered. They existed in a manner far more covert than he had imagined, like hibernating snakes slowly rousing as the warm season arrived.
It was during a routine boundary patrol that Pangu detected the anomaly. As his Spirit-Consciousness swept along the edge of Heaven and Earth, it touched, in the direction of the East Pole, something that should not have been there — a gray speck. That gray speck was very small, smaller than the tiniest particle of Turbid Qi he had ever seen, yet the aura it emitted was one he could never mistake: Chaos. Pure, undifferentiated, void-like, abyssal Chaos. That gray speck was embedded in the boundary of Heaven and Earth like a parasite clinging to skin, and it was infiltrating inward at an extremely slow pace.
He immediately focused his Spirit-Consciousness upon that gray speck. In his Spirit-Platform Sea, the speck was magnified countless times — it was a miniature Chaos vortex, at its core a slow but steady rotation. That rotation carried a characteristic suction, dragging the surrounding clear qi in, bit by bit, and converting it into grayness identical to itself. With each portion of Clear Qi converted, the gray speck grew a little larger, and its suction grew a little stronger. Pangu knew what this was — the old order of Chaos attempting to rebuild its stronghold within Heaven and Earth. The residual dead Chaos Qi had not vanished; it had merely been waiting for its moment. Now the moment had come, and it was counterattacking.
Pangu extended his right hand, forcing a thread of Primordial Source energy from his fingertip — a luminous filament as fine as a strand of hair — and stabbed it toward that gray speck. The instant the light-filament touched the speck, he felt a violent repulsive force — like two magnets of the same pole pushing each other apart. Under that repulsion, the gray speck shuddered, then accelerated its rotation, attempting to absorb the light-filament as well. Pangu did not retreat. He increased the release of his Primordial Source, making the filament thicker and brighter, piercing through the outer layer of the gray speck and stabbing into its core. Under the burning of the light-filament, the gray speck emitted a soundless shriek — an energy-oscillation that detonated directly in his Spirit-Platform Sea. Pangu's head snapped backward; that oscillation triggered a violent disturbance in his Spirit-Consciousness, like a stone hurled into a calm lake. He clenched his jaw, steadied the oscillation in his Spirit-Platform Sea, and continued to release Primordial Source until the gray speck was completely vaporized in the light-filament.
But one gray speck vanished, and another appeared elsewhere. When Pangu's Spirit-Consciousness swept the full boundary, he discovered no fewer than a dozen similar anomalous points — some at the East Pole, some at the North Pole, some even in the depths of the Great Earth directly beneath his feet. They sprouted from the Void like weeds in spring — varying in size, varying in form, but identical in essence: all were products of dead Chaos Qi re-coalescing. In Pangu's heart rose an emotion he had not felt for a very long time: a chill. An instinctive fear, rising from the depths of his Spirit-Platform Sea, toward a force he could not control. At last, he understood — Chaos had never truly been eradicated. It had merely been suppressed, diluted, scattered. But it would not perish, because it was a state more ancient, more fundamental than order. The moment he revealed the slightest weakness, it would re-coalesce, regrow, and seek once more to devour everything.
He began an endless campaign of eradication. Each time he discovered a gray speck, he purified it with Primordial Source energy. But each time he purified one, two new ones would appear in more concealed locations. They had learned to hide — no longer resting on the boundary surface, but boring into the minute fissures of the Void Shell, hiding in the deepest corners of the Heaven-Earth Interlayer, even parasitizing the flow-paths of Clear and Turbid Qi. They had learned to disguise themselves — some gray specks masked themselves as normal fluctuations of Turbid Qi; others hid within the residual energy of thunder and lightning, using the lingering traces of those bolts to veil their Chaos essence. Pangu was forced to expend ten times the energy and time he had used before for boundary patrols. The lamp-flame within his Spirit-Platform Sea — already growing dim — burned down even faster in this ceaseless campaign. Within seven days, he purified no fewer than three hundred gray specks, but on the morning of the eighth day, when he swept the boundary again, he found nearly four hundred more.
In the intervals between his campaigns of eradication, Pangu felt a kind of weariness — a weariness of the will. He could fight visible enemies; he could bear measurable weight. But this omnipresent infiltration — impossible ever to fully cleanse — was consuming his most precious resource: hope. Each time he believed he had thoroughly resolved the problem, Chaos would sprout anew in a corner he had not been watching. It did not fight him head-on — it merely existed, merely waited, merely eroded him with infinite patience. Standing at the center of this world he had shaped with his own hands, Pangu felt, for the first time, true loneliness — lonely in that he was the only one fighting this force. If he were gone, Heaven and Earth would return to Chaos. There was no second option, no reserve, no substitute.
He drew a deep breath and pressed that chill back down. Fear was useless; weariness was useless; loneliness was useless. There was only one thing he could do — stand straight, keep holding on, purify as many gray specks as he could. Even if, in the end, he lost, at least he would make Chaos pay a price. He withdrew his Spirit-Consciousness, stopped thinking about the number of gray specks, and refocused on the Great Earth beneath his feet and the Celestial Dome above his head. Chaos could nibble at the boundaries, but it could never understand the thing he had felt when he created this world — a force deeper than Chaos, the affirmation of life in its own existence, the faith of order in itself.
Pangu stared at those masses of gray vapor churning at the boundary. Their motion held no pattern, as though driven by a blind force. He thought of Mingdun — that opponent who had once ruled everything. These masses of vapor carried Mingdun's shadow, but they possessed none of Mingdun's consciousness — only Mingdun's instinct. They were like afterimages left behind after waking from a great dream, repeating a will that no longer existed. Dealing with them required patience, not strength.