The story of Asura Sect

In the common Honghuang account, when Pangu’s body became heaven and earth a mass of foul blood sank into the underworld and gathered over the years into a boundless sea of blood. Red mist never lifted from its surface, and Minghe took shape within it.

The swords Yuantu and Abi and the Twelve-Ranked Red Lotus of Karmic Fire appeared with the sea of blood. Minghe walked its surface with the two blades and turned the blood of his own body into blood-spirit selves, scattering them through the dark waves.

After Nüwa had made humankind, Minghe learned that the new people had spread across the land and set about making creatures in the sea of blood after the same fashion. He gathered blood-water and remnants of souls and made the first of the Asura.

The Asura woke out of the sea of blood in batch after batch and formed up behind Minghe. He then founded the Asura Sect with the sea of blood as its seat, and the Asura multiplied within it.

While the Wu and Yao clans fought, the souls of the dead poured into the underworld and drifted outside the sea of blood. Houtu left the Wu tribes, followed the weeping into the dark, and saw the dead with nowhere to be reborn.

Houtu came to the edge of the sea of blood, gave up her Ancestral Witch body and let her flesh pass into the earth of the underworld. The six paths of rebirth opened, and the drifting souls began to move towards the six gates.

One of those six is the asura path. From then the Asura were joined to the wheel of rebirth, and the sea of blood neighboured the underworld that Houtu had become.

Minghe still lived in the depths of the sea of blood, and the Asura kept watch among its waves and along the passages of the underworld. Yuantu and Abi never left Minghe’s hand, and the Red Lotus of Karmic Fire sank with him to the heart of the sea.

The sea of blood rises and falls, and Minghe scattered his blood-spirit selves through every part of its water. Honghuang continuations therefore tie his life to the whole sea, saying that while the sea of blood remains he can still appear out of it.