Legend of the Hairy Men
The earliest record of the hairy men sits inside a text called Legends of Ren Zu. It tells that Ren Zu dug out his own two eyes, and they became a son and a daughter, Verdant Great Sun and Desolate Ancient Moon. Verdant Great Sun drank heavily, and one drunken accident trapped him in the depths of the ordinary abyss. He escaped only because the disaster left him a reputation Gu shaped like a chrysanthemum, and word of his drinking spread across the world. A swarm of tiger-striped honey bees, each the size of a leopard, brought him their honey wine and demanded he rank it above the wine of the four heaven and earth monkeys. Drunk, he answered that both had their own merits. Furious at being set beside mere monkeys, the bees moved to attack him, but he vanished before they could. ch. 357
His disappearance lasted seven days and seven nights of drunken haze. He woke bound, carried by a savage, hairy bodied people with dark blue eyes toward a cauldron already burning over a bonfire, who meant to refine him as a human catalyst into an eternal Gu. In his mind, a voice named itself divine travel Gu: born in the heart of anyone who drinks four different top tier wines, it can carry its owner anywhere, but only while he is drunk. It had moved him once before, off the tiger-striped honey bees, and it had also stranded him drunk on an isolated island where he nearly starved. Sober now, he could not call on it to save him again. ch. 357
The hairy men threw him into the cauldron with agates, red pepper, a small blue smoke fox, and more materials besides, until a Gu shaped like a huge, hollow shelled crab went in: vanity Gu. Delighted just to have met the famous Verdant Great Sun, it begged him for the secret of his fame. He snapped that he had no time to talk while dying, and it took his irritation as a lesson, that popularity is earned by enduring heat. Thanking him, it exploded into a formless poisonous wind that turned every hairy man’s dark blue eyes red with vanity. Verdant Great Sun then mocked their hair as ugly and abominable, and needled that his own hair, turned to blazing fire by a strong wine, outshone anything they had. Poisoned by vanity, the hairy men could not bear the taunt, and one by one they set their own hair alight to match him, screaming in pain as the fire spread over their bodies. Verdant Great Sun climbed free of the cauldron in the confusion and told the delighted divine travel Gu that the cleverness was not his. It was vanity itself, he said, that made men foolish enough to endure real pain for a false beauty they should never have chased. ch. 357
Elsewhere, a hairy man sits cross legged refining Gu in front of Fang Yuan. Fang Yuan has just been handed his own materials for the same task: grand white moon gold, skull stones, dragon side tooth, young autumn grass, fifty primeval stones, a flower boar Gu, and a boar cage Gu. The inheritance running the trial gives him three possible Gu to refine from them but does not say which one to choose, so the Gu he produces only has to outdo his opponent’s. Fang Yuan is not a refinement path Gu Master, but his previous life carried him through the refinement path too, and watching the hairy man work lets him guess what is coming. Inwardly sneering but wearing a respectful, flattering smile, he praises the hairy man as a Gu refinement grandmaster who could refine anything in the world. The hairy man laughs aloud in delight, and the flattery alone breaks his concentration and ruins his refinement. He cries out in fear, but heavenly lightning strikes him to ash before he can escape it. Fang Yuan laughs indifferently, collects the abandoned materials, and walks on toward the next round behind a paper crane Gu. ch. 357
