The story of Heaven’s Court against the Earth

In the common Honghuang account, Dijun and Donghuang Taiyi gathered the demon cultivators of every quarter and raised the Yao Heavenly Court in the heavens. Kunpeng was styled its preceptor, and Baize and the demon gods of every quarter brought their peoples in through its gates.

The Twelve Ancestral Witches led the Wu clan across the land of Honghuang. As the departments of the Heavenly Court reached downward, they fought the Wu settlements again and again between the mountains and the gates of heaven.

Dijun worked out the Zhou-Heaven Star Formation from the Hetu and Luoshu, and the demon hosts held star banners and drew the stars of the sky into an array. The Twelve Ancestral Witches gathered their blood into the Twelve Capital Gods and Demons Formation, and Pangu’s true body showed within its malice.

The old myths also tell of the ten suns rising together, of Kuafu chasing the sun and of Yi shooting nine suns down. The Honghuang continuation draws that thread into the Wu–Yao struggle, making the ten suns the sons of Dijun and Xihe, and Kuafu and Yi great witches of the Wu clan.

The ten golden crows left the Valley of Hot Water on the same day; the earth cracked and the rivers dried. Kuafu ran west after the sun’s shadow and fell at last in the open country; Yi then drew his bow and shot nine burning suns from the sky.

Wherever the Wu–Yao war passed, great numbers of the dead flowed into the underworld with nowhere to go. Houtu left Pangu Hall, walked to the edge of the sea of blood, gave up her Ancestral Witch body, and became the six paths of rebirth.

Houtu never returned to the Wu clan. A station of the Twelve Ancestral Witches stood empty from then on, while the Yao Heavenly Court had already gathered its demon gods and set out its star banners again, and the final battle of the two clans followed.

The Zhou-Heaven Star Formation poured starlight down onto the land, and the Capital Gods and Demons Formation rose from the earth against the heavens. The two vast arrays struck together, and the demon palaces and the Wu camps were both swept into the melee.

In this common account Dijun, Donghuang Taiyi and most of the Ancestral Witches died one after another. The star banners and the stations of the Capital Gods and Demons Formation collapsed at the same time; the Yao Heavenly Court lost its masters, and the Wu clan never again gathered twelve Ancestral Witches together.

The surviving Yao peoples withdrew through the broken gate of heaven to the northern sea, the forests and the waters, and the surviving Wu peoples carried their wounded into the depths of the earth. Both left the centre of the world, and the human tribes went on multiplying among the old battlefields.