Deluge myths: divine destruction and renewal of humankind.
The sage-king who is said to have dredged the rivers and founded the Xia lives only in texts written a thousand years and more after him, and the earliest of them to speak his name is a bronze bowl that treats his flood as already ancient.
Nine heads on one blue-green coil, feeding on nine mountains at once: Gonggong's minister, whose foul blood poisoned the ground so no grain would grow and no beast could live there.
The waters had swallowed the hills and were climbing towards heaven, and the father who tried to wall them out failed and died for it; only his son, cut from the same body, found the way to let the flood run home to the sea.
Ra loosed his own Eye on rebellious mankind, then could not call her off. So he brewed seven thousand jars of blood-red beer and flooded the fields, and let the killer drink herself gentle.
Before earth or heaven there was a yawning gap, and on either side of it fire and ice: how the first giant quickened between them, and how the world was built from his murdered body.
