THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
On Mount Feng dwells the god Gengfu, who spends his days swimming the Qingling pool and surfaces wrapped in light; wherever he appears, that state falls to ruin. The same mountain keeps nine bells that ring of themselves when the frost descends, and a beast, the Yonghe — ape-like, red-eyed, red-muzzled, yellow-bodied — whose appearance portends great panic. Mount Feng is a hill crowded with bad news.
Though his name carries the word for 'plough,' Han tradition classed Gengfu with the demons to be driven out at year's end. Zhang Heng's Rhapsody on the Eastern Capital, describing the Great Exorcism at the Luoyang court, where the Fangxiang master led his hundred underlings against the massed spirits of harm, includes the incantation: 'Imprison Gengfu in the Qingling, drown the Drought Demoness in the Divine Pool.' A pool-god from the central mountains thus entered the roster of spirits the Han palace expelled each year.
