Chapter Ninety: Resisting with His Body, Guarding the Four Directions

Volume Three: Supporting the Cosmos Across Eternal Ages — Heaven and Earth Take Fixed Form

Faced with the relentless harassment of the old order's remnant spirits, Pangu resolved to adopt a more aggressive defensive strategy. He would no longer passively wait for attacks to arrive before patching the damage. Instead, he would take the initiative, suppressing the remnant spirits before they could even launch their assaults. This required him to divert more Spirit-Consciousness and primordial qi, but the results were markedly better.

He dispersed his strength across the Four Poles and Eight Expanses, leaving his primordial qi marks at every critical node. These marks stood watch like outpost sentinels, continuously monitoring the condition of the Heaven-Earth boundary. The moment they detected anomalous fluctuations, they would automatically trigger a defensive response. In this way, Pangu no longer needed to maintain hypervigilance at every moment.

But he paid a heavier price for this. Dispersing his strength across the Four Poles and Eight Expanses meant that his core power was severely diluted. His original body, standing between Heaven and Earth, grew more vulnerable than before. If a great upheaval struck the world at such a moment, he might not be able to respond in time.

It was a gamble. Pangu chose to trust in the world's stability. After so long a period of growth, Heaven and Earth had developed considerable resilience — sustaining themselves for short intervals should not be a problem. He staked his wager on the world's own maturation.

Resisting with his body, guarding the Four Directions. Pangu transformed himself into Heaven and Earth's protective shield. He was consuming himself to defend this world. Every additional day he endured, the world's foundation grew a fraction firmer, one step closer to its final form.

The Chaos remnant spirits launched simultaneous assaults from all four directions. East, south, west, north — at each bearing, a vortex of condensed turbid qi hammered against the world's boundary. Pangu knew that passive resistance alone could not hold for long. He drove his feet deeper into the rock beneath him, and at the same time released his will outward, blanketing the entire Celestial Dome under assault. That layer of will was thin yet resilient — like a membrane invisible to the naked eye — dispersing the impact energy of the remnant spirits' attacks across the entire surface of the heavens. Pangu mobilized his whole body's strength to meet this assault. He did not block with his hands — his hands were still bracing the Celestial Dome and could not be freed. He blocked with his will — concentrating all of his spiritual power on those impact points, erecting an invisible barrier of will directly in the chaotic qi vortices' path. That barrier was not material; it was an energy field composed of pure, concentrated will to order, drawn from the very core of Pangu's being. When the chaotic qi vortices crashed against the barrier, it was like water striking rock — they were forced to split and flow around.

The assault from all four directions intensified simultaneously. Pangu stood at the center of Heaven and Earth. His spine was like a giant pillar on the verge of buckling. His feet had sunk ankle-deep into the rock. Cracks spread across the eastern sky-wall, branching in every direction like fissures on a sheet of ice. The southern foundation was collapsing; the rock beneath his feet emitted a low grinding rumble, like a mountain slowly sliding downward. The clear qi layer in the west had caved in — a vast expanse of sky sagging downward like a curtain whose supports had been ripped away. In the north, that stream of Turbid Qi had already infiltrated deep into the Earth Veins, eating away at the most critical junctures in the world's structure.

Pangu's arms bore the weight. His muscle fibers stretched taut one by one to their limits; beneath his skin, blue-green veins bulged like tree roots coiling over rock. Sweat rolled from his forehead — pure liquid condensed from the primordial qi circulating at high speed within his body, escaping through his pores. The droplets struck the ground and evaporated at once, dispersing as white mist.

He had been standing for hundreds of thousands of years, yet every breath in this moment was harder than any previous millennium. The remnant spirits' attacks were draining him — and, worse, draining the world's own stability. He could feel that beyond his will, Heaven and Earth were trembling on instinct — the newly formed rock strata, the recently stabilized air currents, the freshly congealed light and shadow, all emitting uneasy fluctuations under Chaos's assault. He was not merely bearing the weight himself; he was bearing the fear of the entire world.

He tried to pour more of his will into the world's structure. That will flowed from his mind like a thin stream, traveling down his spine to his four limbs, and from his extremities seeping into the earth beneath his feet and the Celestial Dome above his head. He needed Heaven and Earth to feel his presence, to know that someone was holding them up. This method worked at first — the fluctuations gradually stilled after his will infused them. But after the stilling came a worse problem: Heaven and Earth began to rely on his will. They no longer repaired themselves, but waited for him to act. This meant he had to spend even more strength just to keep the world running normally.

This could not continue. Pangu made a decisive choice. He began to recall the primordial qi marks he had scattered across the Four Poles and Eight Expanses, drawing the power he had used for surveillance and early warning back into his body. Those streams of Primordial Qi collided with Chaos remnant spirits several times on the way back, and every collision sent a sharp sting through him — as if countless fine needles were piercing every part of his body at once. He did not stop. He forced every last qi mark back into his body. When those forces flowed back into his Primordial Source core, his body emitted a low, resonant hum — like the Earth Veins resonating in the deep. His muscles swelled in that instant, and the light across his skin burned brighter than before.

