Three hundred years after the pilgrimage was completed, Spirit Mountain is no longer what it once was.
Tang Sanzang’s monk’s staff breaks for no reason in front of the Great Hall of the Buddha. Blue-black rust crawls over the fracture, like forgotten vengeful spirits gnawing at it. Sun Wukong still wears his golden headband, but his Fiery Golden Eyes burn more painfully than ever. He can always glimpse dark mist seeping through cracks in the Tathagata’s golden body. Two skulls are missing from the necklace around Sha Wujing’s neck. The remaining eight grow hot every night, showing him the secret massacre he witnessed in the Buddhist realm when he was the Curtain-Rolling General. Even Zhu Bajie, the most pleasure-loving of them all, once split open the boundary between illusion and reality in the dead of night and saw the souls of Gao Village’s people sealed beneath Spirit Mountain’s glazed roof tiles. It was a century-old blood debt, laid upon him by the Buddhist realm to make him “cut off his worldly ties.”
When the seal on the “Well of No Return” behind the mountain breaks, Buddhist light turns to poisonous mist wherever the water spreads. Countless demons slain by the pilgrimage party and heretics erased by the Buddhist realm emerge from the fog as “Faceless Ghosts.” Their leader wears a tattered kasaya, and his face is exactly like Tang Sanzang’s mortal form. “Jin Chanzi, you obtained the true scriptures and became a Buddha, but who will save us, the ‘past’ you abandoned?”
At the moment the Tathagata’s golden body shatters, Sun Wukong finally understands: the pilgrimage was nothing but a scheme by the Buddhist realm to harvest the fortune of the Three Realms through faith. The golden headband was never a tool to restrain wildness, but a shackle binding his true soul. When the remnant soul of the Six-Eared Macaque crawls out of the dark mist and stands beside him, the headband bursts apart, piece by piece.
“When did I, Old Sun, become your slave?”
This time, what they seek is not the false scriptures of Spirit Mountain, but the truth buried beneath them. And what they fight is not the…
