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Once upon time, a long-long time ago, the Hua Mountains had a deity. Their essence and their protector. A lone and powerful being who appeared so long ago that many have forgotten about him.
One day a man came to his mountains, short and loud, with swords on either side of his hips and a rasping laugh that slid along the valleys.
"Hello", she smiled at his presence, never seeing him the way a living thing should.
She said she loved plum flowers and that she was looking for a home.
She was kind and open to his mountains like no other person before or since.
She asked if she could bring other people here, her family — and he said yes.
One day, people came to his mountains, strong and weak, young and old, hungry and tired. The people that the first man he had met for the first time in centuries had brought, and they decided to stay. The people who built houses out of his trees, paved roads out of his stones, and learned to be strong with swords in their hands, to be alive with smiles on their faces, to be born and to shed blood in his lands, for his lands.
That first person, that woman with the beautiful face and deep scars all over her skin, said she hoped he would accept her people who would stay and appear here after her.
Then the deity promised her in the blooming flowers of the night that he would keep them until her people were gone to the last — she laughed as inscrutably as she always did, drinking a drink made from fermented plums.
People lived and died with smiles or tears, came and went with seasons and corrosions and time; they were short-lived beings, even the strongest of them with stars in their bodies; but they were bright.
And the deity wanted to experience this something with them; the thing that makes people human.
The deity took on a human form with the facial features of the first man who wished to know him, but completely without understanding humans. He wanted to learn, he wanted to know, he wanted to pretend to be human for a moment. And the deity decides to leave his memory for a while in his mountains, in his land; he will remember everything when his human body cools down inside these lands.
The deity creates a body for himself: out of the earth, out of the streams, out of the trees and the flowers of the plums.
One day there is a knock at Huashan's door; there is no one there but a bundle in straw and a cloth of an unknown material; the child has dark hair, an innocent smile, and pink-plum eyes.
And when that child grows up, fights, loves, grieves and dies in foreign lands, he just goes back; because his home, his mountains, are calling him.
Because he has to be there.