Ōmukade

A centipede large enough to wrap around a mountain.

Mount Mikami, by Lake Biwa, in the great telling — coiled around it, seven and a half times.

It eats people. It eats dragons. And ordinary weapons don't touch it — arrows glance off the armoured segments.

Its one weakness is the humblest thing in Japanese folklore.

Human spit.

The bridge at Seta

A warrior named Fujiwara no Hidesato is crossing the Seta bridge, where an enormous serpent lies across the road.

Everyone else has been turning back. He walks over it.

Which is the test — and having passed it, the serpent transforms into a woman and makes her petition. She is of the dragon court, from the palace under the lake, and the ōmukade has been killing her kin, and the dragons cannot stop it.

She asks a human for help. That's worth pausing on: the dragon kingdom, which commands water and weather, has a pest problem it cannot solve, and has to come up onto a bridge and ask a passing archer.

Three arrows

He goes to Mikami at night, and the centipede comes down the mountain — described as a line of two thousand torches, which is the light of its legs.

First arrow: bounces off.

Second arrow: bounces off.

Third arrow: he wets the tip with his own saliva — and it goes in, and the thing dies.

I love this beyond all reason.

The monster is armoured against the finest archery in Japan. What kills it is a man spitting on his arrowhead.

There's no ritual to it, no purification, no priest. It's the most ordinary substance a body produces, applied with contempt, and it goes through armour that turned two clean shots.

(Saliva as a repellent runs all through this tradition — you spit at things, you moisten a charm with it. Something in the folk logic held that what comes out of a living human mouth is the thing the unnatural can't take.)

He got paid in perpetuity

The dragon court's gratitude is itemized, and it's the cleanest hero-economy in Japanese folklore.

An inexhaustible bale of rice. Take from it forever; it never empties. This is where his nickname comes from — Tawara Tōda, "Lord Bag-of-Rice."

Endless bolts of silk. Same principle.

A bronze bell, which he donated to Mii-dera temple.

One arrow. Three perpetual revenue streams, two of them literally inexhaustible.

He also, in the fuller versions, gets taken down to the dragon palace itself for the banquet.

He also killed Masakado

And here's the fact that makes the hero-dossier system worth keeping.

Fujiwara no Hidesato is a real historical figure — and he is credited as co-killer of Taira no Masakado, the rebel who declared himself Emperor, whose severed head flew across Japan and whose burial mound sits in Tokyo's financial district to this day.

So the same archer ended the greatest rebel in Japanese legend and the greatest arthropod.

Same man. Two of the biggest files in the tradition. Historically attested for one of them.

Two footnotes, both good

The paradox. The centipede is elsewhere the messenger of Bishamonten — the Buddhist god of warriors. Sacred to the warriors' own patron deity, and simultaneously the warriors' great monster.

A double posting, never reconciled.

The mining reading. Scholars have proposed that the ōmukade is iron ore — the many-legged thing winding through a mountain is the branching vein, and Hidesato's shooting is the smelting.

Which pairs with the standard reading of the eight-headed serpent as a flood subdued by river engineering.

Both are monsters that turn out to be industry. A mountain full of metal, and a river that keeps drowning the valley — and in both cases the story remembers a man who solved it, and gives him a dragon's daughter for it.