In the aftermath of a catastrophic conflict, most often told as a battle between the water god Gong Gong and the fire god Zhurong, though some versions instead frame it as Gong Gong's own rebellion against the order of heaven, the furious Gong Gong smashes his head against Mount Buzhou, one of the great pillars that had been holding up the sky at the edge of the world. The pillar shatters and collapses, tearing open a hole in the heavens above and tilting the whole surface of the earth out of true. Through the broken sky, fire and flood pour down without check, while wild beasts and birds of prey, no longer held in balance, begin devouring the people below; because the earth now tilts toward the northwest where the pillar fell, Chinese tradition to this day cites the disaster as the reason the sun, moon, and stars appear to drift toward the northwest and why China's great rivers flow toward the southeast.
The creator goddess Nuwa, who in the oldest strands of the tradition had already shaped the first human beings out of yellow clay along a riverbank, now takes on the labor of repairing the broken world, since no other deity in the story moves to correct what Gong Gong's collapse has caused.