The Calamity of Humankind and the Wu-Slaying Sword

After Nüwa made humankind, the new race built settlements along the rivers and valleys. They had neither the flight and transformation of the Yao clan nor the hard bodies of the Wu, and when the two clans fought nearby they took their fire, their grain and their children and moved elsewhere.

The Wu and Yao clans met in battle several times, and the blades of the demon officers mostly glanced off the flesh of the great witches. In one engagement a demon soldier happened to attach a human blood-soul to a broken sword, and when it next met the Wu clan the edge left a wound on a witch’s body.

The matter was carried back to the Yao Heavenly Court, and Dijun called his preceptor and his smiths and had them test it again and again. When the method of refining was settled, companies of demon soldiers came down from the gate of heaven and searched by separate roads along the plains, valleys and mountain passes where humankind lived.

Demon cloud covered the daylight, and fire spread from one settlement to the next. Some carried their children across swift water, some hid in caves and rock clefts, and some tribes lit long fires outside their gates and held the mountain roads with stone axes, bone arrows and wooden spears.

Suiren, Youchao, Ziyi and others led the scattered people into the deep hills, using smoke along the way to guide those behind. Some human bands fled to the gates of cultivators’ mountains, and the rest went on moving along the coasts and the great rivers.

The blood and souls of the dead were swept up by soul-summoning banners and sent into the refining furnace of the Heavenly Court. The fire burned day and night, resentment and metal twined together, and the sword-blank went from red to blue-white; when it came out, countless human souls still circled the blade.

With it the Yao clan refined the Wu-slaying sword and carried it to the front against the Wu. Where its edge passed, bodies that could not otherwise be broken bled; and the Heavenly Court went on taking human blood-souls to make up the resentment on the blade as it thinned.

The once-connected settlements of humankind were cut apart by war, and on the old roads there were only charred posts and gear nobody had gathered up. The survivors lit their fires again in the valleys, on the coasts and outside the seats of saints, and brought their scattered people in group by group.

When the Wu and Yao clans both broke in their final battle, no more great companies of demon soldiers came down through the gate of heaven to hunt humankind. Those who had hidden for years came out of the caves and valleys, returned to the riverbanks, and built new settlements on the burnt ground.