Concentrated power would accomplish more focused work. Pangu chose a defense strategy of breaking through the surface at a single point. He would no longer try to plug every breach at once, but would concentrate all his strength on the most critical position — the world's central axis. This axis stretched from the highest point of the Celestial Dome above his head straight down to the deepest core of the earth beneath his feet, the most vital load-bearing segment of the entire world's structure. As long as this axis was not severed, Heaven and Earth would not collapse.

Within a few short days, the Four Poles' assault had torn open vast regions along the world's boundary. The eastern sky-wall was ripped by a rift stretching ten thousand li, the sky curling outward on both sides of the fissure like torn cloth. The southern foundation collapsed across a wide area, forming a bottomless abyss. The western clear qi layer vanished entirely across a thousand-li radius — that patch of sky became a blank zone where light itself warped. In the north, turbid qi had contaminated the source of the Earth Veins; a black liquid seeped from the cracks in the rock, flowing across the ground like blood.

Pangu did not turn to look at the damage. He focused his entire attention on the central axis. Both hands braced against the exact center above his head, both feet planted in the exact center below — his whole body driven between Heaven and Earth like a nail. Under the immense pressure, his bones emitted a continuous creaking sound — the noise of bone self-compressing at its structural limit. His bone density was increasing; the energy within his marrow was being compressed under pressure into a purer form.

The will of the Chaos remnants found him. That will no longer scattered across four directions, but coalesced from the world's edges into a single stream, rushing toward him along the central axis. Mingdun's will-fragments let out their final shriek within that assault — it already knew it could not truly destroy Pangu, but it still sought to leave an indelible wound upon him before vanishing.

Pangu did not dodge. He opened his eyes wide and stared directly into the oncoming Chaos torrent. His pupils turned a bottomless black under the torrent's reflection, but at their deepest point, a sliver of silver-white light burned stubbornly — the spark of the will to order, his final card.

The Chaos torrent crashed into him.

In that instant, Heaven and Earth fell silent.

All sound vanished — the howl of wind, the grinding of rock, the trembling of the Celestial Dome, even Pangu's own heartbeat, all disappeared in that moment. The world became a soundless image, like a painting frozen in time. Pangu's body bent backward into a bow under the torrent's impact, his spine releasing a cascade of cracking sounds under the immense pressure — every vertebra being re-compacted at its absolute limit. His chest caved inward; the cartilage between his ribs was squeezed, fine fissures forming within. His lips were pressed shut, but a silver-white light blazed through the seams of his clenched teeth — the glow of his primordial qi moving at its extreme threshold.

The impact lasted three full days.

For three days, Pangu did not move an inch. His body bore a concentrated strike equivalent to the entire remaining strength of the Chaos remnants, yet he never retreated a single step. His feet left two deep footprints in the ground. The rock at the edges of those footprints had melted under extreme heat, forming a smooth layer of vitrified glaze. The section of the Celestial Dome braced by his hands developed a hand-shaped protrusion — packed full of his primordial qi, it became a new structure within the heavens.

On the evening of the third day, the Chaos torrent finally began to weaken.

Mingdun's residual will let out one last shriek and dissolved. That will was no longer a complete consciousness, but shattered memory — memory of Chaos, memory of order, memory of birth. Those shards of memory scattered through the air like ash blown by the wind, falling into every corner of Heaven and Earth. Pangu made no effort to collect those memory shards. He let them disperse in the wind, then slowly raised his head. His face held no expression, but in his eyes there was a faint flicker — the look of one who had reached the absolute limit of exhaustion.

When he pulled his feet from the rock, two prints deep enough to reach his calves remained in the ground. He glanced down at those prints, then resumed pressing the Celestial Dome upward. This wave of Chaos remnant assault had cost him dearly — his Primordial Source expenditure had exceeded his estimate by thirty percent, and the damage to his physical body would require a long time to repair. But the price had bought a worthy result: this wave had consumed the last viable strength of the Chaos remnants. The war of attrition to come would be far easier.

His body trembled faintly — a natural response to extreme depletion. He suppressed that trembling, then spoke a sentence to himself in a calm voice. That sentence had no sound, only a single thought — a thought of endurance and inevitability — rekindling the strength to survive deep within his shattered body like a spark.

In the distance, the rifts at the world's edge were slowly healing. Though they still remained, they were no longer expanding. At the edge of the southern abyss, new rock began to well up from below. The vanished clear qi layer in the west began to gather again. Heaven and Earth were repairing themselves with their own power. Pangu's gamble — he had won.