Houtu Becomes the Six Paths of Rebirth

The Wu and Yao clans killed one another for years and the country was stained with blood. The dead grew more numerous by the day, and their souls, leaving the body, had nowhere to go and drifted on the cold wind.

Lonely souls gathered on the battlefields, in the deep valleys and along the wild riverbanks, crying day and night and finding no road home, and lingered outside the settlements of the living. Others were drawn by the force of the sea of blood and drifted on the wind towards the underworld.

Houtu left Pangu Hall, walked through the settlements and valleys the war had passed, and went on west alone in the direction of the wailing. Beyond range after range she came at last to a heaving sea of blood in the underworld.

In that sea the Asura, whom Minghe had made, came and went, while the dead gathered on its shore still had no way in and could only wander weeping at the edge of the waves.

Houtu stood by the sea of blood for days, then gave up her Ancestral Witch body and, using the blood of her own line, opened six passages of rebirth in the depths of the underworld.

The paths of devas, of humans, of asuras, of animals, of hungry ghosts and of hells were joined through, and the souls that had drifted with nowhere to go at last turned along them and were reborn.

As the six paths took shape, the depths of the underworld shook without stopping and the merit of heaven and earth came down into the sea of blood. Houtu’s Ancestral Witch body dissolved within the wheel, leaving only her intent to guard the six paths; later Honghuang novels mostly call her Lady Pingxin, though some still call her Houtu.

When the other Ancestral Witches felt her breath cease and hurried to the underworld, the six paths were already turning as they should. A station of the Twelve Capital Gods and Demons Formation stood empty from then on, and when the Wu and Yao clans opened the war again and it came at last to the calamity that destroyed both, the Wu clan could no longer put twelve into the formation as before.