Mythology

Chiyou could summon the wind and the rain. The Yellow Emperor lost nine battles in a row. What he brought in to finish the war won him the world and cost two beings from heaven their way home, and the ground where they fought did not see rain for a long time.

Heaven cut off his head and buried it under a mountain. Then he used his nipples for eyes and his navel for a mouth, and he raised his shield and his axe and went on dancing. The one rebel the gods could not make stop moving.

The youngest daughter of the Flame Emperor waded into the East Sea and did not come back. She returned as a bird with a white beak and red feet, and she has been carrying one twig at a time out over the water ever since. Nobody sentenced her to it. Nobody has told her to stop.

He reached the place where the sun goes down, and then he found out what that meant. He drank the Yellow River and the Wei River dry and the two great rivers were not enough for one man. He died of thirst on the road north. The staff he let fall became a peach grove, and the grove stands to this day on the busiest road in the country.

The father dammed the flood for nine years and was killed for it. The son changed one word and spent thirteen years doing the opposite. He cut a gate through a mountain with fire and cold water, let a winged dragon draw the river courses with its tail, and chained the water demon Wuzhiqi under a hill. Three times he passed his own gate and never went inside.

Heaven and earth began as one thing, shaped like an egg, and someone was asleep inside it. He woke, opened up and down, and then stood in the gap holding them apart for eighteen thousand years. When he finally fell, nothing in him was kept back: his breath became wind, his eyes became the sun and the moon, his blood became the rivers, his sweat became rain.

The four pillars of the sky broke, fire and flood came up together, and the one who had made human beings went to work alone. She smelted five-coloured stone, cut the legs off a giant turtle, and patched the sky. Then she left it permanently tilted, and every river in China still follows that tilt.

Ten suns rose at once and the fields burned. Six man-eating monsters came up out of the water. Heaven sent down one archer with a red bow. What happened to him afterwards is the part nobody warns you about.