Two hundred li further north stands Mount Fajiu, where the mulberry trees grow thick. There lives a bird there. It looks like a crow, but its head is patterned, its beak is white, and its feet are red, and its name is Jingwei — for its cry is its own name, called out again and again over the valleys: jing-wei, jing-wei.
She was once Nüwa, the youngest daughter of the Flame Emperor.
Nüwa went out to play on the Eastern Sea, and the sea took her, and she did not come back. The Flame Emperor could not raise the waters or break them; even a god cannot fight the whole ocean. So his daughter did what the dead do in the old stories — she came back changed. Not as a vengeful ghost, not as a dragon. As a small bird with red feet, too small to be noticed by anything as large as the sea.
And the small bird began to carry the mountains to the ocean.
Twig by twig from the western hills, pebble by pebble, she flies across the whole width of the land and drops them into the Eastern Sea. She has been doing it since the age of the gods. A twig weighs nothing. A pebble weighs nothing. The sea has not noticed, and never will, and she has never stopped.
Later tellers gave the sea a voice, and let it laugh at her: Little bird, you will work a million years and never fill me. And they gave Jingwei her answer, which is the answer of every small stubborn creature that has ever been loved for refusing: Then I will work ten million.
The whole myth, in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, is told in forty-odd characters — a mountain, a bird, a drowned girl, a task. Nothing is explained and nothing needs to be. Somewhere between the mountains and the sea, the smallest creature in the story is still flying, still calling her own name over the water, still dropping mountains into the ocean one stone at a time.