[Journey to the West + underdog + resistance + revenge + confronting the Jade Emperor + Heavenly Dao] She was once an apricot immortal on Thorn Ridge, enjoying the breeze and moonlight and composing poetry over tea with her fellow trees. She had never committed the slightest evil, yet because she stood in the way of the destined pilgrimage, a Buddhist disciple smashed her home with a rake, and all her companions perished.
Only a wisp of her fragrant soul remained, carrying the grievances and life essence of a hundred thousand plants and trees as it crawled back from the blood-soaked earth into the human world.
From that moment on, the delicate apricot blossoms withered away, and the Grudge of All Trees was born anew: pale as bone, marked with veins of blood.
Simple revenge was never enough for her:
• Tear apart the Golden Body of the Victorious Fighting Buddha, and let the Three Realms see how many nameless souls lie beneath the ledger of merit;
• Confront the Buddhas of Vulture Peak: if compassion reaches only those chosen by Heaven, then was this scripture brought back to save all beings, or to destroy them?
• Overturn the rules set by Heaven and Earth, and win the right to stand beneath the sun for all the blades of grass crushed by grand narratives, and all the beings labeled “monsters” by gods and Buddhas!
Once the most insignificant footnote on the pilgrimage west, she now takes chaos as her brush and rewrites the epic of Journey to the West.
Witness how a speck of dust gathers the resentment of all living things and topples the golden mountain of gods and Buddhas; witness how a blood-red apricot tree, with its tiny frame, breaks open a new sky for those without a voice!
