Kuafu raced the sun.
He followed it westward across the whole country, and at the end of the day he came up to it — close enough to be burned by it, the texts say — and he was thirsty, and the thirst was the thirst of something enormous.
He drank at the Yellow River. He drank at the Wei. He drank them both down, and they were not enough.
So he turned north, toward the great marsh of the northern wastes, to drink that as well.
He did not reach it.
He died of thirst on the road, and as he fell, he threw down the staff he had been carrying.
It became the Deng Forest — and the Deng Forest is a forest of peach trees, and it is there still, and travellers have rested in its shade and eaten its fruit for as long as there have been travellers.
That is the whole of it: twenty-five characters in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and no commentary at all. A giant ran after the sun, drank two rivers, failed, and left a orchard.
The tradition has never agreed on what to think of him. The Confucian reading is a warning: he overreached, and he died, and the peach trees are the only mercy in a story about pride. The Taoist reading is the opposite: the race was never about winning, and the point of a life spent chasing the sun is that the staff takes root where you fall.
What the text will not let anyone say is that he was ridiculous. He drank the Yellow River. Two thousand years of readers have argued about whether he was wise or foolish, and not one of them has suggested he was small.
And the image the tradition keeps returning to is the last one — not the running, not the drinking, not the dying, but the staff in the dust, and the fact that it grew.