The martial god of wealth's most memorable scene, at least in the sixteenth century novel Investiture of the Gods, is his death rather than his glory. Zhao Gongming, serving the losing Shang side in the novel's war against the Zhou, is killed by the strategist Jiang Ziya through a ritual technique rather than a weapon: a straw effigy of Zhao is made, his name is written upon it, and it is shot with peachwood arrows across twenty one days of ritual observance until the sympathetic magic takes his life at a distance.
Only after his death, in the novel's closing distribution of divine offices, is Zhao Gongming posthumously appointed Marshal of the God of Wealth, given command over four subordinate deities of profit, joy and fair trade, and set to preside over the very prosperity his own death had nothing to do with earning. The scene is often read as characteristic of the novel's larger pattern, in which many of the folk pantheon's offices are handed out at the end as consolation prizes to defeated warriors, so that a violent death in a losing cause becomes, by literary convention rather than by any older cult tradition, the origin story explaining why a fierce general on a black tiger is the one Chinese households now welcome every lunar new year as the bringer of riches.