Phoenix Calls from Mount Cangwu

The Phoenix Sings Over Cangwu

In the ancient primordial age, floods ravaged the land and countless states stood side by side. It was a chaotic era in which divinity had not yet faded and humanity was only beginning to emerge.

His name was Chong Hua, known to history as Emperor Shun of Yu. Everyone knew him as an unsurpassed paragon of filial piety and a sage of virtue, but no one knew that he was born with “double pupils,” allowing him to see through the illusions of heaven and earth; his ears possessed “Heaven’s Hearing,” letting him hear the wicked schemes in people’s hearts.

He was born into a family sunk in darkness. His father was stubborn, his mother domineering, and his younger brother arrogant. He repeatedly faced attempts on his life. Trapped at the bottom of a well with no way out, he awakened his divine power. He heard the dragon’s roar of the floodwaters deep in the earth, and the desire for revenge within himself. He chose to suppress his bestial instincts and wield “virtue” as a blade. He farmed Mount Li, made pottery at Lei Marsh, and used the phoenix’s song to tame wild beasts and enlighten the people.

He ascended the imperial throne, only to discover that he could not tame the human heart. Faced with raging floods and the rise of the powerful minister Yu, he tried to mend a shattered world with ritual and music, but only found deeper loneliness. In the end, he chose to journey south to Cangwu, transforming himself into Mount Jiuyi to forever guard the land he had loved, suffered for, and struggled upon.

This is an epic about a “listener to the wind,” a tragic legend of how a sage was torn between divinity and humanity before becoming an eternal totem.

When the music of a hundred birds paying homage to the phoenix begins, what do you hear: the overture to civilization, or a hero’s elegy?