The morning bell at Spirit Mountain rang for the third time. Sun Wukong sat cross-legged on a lotus throne, impatiently tapping his Golden Cudgel with golden knuckles.
“Amitabha Buddha...” Tang Sanzang, seated beside him, suddenly spoke in a voice only he could hear. “Wukong, your mind is unsettled today.”
“Master, don’t you find it strange?”
Sun Wukong’s Fiery Golden Eyes swept across the Buddhas. “Those bald... ahem, the bodhisattvas don’t even vary the intervals between their breaths while chanting.”
A peach slipped from Tang Sanzang’s sleeve. “Eat it.”
“This peach...” Sun Wukong took it, then suddenly narrowed his eyes. The Golden Cudgel’s pattern had appeared on its skin!
“A woodcutter gave it to me while I was begging for alms yesterday.” Tang Sanzang lowered his eyes. “He said... he found it on Mount Lingtai Fangcun.”
He was the stone monkey fated to die in the Eight Trigrams Furnace, but he survived thanks to his future self, the Victorious Fighting Buddha, who transmigrated through time to save him. Yet this “salvation” tore apart the threads of causality, freeing the evil thoughts of the Chaos Demon Ape hidden within his stone womb. They grew wildly on the misdeeds and karmic burdens he accumulated, until even the Heavenly Dao was corrupted.
More terrifying still, the Victorious Fighting Buddha who had transmigrated from the future was punished for disrupting causality and turned into a peach, with all his cultivation and memories sealed inside it.
(This story follows the causal thread in which Sun Wukong is refined by Taishang Laojun. However, because Sun Wukong from the future, the Victorious Fighting Buddha, intervened, the local Sun Wukong, who should have been refined, survived.)
