The story of Chaos Bell

In the common account that joins the treasures of the sky-splitting to the history of the Wu and Yao clans, the Chaos Bell was formed from the haft of the Pangu Axe and came into the world with Donghuang Taiyi, so that it is also often called the Bell of the Eastern Emperor.

Dijun and Taiyi gathered the demon hosts of the world and raised halls in the heavens. Taiyi carried the Chaos Bell into the Yao Heavenly Court, and when its note first passed the heavenly gate the demon generals of every quarter came into the hall in order to receive their commands.

After the Wu clan took the land of Honghuang, the Yao Heavenly Court and the Twelve Ancestral Witches fought many times. Taiyi carried the bell below, and its sound pressed down the churning cloud-vapour and the shaking of the hills so that the demon army could form up again behind it.

Dijun worked out the Zhou-Heaven Star Formation from the Hetu and Luoshu, while the Twelve Ancestral Witches gathered their blood in Pangu Hall into the Twelve Capital Gods and Demons Formation. Taiyi stood with the bell at the side of the Yao star formation.

When the two great formations struck head-on, starlight fell from the vault and Pangu’s true body rose out of the earth. The Chaos Bell rang again and again within the array, shielding the demon gods and the formation’s eyes around Taiyi.

In the commoner account of the final Wu–Yao battle, Dijun and several of the Ancestral Witches fell one after another, and Taiyi still carried the bell into the press of the Ancestral Witches. Its sound was swallowed at last by blades and by the noise of bursting, and Taiyi died in that battle.

The Yao Heavenly Court came apart with that battle and its old halls became broken walls, and the Chaos Bell was not in the wreckage. Afterwards men followed a lingering note here and there to look for it, and nobody ever brought it back to the Yao Heavenly Court.