To mend the sky, Nuwa gathers and melts stones of five colors, fusing them into a great patch that seals the hole through which fire and flood had been pouring. To replace the broken pillar and give the sky a stable support at each corner, she catches a giant sea turtle, cuts off its four legs, and sets them upright as new pillars at the world's four edges. She kills a black dragon that had been ravaging the land in the chaos following the collapse, and finally dams the remaining floodwaters using the piled ash of burnt reeds, restoring order to a world that had come close to total ruin.
In later iconography and text, Nuwa is very frequently paired with the culture hero Fuxi, sometimes described as her brother, sometimes as her husband, and often depicted together with two human upper bodies and a single pair of intertwined serpent or dragon tails, an image found on Han-dynasty tomb reliefs and silk paintings across several centuries. Together the pair are credited not only with repairing the cosmos but with instituting marriage, kinship rules, and the earliest tools of settled life, making Nuwa and Fuxi jointly responsible for both the physical stability of the world and the social order that allows human civilization to continue within it.