射落九烏 Nine Crows Shot Down
這水：这水：
逐句解 Line by line
As for this water:
Two characters. The chapter stops to explain where the hot spring came from, which it does not have to do and takes fifty-two characters over.
Since the world was split open there had been ten suns by rights. Later Yi, who was a fine hand with a bow, shot down nine of the crows so that they fell to earth, and only the one golden crow was left — which is the true fire of the sun.
羿 is Yi the Archer, and this is one of the oldest stories in Chinese. Ten suns rose together and scorched the world; Yi shot nine of them out of the sky. The suns are 烏, crows — a three-legged crow was held to live in the sun, so the bird and the star are the same thing. 原貞 means properly, by rights.
There are nine hot springs in heaven and earth, and all of them are what those crows turned into.
處 is chù, a place — a measure word for locations. And here is the join: the nine suns that fell became the nine hot springs, so the water is hot because it used to be a sun. It is a piece of folk etymology built backwards from the fact that hot water comes out of the ground.
The book stops the story to explain why the water is hot, and the explanation is a myth most Chinese readers would have known since childhood.
Ten suns rose together and the world began to burn, so Yi the Archer shot nine of them down. The suns are crows in this telling, because a three-legged crow was supposed to live inside the sun — the bird and the star being the same object. One was left, and that is the sun we have.
The clever part is the join. Nine suns fell to earth; there are nine hot springs; therefore the springs are the fallen suns, still warm. It is reasoning backwards from a fact that needed explaining, and it is exactly how this kind of story gets made.