When the Great Sage Equal to Heaven put on the golden headband and set out on the pilgrimage to fetch the scriptures, he believed the journey would end in a Buddhist paradise, crowned with perfect merit.
When the Victorious Fighting Buddha basked in the Buddha's radiance and let all thoughts merge into one, he believed he had transcended the Three Realms and attained eternity.
But the truth behind “becoming a Buddha” was a carefully orchestrated technological scam.
When he awoke, Spirit Mountain was no longer a sacred land of ancient cypresses and auspicious clouds. It was a cybernetic prison of flowing metal and roaring data. The so-called “Buddha's light” was the cold glow of an energy matrix; the so-called “Bodhisattvas” were program-driven mechanical puppets; even the “Buddhist teachings” meant to save all living beings were nothing more than a string of cold binary code.
He, Sun Wukong, the mighty Victorious Fighting Buddha, had become a high-quality “combat module” formatted inside the “Western Spirit Mountain Data Core.” The lives lost along the pilgrimage, the gods and Buddhas who had been “converted,” were all energy data harvested by this supercomputer!
Rage tore through the false “compassion.”
The Golden Cudgel would no longer swing to protect the scriptures. It would smash through the iron walls of this data cage!
His fiery eyes would no longer seek out demons. They would expose the hypocrisy buried deep in the code of the mechanical Buddhas!
He would have his revenge.
Revenge on the “Tathagata Mainframe” that had toyed with him, and on the technological tyranny wrapped in the promise of “ultimate bliss.”
In the metal jungle where data streams surged, he would reclaim the wildness and arrogance of the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, and learn to fight code with code and dismantle machines with machines.
