Chapter 1 — The Egg

Before there were directions, everything was shut inside a single shell.

There was no above and no below. What was dark and heavy mingled with what was pale and light, thick and unmoving, like the white and yolk of an egg that had never been cracked. There was no sound, for there was no space for sound to cross.

In the center of that thickness, Pangu slept.

He had slept for eighteen thousand years. His knees were drawn up to his chest, his palms were pressed to his temples, and his breath moved in and out so slowly that one breath and the next were separated by seasons that had no names yet.

Then his eyelids stirred.

He opened his eyes, and saw nothing. What pressed against his eyeballs was the same darkness that pressed against his back and the soles of his feet. He tried to stretch his legs, and his heels struck something dense and unyielding. He tried to raise his arms, and his elbows met the same wall.

His chest grew tight.

Pangu reached into the dark at his side, and his fingers closed around the haft of a great axe. He did not know how long that axe had lain there with him. He gripped it with both hands, drew his shoulders back as far as the cramped space allowed, and swung it forward.

A sound tore through the dark, dry and heavy, like split stone.

The shell before him broke. It did not shatter into pieces. A long crack opened across the middle, and through that crack what had been mingled began to part. What was clear and light drifted upward, slow as smoke. What was murky and heavy sank downward, thick as mud settling to the bottom of a jar.

Pangu set his feet upon the sinking mud. He raised both palms and pressed them against the rising mist.

If he lowered his hands, the two would close together again. He could feel the weight above his palms, still soft, still wanting to fall back and mingle with the mud beneath his feet. So he stood between them, his knees bent and his neck bowed, holding the sky upon his shoulders.

Every day the sky rose one span higher. Every day the earth grew one span thicker. Every day Pangu’s body grew one span taller to fill the space between them.

No one watched him. There was no sun to mark the morning, and no moon to mark the night. There was only the cold pressure against his palms and the damp mud slowly hardening under his heels. His muscles knotted like the roots of an old tree. His beard grew down past his chest, past his knees, and trailed across the face of the earth that had no grass yet.

Eighteen thousand years passed in that way.

By the end of those years, the sky had risen ninety thousand li above the earth. Pangu stood straight at last. His arms were stretched straight above his head, his heels were planted deep in stone, and between his crown and his soles lay a vast, empty distance where the wind could finally blow.

He felt the sky above his palms. It no longer sank when he eased his fingers. It had hardened in its place, far and cold. He felt the earth beneath his feet. It was solid, wide, and still.

They would not close together again.

Pangu lowered his arms for the first time in eighteen thousand years. His shoulders dropped. His knees bent, slowly, like a mountain settling into the ground, and he lay down upon the earth he had held apart from the sky.

He let out one long breath, and did not draw another.

That breath did not vanish. It rushed across the bare plains and became the wind and the clouds. The last sound that left his throat rose and rolled along the roof of the sky, becoming thunder.

His left eye lifted from its socket, climbed into the east, and blazed as the sun. His right eye rose into the west, pale and cool, and became the moon.

His body did not rot. His four limbs and his trunk settled into the four quarters and the center, becoming the five great mountains that pinned down the corners of the earth. His blood flowed out from his veins, filling the low hollows and cutting long channels toward the sea, becoming the rivers that never run dry. His sinews stretched beneath the ground and became the roads of the land, and his flesh softened into the soil of the fields.

The long hair of his head and his beard drifted upward into the dark sky and scattered there as the stars. The fine hair upon his skin took root in the soil and grew green as grass and trees. His teeth and his bones hardened into jade and metal hidden inside the hills, and the sweat that still clung to his skin fell back as rain and morning dew.

When all of it was finished, the world was wide and complete.

The sun rose in the east and sank in the west. The rivers ran between their banks. The wind moved through the branches of the new trees, and the grass bent and rose again.

Yet across the whole breadth of the earth, from the foot of the five mountains to the shore of the eastern sea, no voice answered the wind.

---

Nüwa walked along the bank of a yellow river.

Her upper body was the body of a woman, with dark hair falling loose over her shoulders, and below the waist her body was the long, coiled body of a serpent that moved without sound over wet pebbles and dry reeds. Where she passed, birds looked down from the branches and deer lifted their heads from the water, then returned to their drinking.

She had walked for days across the plains and through the mountain passes. She had seen fish swimming in the clear shallows and beasts running in herds across the hills. Every creature had its kind. When a deer called, another deer answered from the thicket. When a bird rose from the reeds, ten more rose behind it.

Only she had no reflection in the world except the one that looked back at her from the water.

She stopped where the river curved and the current slowed. She knelt at the water’s edge and looked down. The surface was still. In it she saw her own brow, her eyes, her nose, and the line of her mouth. When she tilted her head, the face in the water tilted with her. When she reached out and touched the surface, the face broke into ripples and was gone.

She drew her hand back. Beneath the shallow water lay a bed of soft yellow clay, washed fine by the river.

Nüwa pushed both hands into the mud and lifted a lump of it onto her knee. It was cool and heavy, and it held the shape of her fingers.

She looked at the water again, waited until the ripples smoothed out, and began to press the clay. She shaped a round head, two shoulders, and a narrow chest. When she came to the waist, she did not give it a serpent’s tail like her own. She split the clay in two and rolled each half between her palms into a leg, with a knee that could bend and a flat sole at the bottom. She pinched out two arms, and with the tip of her fingernail she marked five tiny fingers on each hand.

