Chapter Ninety-Five: Residual Blight of Turbid Qi, Chaos in Heaven and Earth

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

Even as Pangu focused on resisting the external remnant spirits, the internal turbid qi rose in turmoil once more. The residual turbid qi settled deep underground had, at some unknown point, begun to mutate. It was no longer mere inert gas but had become a diffusive, corrosive presence. Pangu named it the turbid blight.

The turbid blight seeped upward from the depths. Wherever it passed, the earth turned black, clear qi became contaminated, and the very foundations of life were eaten away. It spread through Heaven and Earth like a pestilence. Left unchecked, it could corrode the entire world into nothing.

Pangu had no choice but to divert part of his strength to combat the turbid blight. He erected multiple primordial qi barriers deep within the earth to block its spread, while simultaneously channeling clear qi downward to transform turbidity with clarity. These two measures, applied together, curbed the blight's advance to some degree.

But the source of the blight remained. The turbid blight substance continuously generated in the depths — unless eliminated at the root, it would sooner or later breach his defenses. Pangu knew this was merely a delaying tactic. The true solution required him to find the fundamental cause of the blight's generation.

Residual blight of Turbid Qi, Chaos in Heaven and Earth. Beset from within and without, Pangu struggled to maintain the world's stability.

The turbid qi residue that had not coalesced into solid form drifted through the world like mist grown teeth. It possessed no fixed shape, floating freely through the Primordial Qi Sea, devouring every trace of pure primordial qi it encountered. Its sole survival instinct was to enlarge its own bulk. Pangu was forced to divert extra energy to track and eliminate those qi masses. The turbid qi's mode of diffusion reminded Pangu of the scene when the Chaos Egg had shattered and chaotic qi gushed forth — pervasive infiltration. The turbid qi passed through the fissures in the strata, spreading in every direction along the pathways of energy flow, forming dark currents invisible to the naked eye within the clear-turbid circulation. The course of those dark currents closely aligned with the world's energy channels — the turbid qi was not drifting at random; it was exploiting the world's own circulatory order to propagate itself.

Pangu's feet were planted deep in the earth. His toes pierced the crust like mountain roots, sensing every faint tremor below the strata. The paths of the turbid blight's infiltration transmitted upward through his soles — first, an ice-cold sting at the center of his foot, as if something had bitten him from underground. That sting crept upward along his legs, leaving a sticky, unsettling aftertaste in his marrow. He looked down at the earth and saw spiderweb-like black veins spreading around his feet. Those veins were slowly expanding, each one corresponding to a channel of turbid blight infiltration deep beneath the ground.

He raised his hand and channeled clear qi down into the strata. The power of Clear Qi cascaded from his palm like water, seeping along his legs into the earth. Where the clear qi passed, the black veins were pressed back, retreating slowly like an ebbing tide. But Pangu could feel it was only temporary — the turbid blight had not been destroyed, merely driven deeper. It was regrouping in the farther depths, waiting for the next chance to surge upward.

Something had gone wrong with the clear-turbid circulation between Heaven and Earth. Pangu sank his Spirit-Consciousness into the circulation order to investigate and found that, at some unknown point, the residual turbid qi that was supposed to be broken down and transformed during the cycle had developed resistance to transformation. It had nested within the circulation channels, clinging like a parasite to the routes of Clear Qi flow, greedily absorbing the pure energy from the clear qi. A channel of Clear Qi that had once flowed freely was now narrowed and constricted by turbid qi erosion, its flow rate nearly halved. Pangu had no choice but to manually clear the blocked channels. He condensed his willpower into fine threads of Spirit-Consciousness, probing into those narrow fissures, bit by bit peeling away the turbid qi residue. The sensation was like scraping moss off stone with his own fingers — laborious, monotonous, and without end. He would clear one channel, turn around, and find fresh turbid qi sediment already forming where he had just cleaned.

