Wu clan

In the common Honghuang account, when Pangu fell, twelve masses of his blood sank into the earth and engendered Dijiang, Zhujiuyin, Jumang, Zhurong, Gonggong, Rushou, Xuanming, Qiangliang, Xizi, Tianwu, Shebishi and Houtu.

The Twelve Ancestral Witches met in Pangu Hall, each leading a people of his own.

The Wu peoples moved out from Pangu Hall in every direction and set up their settlements among the hills and river valleys. After Dijun and Taiyi had gathered the demon hosts in the heavens, war between the sky and the earth never stopped.

The Twelve Ancestral Witches poured their blood into a single array and set out the Twelve Capital Gods and Demons Formation. As it rose, twelve figures gathered into one within the malice, and Pangu’s true body stood up out of the earth.

The Honghuang continuation also joins the old myth of the war between Gonggong and Zhurong to the Wu line. After that battle Gonggong struck down Mount Buzhou; the pillar of the sky broke, the cords of the earth gave way, and the flood poured through the tear into the human world.

Another old myth taken in begins with the ten suns rising together. Kuafu ran west after the sun’s shadow and fell in the open country before he could drink the great marsh dry; Yi climbed to a height, drew his bow and shot nine suns down. The Honghuang account writes both of them as great witches of the Wu clan.

Houtu, outside the settlements, saw the souls of the dead with nowhere to go and walked alone into the underworld. At the edge of the sea of blood she gave up her Ancestral Witch body, the six paths of rebirth opened out of the dark, and she never returned to Pangu Hall.

A seat stood empty in Pangu Hall from then on. When the remaining Ancestral Witches gathered again, the Twelve Capital Gods and Demons Formation could no longer be raised as complete as it had been.

When the final Wu–Yao battle came, the Wu clan attacked the Heavenly Court from the earth while the Yao clan opened the Zhou-Heaven Star Formation. Starlight bore down on the mountains and rivers, the Ancestral Witch bodies charged the demon palace, and both peoples fought in confusion below the broken gate of heaven.

The Honghuang continuations differ on the opponents and the manner of death, but all of them let Dijun, Donghuang Taiyi and most of the Ancestral Witches die in that battle. The Capital Gods and Demons Formation and the Zhou-Heaven Star Formation collapsed with them.

The surviving Wu peoples carried their wounded from the field and went back into the depths of the earth. Some tribes stayed where they had been and some went on moving, but the twelve Ancestral Witches never walked into Pangu Hall together again.