The Primordial Chaos Within the Furnace
I was born different from everyone else.
Before I left my mother's womb, I was already conscious. Both my parents were mighty beings from the Upper Realm, yet I was unable to practice any cultivation technique in this world.
It wasn't until the day my mother exhausted her cultivation to open my meridians that she discovered a world of my own had formed inside me:
Chaos had just begun to part, and the primordial world had just emerged.
I am the furnace, I am heaven and earth, I am all things.
“Is this... the Hongmeng Dao Body?” my father asked in a trembling voice. “A Dao that belongs to no realm and cannot be contained by this one!”
Feeling the newborn world within me, I smiled faintly. “No, I just... came with my own path to immortality.”
On the three hundred and seventy thousandth time I moved in the womb, I finally learned to read my mother's emotions.
Her heartbeat, muffled by the warm amniotic fluid, was like a morning bell ringing through clouds, every beat filled with tenderness. But sometimes, when waves known as “mystic sounds from the Upper Realm” came from somewhere far away, her heart would skip a beat, then quicken, growing tense in a way I couldn't quite describe.
At times like these, I curled up in the darkness of chaos, touched my still-forming limbs, and began counting my fetal breaths.
One breath, two breaths, three.
My fetal breathing was unlike that of other children. My father once probed me with his divine sense. That was the first time I “heard” his voice, deep and resonant as mountains shaking: “This child... breathes in a cycle of its own, untouched by the spiritual energy nourishing its mother.”
