The armies of the deep have gathered for the fray. The quarrel began when one of the Eight Immortals "changed his flute into a fishing-line" and "caught him on the hook" — the Dragon-prince himself, held for a hostage — and the dragon-court raised its hosts for revenge. Now a dragon-king, Ao Ch'in, takes "a ball of fire full on his head", and his army is near collapse — when a rescuer arrives carrying nothing more warlike than a "bottle of lustral water", the water kept for ritual cleansing. Dipping a "willow-branch for the purpose" into it, Tz'u-hang Ta-shih "sprinkled the combatants with this magic fluid", and at its cool touch the enchantments of both sides simply fail, every power in the field undone.

The one witness on the shelf is the 1922 compendium Myths & Legends of China, in its chapter on the myths of the waters, where the Eight Immortals fall out with the dragon-kings of the sea over a shipwrecked servant and some lost presents. The wonder here is not a weapon but a solvent: the magic fluid the address is named for works by subtraction, dissolving the very sorcery the battle runs on. The sprinkled water and the willow-branch belong to a whole grammar of Chinese purification, though the served page shows us only this single stroke of it.

The shelf is thin here — this address borrows its references from a neighbouring entry and rests on a single Chinese page, with no second tradition wired to read beside it. When water is the strongest thing in a war of gods, what does it mean that its power is the power to leave everyone powerless?