She set the small figure down on the dry bank beside her.

Still holding her breath, she leaned close and blew lightly across its face.

The clay lost its wet sheen. It warmed to the color of sun-dried earth. The tiny chest rose, fell, and rose again. The figure blinked its eyes, moved its fingers in the dust, and pushed itself up onto its two feet. It stood no taller than her forearm. It looked at the river, looked at the sky, and then turned its face up toward Nüwa and made a clear, small sound in its throat.

Nüwa smiled. For the first time since she had walked the earth, the air around her did not feel empty.

She scooped up more clay and shaped another. This one she made slightly broader in the shoulder, and the next she made softer in the cheek. One after another she set them down upon the bank, and each one stood, shook the river mud from its heels, and gathered around her knees. They touched one another’s hands. They pointed at the water and laughed. Their voices were light and quick, like pebbles clicking together in a stream.

She worked while the sun climbed to the middle of the sky, and she kept working as it sloped toward the west. Dozens of small figures now ran along the riverbank, yet beyond that one bend of the river the plains still stretched out for thousands of li, silent and empty.

Her arms grew heavy. The yellow mud dried under her fingernails and stiffened her knuckles. If she shaped them one by one with her hands, she would sit by this river for a thousand years and still not fill a single valley.

She looked around the bank. Growing among the stones was a long, tough vine of wild cord-grass.

Nüwa pulled the vine free from the earth, wound one end around her wrist, and swung the other end down into the deep mud at the river’s edge. She dragged it back and forth until the whole length of the vine was coated thick with yellow mire. Then she stood upright, braced her serpent tail against the bank, and whipped the vine hard through the air.

Drops of mud flew from the cord like rain shaken from a branch.

Wherever a drop struck the dry ground, it did not flatten. As it touched the earth, it drew itself together, grew limbs and a head, and stood up. Nüwa whipped the vine to the east, to the west, and toward the open plain. Hundreds of drops scattered across the grass, and hundreds of men and women rose from the ground, brushing the dust from their knees and calling out to one another.

Before the sun had touched the western hills, the riverbank was crowded with them. She showed them how to pair together as man and woman, so that when their own days were done, children would be born from their bodies and she would not need to come back to the river with her hands in the mud.

In the generations that followed, they spread out from the river into the valleys. They learned to gather wild grain, to weave grass against the cold, and to sleep beneath roofs of branches. Nüwa walked among them from time to time, or watched them from the high ridges. They were small and fragile, and their lives passed quickly, like grass that greens in spring and browns in autumn, yet their villages were never quiet.

---

Then the sky broke.

It came without warning, in the middle of an ordinary day when women were hulling grain in the courtyards and men were setting fish traps in the shallows.

A sound came from the northwest first, deeper than any thunder Pangu’s voice had ever made. It was the sound of stone giving way under a weight it had carried for too long.

Across the dome of the sky, a jagged rent split open from horizon to horizon. Where the pale blue vault tore apart, there was no light behind it, only a black, cold emptiness that had lain outside the world since the day the egg was broken. The four pillars that held up the corners of the heavens shuddered and cracked.

At that very instant, the earth beneath the villages heaved and split. Long chasms opened across the fields, swallowing trees and houses whole. From deep below the rock, the dark waters of the nine springs surged upward through the cracks, cold and foaming, and spilled out across the plains.

In the mountains, the forests caught fire by themselves. Red flames ran along the ridges, driving the great beasts down from their lairs. Tigers and leopards with singed fur burst into the flooded valleys, seizing anyone they could reach, while from the sky giant birds of prey swooped down through the smoke, their talons closing around the shoulders of the old and the small.

Nüwa came down from the mountain pass at a run.

The yellow river she had known was gone. It had joined the dark water bursting from the split ground, turning the whole valley into a churning brown sea. Rain poured down straight through the rent in the sky, not in drops, but in solid sheets that beat the roofs flat into the mud.

Halfway up a stony hill that had not yet gone under, a few dozen people clung to the wet rocks. Below them, the water was rising fast, carrying drowned cattle, broken thatch, and the bodies of men and women whose faces were turned downward in the current.

At the edge of the water, a small boy stood on a jutting boulder, cut off from the hill by a rushing channel. A great serpent with gray scales was swimming toward the stone, its head raised above the foam.

Nüwa swept into the channel. Her tail struck the serpent across the neck and broke its spine with a single blow, sending its limp body spinning away into the dark flood. She reached up, lifted the boy from the boulder, and set him down on the higher ground among the others.

The boy was shivering so hard his teeth clicked. His fingers caught the edge of her garment and held on. On his cheek there was a smear of yellow mud, the same color as the clay she had held in her palms by the river long ago.

Above them, the crack in the sky widened with another groan of tearing stone. A fragment of the vault broke loose and fell flaming into the eastern hills.

The people on the hill pressed around her, weeping and holding up their children, waiting for her to shelter them beneath her arms.

Nüwa looked down at the boy’s small fingers gripping her hem. Then she looked up at the black gap yawning across the roof of the world. If that roof came down, there would be no hill left to stand on, and no river left to remember.

Gently, she pried the boy’s fingers loose from her cloth, one by one.

“Wait here,” she said.

She turned away from the hill and went up toward the broken sky.