In the 27th year of Zhenguan of the Tang Dynasty, it has been ten years since the four masters and disciples returned to the Tang Dynasty to learn Buddhist scriptures. When Tang Monk, the Buddha of Zhantan Merit, was preaching in Chang'an, he suddenly saw that the scroll spontaneously ignited, and the broken pages showed the characters "Untainted Queru, the spiritual mountain is covered with dust"; Sun Wukong, the victorious Buddha, noticed that the golden cudgel was shaking for no reason, and the immortal veins of Huaguo Mountain were withered; "empty sacrifices" occurred frequently in the Western Heaven Offering Treasury under the control of Zhu Bajie, the envoy of the Pure Altar, and the offerings turned into rotten rats; the golden-bodied Luohan Sha Monk discovered that there were inscriptions engraved on the bottom of the quicksand river. The stone tablet of "Fake Merit and Virtue"; the Eight Heavenly Dragons and White Dragon Horses witnessed the auspicious clouds condense into copper-stinking black mist on the Lingshan Pillar.
The Five Saints noticed that the foundation of faith in the Buddhist world and the human world was collapsing. After investigation, they found that after the Tathagata retreated, the old-school forces headed by the "Landeng Ancient Buddha" in Lingshan monopolized faith resources through the "merit quantification" system, concocted "apocrypses" to control the misfortune and blessings of the world, and transformed practice into a "merit KPI assessment." The masters and disciples who used to conquer demons and demons now have to fight against the chronic diseases of the system under the cloak of sanctity - they broke into the "Quantified Hell" to expose the fraud of merits, broke through the "Mask Zen Forest" to expose the tampering of scriptures, fought against the "Oligarchs" to cut off the chain of interests, and finally recast the true meaning of faith in the "Wugou Cliff". The whole book is based on the narrative of gods and demons, which satirizes formalism, alienation of power and commodification of faith, continuing the critical tradition of "portraying reality with fantasy" in the original work.
