[A xianxia novel woven into Journey to the West, closely following its story.]
“Was ten lifetimes of reincarnation a Buddhist gift of spiritual practice, or a conspiracy between gods and Buddhas?”
Jin Chanzi, Tathagata's second disciple, disrespected the Buddhist teachings, and a blaze of black-lotus karma fire burned away his Buddha-heart in the Great Thunderclap Temple.
Jiang Liuer transmigrated into his tenth reincarnation and only then learned that the pilgrimage to obtain the scriptures, a grand undertaking that shook the Three Realms, was nothing more than a pawn in the struggle between gods and Buddhas.
His kasaya stained with blood, Buddha and demon sharing one body.
When memories of his past life awakened inside the Formless Bell, and the Black Lotus devoured the True Scriptures of Dizang, Jiang Liuer decided to become Xuanzang, take up the bloodstained Nine-Ringed Monk's Staff, and set out on the path to defy Heaven!
This is a forbidden quest for enlightenment that begins at Mount Lingshan and ends in the netherworld.
When the Golden Cicada's sacred body devoured the karmic trials of the Eighty-One Tribulations, and its burning karma fire seared through the Three Realms' hypocrisy, the monk who had once carved out his heart and spilled his blood for all living beings finally understood:
There are no true scriptures in the Western Heaven, only a fragment of the primordial world in which all beings are pieces on a board.
