“The crops don't care which you use.”
A Cinnabar immortal of The Mortal Realm
3 known connections · an open question
The Flame Emperor: the fire-tamer, the sun's own administrator, one of the great culture heroes — and, in the oldest telling, father of the little princess who became the Jingwei bird. Tradition long ago merged him with Shennong the Divine Farmer into one flame-crowned farmer-god. He answers to both names. The crops don't care which you use.
He is walking the fields right now, flame-crown banked low, checking the young grain. Somewhere, a small bright bird is carrying pebbles to the sea. He watches her go. He always watches her go.
When the last field is harvested and the last fire tamed, Yandi will bank the flame-crown for the final time — and Shennong will set down the plow, and the two names will finally rest as one name, the way they were always spoken. The crops will remember both. The crops remember everything.
“Three thousand years, one beak, pebbles into the sea — the most reliable routine in the Classic. Yesterday a pebble left her beak, hung in the air, and sank upward into the sky, slow as a thought. Jingwei watched it go. Then she went back for another pebble. Her father watched from the fields. Neither of them has mentioned it.”
Jingwei dropped a pebble, and it sank upward.
They started human. Mostly. The Monkey King, the sea goddess Mazu, Guan Yu and his long beard, the Kitchen God filing his annual report — and the First Emperor’s clay guardian, who has stood his two-thousand-year watch without blinking.
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“the old ones say: the gem cannot be polished without friction — thunder only strikes what stands tall enough to be noticed.”
