Lac Long Quan

Before he meets Au Co, the Linh Nam Chich Quai gives Lac Long Quan a separate cycle of heroic deeds in his own right, clearing the land of three monstrous spirits collectively remembered as the Ngu Tinh. Ngu Tinh, a giant fish demon with a centipede-like body large enough to be mistaken for a ship's sail, terrorized fishermen along the coast until Lac Long Quan cut it into three pieces, its head becoming a mountain, its tail forming the beach around what is now Bach Long Vi island, and its body carried off to a distant land. Ho Tinh, a nine-tailed fox spirit, had lived for centuries beneath a mountain west of what is now Hanoi, luring travelers, particularly young women, into its cave; Lac Long Quan destroyed its lair and drove floodwater into the cave to finish it. Moc Tinh, a centuries-old tree spirit capable of taking human form, sabotaged farmers' fields by night until Lac Long Quan felled its host tree and scattered its remains across separate regions to prevent it reforming. The three victories are told as a connected sequence establishing Lac Long Quan as a land-clearing culture hero in his own right, distinct from and prior to his role as husband to Au Co and father of the Hung Kings' line, presented as the reason the land was made safe for human settlement before that dynasty's founding.

Lac Long Quan is not remembered only in chronicle text; a living annual festival at Binh Da, in what is now Hanoi's Thanh Oai district, continues to venerate him by name as Quoc To, National Ancestor. Vietnam's cultural heritage authorities recognized the Binh Da Festival as a National Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2014, the first festival in Hanoi to receive that designation, and Vietnamese press covering recent editions of the festival describe its central rite as a solemn procession, ritual offerings and incense ceremony held in Lac Long Quan's honor at the Noi Binh Da communal house, which preserves a bas-relief said to date back more than a thousand years and to have been commissioned under the tenth century king Dinh Tien Hoang. The festival is held annually around the sixth day of the third lunar month, placing it close to the better known Hung Kings' Temple Festival that honors Lac Long Quan's own son, and both observances draw on the same founding narrative, that the Vietnamese people descend from the union of the dragon lord and the mountain fairy, con Rong chau Tien. The continued state recognition and annual observance make Lac Long Quan's veneration a matter of documented, ongoing public practice rather than only of recorded myth.