On the field where the house of Chou wars against the last of the Shang, the weapon that decides single combats between immortals is not a sword but a whip. The Chou champion Chiang Tzu-ya closes with the enemy general Wên Chung amid a din of "striking whips and falling hammers," then "quickly seized his Vanquish-spirits Whip" and struck a rival captain "in the middle of the skull," so that "the brain-fluid gushed forth" and the man died. Wên Chung answers in kind — mounted on his unicorn and "brandishing his magic whip dashed to meet him" — until Tzu-ya "brought out his great magic whip" and wounded him in the arm. Here the whip is no herdsman's lash but an instrument of slaughter.

The strangest of these implements kills of its own accord. When the rebel Yüan Hung sends two scouts against the Chou camp, Tzu-ya "threw into the air his 'devil-chaser' whip," which fell upon them and "cleft their skulls in twain" — a weapon that flies, chooses, and strikes with no hand to guide it. The same chapter arms the demon Mo-li Shou, who "has two whips and a panther-skin bag" holding a man-devouring creature. Across these episodes the whip belongs to the air and the skull, nearer to a thunderbolt than to a driver's goad.

Only the Chinese witness is wired to served text here — Werner's Myths & Legends of China (published 1922) — while the apparatus files beside it a single bare catchword, "pisk", left unglossed and unread. Still, the served chapter gives the motif its full strangeness. Why, among all the swords and seals and gourds of this celestial armoury, is it the whip — the plain tool of the driver and the herdsman — that the storytellers raised to a skull-cleaving, self-guiding weapon of the gods?