Legends

Strength, Wisdom and Hope

One of the oldest Ren Zu legends tells how the first man survives Predicament by giving his youth, his middle years, and finally his heart to three Gu.

Rules & Regulations

A Ren Zu legend follows the aging first man into a mountain cave, where saying a paired Gu's names in the dark wins him command of it.

Wisdom against restrictions

A Ren Zu legend has the first man net every other Gu in the world, then lose his youth and his one chance at wisdom.

Attitude

A Ren Zu legend follows the mask that will not stay on a heartless man, and what it would take for a man who gave his heart away to wear it.

Light of Faith

A Ren Zu legend names the light the blinded first man still sees after his dug-out eyes became a son and a daughter.

The Origin of Wine

A Ren Zu legend sends Verdant Great Sun to four monkey groups for their wine, and credits monkeys, not humans, with brewing first.

Reputation Gu

A Ren Zu legend follows Verdant Great Sun's search for a way out of a bottomless abyss, and the shameless method that finally gets him across it.

Vanity

A Ren Zu legend follows Verdant Great Sun into a cauldron of Hairy Men refining eternal Gu with him as its human catalyst, and the doomed Gu whose dying wish turns their pride against them.

Not knowing one's limits

A Ren Zu legend follows Verdant Great Sun's flight into the nine heavens to remake the Gu that keeps stranding him, and the wings that carry him past every warning he is given.

Road of Life and Death

A Ren Zu legend follows Ren Zu into the land of the dead on wisdom Gu's instructions, to walk his eldest son's soul back out along the Road of Life.

Love is cruel

A Ren Zu legend follows Desolate Ancient Moon up Cheng Bai mountain, where a rockman's courtship costs him his metals, then his heart, and does not win her love.

Troubles of love

A Ren Zu legend follows Desolate Ancient Moon through the rubble of a mountain love Gu smashed, searching rock by rock for the one success Gu among failure Gu's children.

Northern Dark Ice Soul

A Ren Zu legend introduces his third son, born from soul fragments in Luo Po Valley, who is pulled into the human world by unexpected Gu and, sent hunting a meaning Gu that does not exist, makes one himself.

Understanding one's purpose

A Ren Zu legend follows his children to a still blue sea of life Gu, where wisdom Gu's price for its directions and the sea's own price for a body converge on Desolate Ancient Moon.

Taking the first step

A Ren Zu legend follows him into loneliness inside Luo Po Valley, where a Gu called self persuades him off fate's own road and cognition Gu gives him the wings to walk a new one.

Walking Meat Tree

A Ren Zu legend follows his son Northern Dark Ice Soul into black heaven, where a starving Gu that calls itself fire grows into the blaze that burns the walking meat trees.

Living in a dream

A Ren Zu legend follows Northern Dark Ice Soul into a dream realm's grip, where a vision of his dead sister's forgiveness leaves him running back into the dark to be eaten again.

Origin of dreams

A Ren Zu legend traces the first mortals to derivation Gu's burst stomach, and their nightly dreams to the dream realms swallowed alongside Ren Zu's ten children.

Stepping into Ordinary Abyss

A Ren Zu legend follows him onto a road of his own making, into the ordinary marsh at the bottom of ordinary abyss, where self Gu tells him only his own legs will carry him out and he works out for himself that the going is easier in older tracks.

Becoming Extraordinary

A Ren Zu legend follows him through ordinary abyss on paths only he has walked, where a tree grown from his own heart's blood bears a daughter he cannot carry with him out of it.

Learning through failure

A Ren Zu legend follows him testing a hairy man's newly refined worms for success Gu, losing courage Gu, faith Gu and strength Gu as each one fails, and what self Gu says a failure is worth.

Freedom in death

A Ren Zu legend follows his long campaign to make free-flying feathermen fly into Ordinary Abyss for his daughter, and what freedom costs them when they refuse him to the end.

Fear is scarier than death

A Ren Zu legend follows him meeting fear Gu through a beastman it already tormented, and what the Gu makes of him rather than let him reach the Door of Life and Death.

