Nezha

Nezha's myth, most fully elaborated in the Ming-dynasty novel Investiture of the Gods, is a genuinely strange and violent origin story even by the standards of Chinese mythology. Born after a three-year pregnancy as a ball of flesh that his father, the military commander Li Jing, slashes open in alarm, Nezha emerges already a fully formed child with supernatural strength and a fierce, uncontrollable temper. Playing by the sea, he kills the son of the Dragon King in a fight and, when the Dragon King demands his parents' lives in retribution, Nezha resolves the crisis by taking his own life — cutting his flesh from his bones and returning them to his parents, severing the debt of a body he holds came from them in the first place.

His mother preserves his spirit, and his teacher, the immortal Taiyi Zhenren, reconstitutes him a new body from lotus root and leaf, restoring him to a still-childlike but now independently divine existence, no longer bound by ordinary filial obligation to the father who had, in several versions, gone on to destroy his spirit-tablet out of shame and fear. Nezha subsequently reconciles with and even protects his family, but the myth's core — a child who settles his own moral debts through radical self-sacrifice and is reborn independent of his origin — has made him an enduringly popular figure of righteous, uncontainable, and ultimately protective youthful energy, worshipped particularly as a guardian of children and, in Taiwan, celebrated in vivid, high-energy temple parade performances.