After creating everything Prajapati is like a runner at the end of a race. His breath and strength leave him, he falls, and food flows from the eye he lies on. The gods say there is no other foundation and ask Agni to let them restore him in the fire; Agni is paid by becoming the mouth through which the gods eat (7.1.2), or, in 6.1.2, Prajapati himself asks Agni and promises to be called by Agni's name. The gods heat him, the offerings become bricks and pass into him, and he says his happiness is as great as their offering. Made whole, he is stood upright. Hair, skin, flesh, bone and marrow are the five layers of the altar. A teacher warns against watching an altar built in less than a year.
Prajapati makes Death above the mortal creatures. Half mortal himself, he fears Death, becomes clay and water and enters the earth. Death asks the gods where their maker is and promises not to harm him; the gods gather the water and the clay and make a brick, then wrap his mortal layers in immortal ones. Later the gods, wanting immortality, build the altar wrongly until Prajapati gives them the right count of stones and bricks. Death complains that all men will now be immortal; the gods rule that nobody shall be immortal with the body, which is Death's share.
What is different here:
He hides from Death instead of collapsing from toil; Death, not the gods, proposes the search; clay and water explain the brick; ends with the settlement about the body.
Having created all things Prajapati feels emptied and fears death. He tries to take the creatures back into himself by dividing his body into two, three, four and more sets of bricks, fails each time, stops at twenty-four, and finally builds himself a body out of the three Vedas, counted hour by hour through the year.
What is different here:
No helpers at all: Prajapati restores himself, by arithmetic and by the Vedas.
While Prajapati was creating, Death, that evil, overpowered him. He practised austerity for a thousand years to leave it behind; lights rose from the pores of his skin and became the stars, and in the thousandth year he cleansed himself through.
What is different here:
Death overpowers him during creation; the cure is a thousand years of austerity and the stars are a by-product.