All looked lost for the Yellow Emperor. Looking through his ranks he noticed one of his courtiers who seemed to be dozing peace-fully, his head on his chest. Yellow Emperor angrily berated the courtier named Feng Hou for having a nap when the very existence of the empire hung so precariously in the bal-ance. Feng Hou opened his eyes and told the emperor that he had not been sleeping. He had been pondering a way out of their predicament. Indeed Feng Hou had come up with an ingenious solution. He had invented something very like a compass, which could always point one in a certain direction. He set it in front of the Yellow Emperor’s chariot in the form of a fairy statue whose arm always pointed south, an incredible feat of engineer-ing in the midst of the clamor of war. Since the Yellow Emperor could now tell at all times which way was south, he could see clearly all other directions too. The Yellow Emperor now had the means to break out of the encircling fog. The tide of war had turned.
Among the armies of Chi You were mountain demons and river monsters, who had the magical ability to emit strange sounds.
Those who heard these terrible sounds would grow perplexed and lose consciousness. Like men possessed they would follow the direction of the sound and walk straight into a pre-prepared trap and certain death. Yel-low Emperor desperately ordered a counter-attack. He called up his divine ally, Dragon Ying Long. The sound emitted by this mighty dragon was even more fearful than those of Chi You’s monsters. When the dragon’s great roar echoed round the field and soared to the clouds, Chi You’s demons and monsters trembled with fear and fled like frightened rats. The Yellow Emperor’s army took advan-tage of the opportunity and rushed forward to claim a small victory.
Dragon Ying Long lived in the south of Xiong Li Tu Yue Mountain where he had stored a prodigious quantity of rainwater. The Yellow Emperor sought to exploit this re-source. If Chi You could unleash a great fog, why could not he, through Dragon Ying Long, unleash a fearsome rainstorm?
Dragon Ying Long unfurled his great
wings and soared into the sky towards Chi You’s forces. He was poised to let loose a ter-rible downpour when Chi You took decisive action. The wind god, Feng Bo, and the mas-ter of rain, Yu Shi, fought alongside Chi You. They let loose a devastating storm, and Drag-on Ying Long, buffeted by great gales, could not utilize his powers. The Yellow Emperor’ s armies broke rank and fled in all directions like a common rabble.
The Yellow Emperor who was watching the progress of the battle from the top of a nearby mountain was greatly distressed by the failure of Dragon Ying Long to strike against the enemy. Desperately he turned to his daughter, Princess Ba, to halt the seemingly inexorable progress of Chi You’s relentless forces. Princess Ba lived in the Gong Gong Platform on Xikun Mountain, and habitually wore green clothes. She was not pretty and was said to be bald. But she had the magical power to produce scorching heat needed to counter Chi You’s storm monsters. Princess Ba used her powers and her devastating attack dispelled the gales and downpours in an in-stant. In their stead, a burning sun hung blaz-ing in the sky. Chaos descended on the forces of all the followers of Chi You and they fled in complete disarray. The Yellow Emperor, Dragon Ying Long by his side, seized the window of opportunity offered by Princess Ba and waded into Chi You’s armies massacring wherever they went. Princess Ba’s interven-tion had proved decisive. The battle had been won.
However, victory had come at a terrible price for Princess Ba. In helping her father achieve a glorious victory, she had expended so much energy that she lost the ability to climb to the Heavens. She was forced to remain on the Earth. Wherever she went, drought and famine inevitably followed her so she was much hated by the people wherever she wandered on the Earth. She was known and feared as the “Demon of Drought”. When the Yellow Emperor heard of the terrible or-deals his daughter had to face on Earth he was greatly saddened and arranged for her to settle in the area north of the Chi Shui River. However the piteous princess had become ac-customed to wandering the Earth. She found it impossible to stay in one place and occasion-ally the “demon of drought” would escape. When the drought-causing princess would ar-rive in an area, the people would dig long wa-ter channels and ditches and then offer up an earnest prayer, “Oh, powerful god, have pity on us. Please return to your home north of the Chi Shui River! ” The princess was always abashed by these entreaties and nearly always relented and returned home where the damage she could cause was minimal.
Chi You was captured alive and there was no way that the Yellow Emperor could allow such an implacable foe to live. He or-dered his immediate execution on the killing fields of Zhuo Lu. Chi You was still held in such fear that he was kept handcuffed and bound for days after he was dead. Finally these manacles and handcuffs were thrown out on the plain, far from any human habita-tion. As they landed they were transformed into a grove of maple trees, every leaf as scar-let red as the blood that had so prodigiously spilled out of the body of Chi You. It is said that the leaves of these maple trees whipped against each other with great violence, send-ing forth the eternal hostility that Chi You would forever harbor towards the all-powerful Yellow Emperor.
