A murdered man rises from the river and "came out full of life and health" — and the hand that raised him belongs to a god he had once shown mercy. In the tale gathered in Myths & Legends of China (published 1922), the young official Ch'ên Kuang-jui had bought a fine carp from a fisherman and, struck by its strange look, let it go; the fish, it turns out, was "no other than Lung Wang, the God of the River," who "had been going through his kingdom in that guise" when he was caught in the net. When the man is later killed and thrown into the water, the debt is repaid in kind: "On learning that his rescuer had been cast into the river, Lung Wang had saved him". Years pass while the drowned man serves in the god's court; then, on the day his family sacrifice his murderer's heart on the bank, "Lung Wang ordered that he return to earth." His body "suddenly appeared on the surface of the water," floated to the bank, and revived. He was, the record says flatly, "not dead after all."

The Greek shelf touches this same power only in passing. In the Library of Apollodorus (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE), Hercules crosses paths with Iphitus "as he came from Pherae after saving the dead Alcestis for Admetus" — a single subordinate clause, the great resuscitation folded away inside another man's errand about stolen cattle. The deed that the whole motif is named for survives here as a half-line aside; only the Chinese witness is wired to a full narrative of a god calling a dead man back, and the fuller Greek and other authorities on the address wait unread.

In both stories the debt runs backward: the man saved a life without knowing whose it was, and that life saved his. Does the god raise him because he is just, or only because he owes?