Betrayal and Loyalty to oneself

A Ren Zu legend follows courage reaching his heart on the scent of love, then a choice between two Gu that trade places the moment he takes them.

Love must be selfless

A Ren Zu legend follows him and a snowman testing whether love can truly burn like fire, and what colliding two hearts costs the one that cannot survive it.

Miniman in a well

A Ren Zu legend follows a miniman no taller than a finger, who mistakes Boundless Forest Samsara for a mountain and weeps at the giant he finds instead.

Opening one's horizon

A Ren Zu legend follows Boundless Forest Samsara to the well the miniman calls his former home, where his own people mistake their sky and their tallest mountain for the whole world, and once exiled him for saying otherwise.

Perseverance bears a ladder

A Ren Zu legend follows Boundless Forest Samsara and a miniman racing to build separate ladders out of Ordinary Abyss, where his refusal to quit outlasts her borrowed strength and earns him a Gu that names itself perseverance.

Wealth

A Ren Zu legend follows him refining a Gu everyone would want, from blue sea water, his own severed hands and the miseries of losing things, until a daughter born of the fire hands him the finished Gu, called wealth.

Webs of Fate

A Ren Zu legend follows him, his son and his daughter to the feathermen's empty residence, where a spider that names itself fate Gu binds the family in a web it says has controlled them all along.

Pursuit of Freedom

A Ren Zu legend follows him mistaking himself in turn for wingless birds, toothless leopards, and gill-less fish, each also pursuing a lost freedom Gu, before his own wish to escape fate's shackles leaves onlookers certain he has gone mad.

Reverend Insanity

A reprise of Ren Zu's three wishes to the birds, beasts, and fish, ending in his choice to become a lunatic and a demon rather than accept fate's limits.

Joy and Weight of Freedom

A Ren Zu legend has freedom Gu fly to him unbidden, drawn by the cognition Gu already on him, and his refusal to release it brings down responsibility Gu's weight and fate Gu's own binding silk. He loses it anyway the moment he panics, and is left wishing he had lost love or life instead.

Strong eat the weak

A Ren Zu legend sends him to find wisdom Gu, so that self Gu can eat a mouthful of it as it once ate part of strength Gu. On the road, sympathy for a Gu fleeing strong Gu draws him into stopping the hunt, and strong Gu states nature's law that the strong eat the weak.

Lightning and Hatred

A Ren Zu legend follows two of his children, exiled by fate Gu, into a heaven where a furious lightning Gu bargains for a way out and breaks far more than the wall it promised, shattering the heaven the four of them then flee.

Facing a Strong Predicament

A Ren Zu legend has the first man face a Predicament backed by strong Gu, where every disguise fails and an eating contest already costs him his skin and his flesh.

Hope triumphs again

A Ren Zu legend has the first man endure a storm of Tribulations inside the Predicament that carries strong Gu, where three of his Gu flee in fear but hope Gu's light turns the cracks in his bones into a way to swallow the Tribulations whole.

Effort begets results

A Ren Zu legend follows the newborn Great Strength True Martial testing what effort alone is worth, as the harder Upslope Road hands him an invisible effort Gu, then authority, fortitude and an ability he calls effort's own result.

Thirst for knowledge

A Ren Zu legend takes him and Great Strength True Martial into Qian Kun Crystal Wall, where its sensations overwhelm the son until an inkman elder shows Ren Zu the ink texts that free him, and Ren Zu then asks how wisdom Gu can be found deeper inside.

Finding Wisdom

A Ren Zu legend follows his newborn daughter, Carefree Wisdom Heart, joining him and Great Strength True Martial in a search of Qian Kun Crystal Wall for a wisdom Gu that is deliberately hiding, and that the inkman elder can only place in the wall's most mysterious region.

Betraying one's self

A Ren Zu legend follows wisdom Gu's revenge for being bitten, a lie that walks Ren Zu into Hu Land and provokes self Gu into leaving him over an older self-deception, and the chase into the River of Time that follows.

Finding self

A Ren Zu legend follows him and his children out of the River of Time, learning to carry the grief and joy the truthful floating ice stirs in their hearts, on a search for a self Gu that time has changed as much as it has changed him.