The free-floating turbid qi masses drifting through the world were even more troublesome than the turbid blight in the strata. They had no fixed position, drifting everywhere with the currents of the Primordial Qi Sea. Pangu once tracked a fist-sized turbid qi mass for three full days and nights. Its trajectory followed no discernible pattern — at times riding the airflow upward, at times descending against the wind, at times hanging motionless in midair as if listening for something. Pangu's Spirit-Consciousness locked onto its position, but just as he drew near, the qi mass suddenly burst apart like a startled bird, splitting into more than a dozen smaller fragments that fled in different directions. He had to lock onto all the fragments simultaneously, capturing and purifying each one. He repeated such hunts dozens of times every day.

His lower back began to ache. This was a sensation he had never felt before. No matter how long he had stood in the past, his body had never experienced the slightest discomfort. But now, the prolonged bracing combined with frequent bending to clean had produced a dull, persistent ache in his lumbar spine. The pain was not intense, but it followed him like a shadow, reminding him that his body was no longer the tireless vessel it had once been.

A gray-black zone had appeared in the southeastern region of Heaven and Earth. The sky there was shrouded by a shallow layer of turbid mist that sunlight could not penetrate; the land below was a dead, silent gray. As Pangu drew near, he sensed a damp, decaying odor. It wormed into his nostrils and stung him into a sneeze. That sneeze shook the Celestial Dome, sending the just-stabilized firmament swaying again. He had to brace the dome harder while freeing one hand to disperse the turbid mist. His hand swept through the air, raising a great wind that blew the mist away. But the gray-black sediment on the ground remained. It clung to the surfaces of rock and soil like moss, emitting a sour, putrid smell. Pangu crouched down and scraped at the sediment with a finger. A warm, slick sensation came through his fingertip — the heat given off by something living, something metabolizing. He shook his hand, but the warmth lingered on his fingertip for a long while before fading.

He toured the Four Poles and found that the turbid blight's spread was uneven. In some places, it was so severe the earth's skin had ulcerated, black inner layers folding outward; in others, only scattered spots of infection dotted the landscape. Those heavily infected zones were distributed across the world like festering wounds, connected to one another by underground dark currents, forming an enormous network of turbid blight. Pangu realized that network possessed its own life rhythm — it was breathing. Each 'inhalation' drew turbid qi from the depths; each 'exhalation' released pollutants toward the surface. The network's center lay directly beneath the earth, at the deepest point between Pangu's feet. The turbid blight concentration there was a hundred times that of anywhere else.

He pressed his palm to the ground and felt the network's pulse. A rhythmic, low heartbeat came through the soil beneath his hand — thump, thump, thump — its cadence eerily synchronized with the counterattack rhythm of the Chaos remnant spirits. Pangu understood at once: there was some kind of tacit coordination between the Chaos remnant spirits and the turbid blight underground. The remnant spirits harried him from outside, the turbid blight ate away at him from within, the two flanks coordinating so well that he could barely attend to both. He stood up and saw that his handprint remained on the ground — in the palm-shaped depression, the soil had turned charred black, still sizzling with white smoke. That was the residue of his palm's primordial qi clashing against the turbid blight.

In the distance, the vegetation on another mountain peak had withered. Pangu looked over and saw a great expanse of brown patches spreading across the mountainside, like ringworm growing on the mountain's body. Those patches were visibly expanding — tree after tree toppling, patch after patch of grass withering, exposing the bare, cracked soil beneath. A nameless small beast burst from the withered grass, its body caked with brown turbid blight particles. It ran a few steps before collapsing into convulsions. Pangu had no time to think — he sent a stream of Primordial Qi to envelop the small beast and forced the turbid blight from its body. The beast stirred in his palm, opened its eyes and looked at him, then fled with desperate speed. Pangu watched it vanish into the distance, but no relief came to his heart — he could save this one, but not all of them.

He raised his head. Several new cracks had appeared across the Celestial Dome, fine as strands of hair, spreading from the center outward like crazing on porcelain. Every crack corresponded to a moment his attention had been diverted toward the turbid blight, weakening his support of the firmament. He refocused his concentration on his arms, feeling the weight of the Celestial Dome transmit from his arms to his shoulders, then from his shoulders through his entire body. That weight was heavier than before — because he had grown weaker.