Houyi and the Ten Suns
Balance restored by reducing excess power.
In the earliest days, the heavens held ten suns, each a radiant child of the sun goddess. They rose one after another, so that light and warmth came in turn, measured and gentle. The world flourished beneath their rhythm, rivers glistened, crops grew tall, and men and women gave thanks for the balance.
But the suns were young, and youth grows restless. Tiring of their appointed turns, they gathered together and said, “Why should we rise alone? Let us go forth all at once, and blaze across the sky together.” So one morning all ten rose, their fires burning side by side.
The earth withered. Fields dried to dust, rivers shrank to trickles, and mountains split beneath the heat. Birds fell from the air, beasts collapsed in their tracks, and humankind cried out in terror. Their voices reached Yao, the sage-king, who looked up at the blinding sky and knew that his people would perish if nothing was done.
So Yao called Houyi, the archer of unmatched skill. Houyi took his bow of mulberry wood, his arrows tipped with white feathers, and set forth. He climbed Kunlun, the great mountain at the world’s spine, and from its heights he beheld the blazing suns.
He nocked an arrow and drew the bowstring to his ear. With a thunderous crack the first sun fell, its fiery body bursting into sparks. He loosed again, and another was struck down, its flames extinguished as it tumbled from the sky. One by one he shot, until nine suns lay slain, their light fading into embers. Only one he spared, for without a sun the world would freeze. That lone orb rose and set thereafter as we know it still, the single sun that warms the earth.
The people rejoiced, for rivers flowed again, crops sprouted, and the air cooled. They praised Houyi as savior, bringing life back from the brink of ruin. Yet the tale carries shadows too, for with the suns destroyed, the goddess wept for her children, and Houyi himself was marked by both glory and sorrow.
In later days he would seek immortality, his fate entwined with Chang’e, whose flight to the moon is told in another story. But the memory of Houyi as archer remained foremost: the man who drew his bow against heaven’s fire and left the balance of earth restored.
So the people told his tale beneath the single sun that still shines. Whenever the summer grows fierce, or drought scorches the fields, they remember the time when ten suns once blazed together, and the archer Houyi saved the world with his bow.
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