Not knowing one's limits

Drunk, Verdant Great Sun uses divine travel Gu’s power and lands in danger. Twice already sent to near-fatal places by it, he fears wine itself now and calls his life meaningless. Ashamed, divine travel Gu offers a fix: gather a jade bamboo from Azure Heaven and an eight-sided star fragment from Blue Heaven, then fly into the sunrise so its light can remake divine travel Gu into fixed immortal travel Gu. Verdant Great Sun doubts he can fly at all, being born to walk the ground rather than soar like a bird. Wisdom Gu, who first taught him to drink only to be left in peace, now hides from him rather than be found again. Divine travel Gu turns him instead to cognition Gu, wisdom Gu’s mother, who grants him a pair of white wings named self, pure as snow and given to flex and range. Cognition Gu warns him not to bask too long in sunlight or his sense of self will swell or shrink, and that the higher he flies, the harder he falls. ^{ch. 371}

Heeding the warning, Verdant Great Sun hides in clouds whenever the sky is clear and climbs to Azure Heaven, delighting in flight along the way, where he plucks a stem of jade bamboo growing from the void. By night in Blue Heaven he searches a river of falling stardust for eight-sided fragments rather than seven- or sixteen-sided ones, and finds one. At dawn he flies toward the rising sun holding bamboo and fragment, and summons divine travel Gu, which swallows the fragment, enters the bamboo and begins to change. Divine travel Gu warns him to keep flying toward the light without leaving it until the change ends, then head for the clouds at once, and reminds him of cognition Gu’s caution about the wings. He boasts that the light of glory can do nothing to him. He has already survived the Ordinary Abyss and the Hairy Men, holds reputation Gu, and has transcended vanity. ^{ch. 371}

Divine travel Gu completes its change into fixed immortal travel Gu, but by then the sunlight has already swollen Verdant Great Sun’s wings to three times their size. Fixed immortal travel Gu begs him to hide in the clouds and stop climbing, but delighted with his larger, stronger wings, he only flies higher, wondering aloud what lies above the nine heavens. His wings expand past their limit and burst. Losing them, he falls and lands an unrecognizable ruin, Ren Zu’s eldest son dead. ^{ch. 371}