Journey to the West: I, Tang Sanzang, Become a Buddha by Racking Up Tribulations

Tang Sanzang has been reborn, carrying the memories of his failed pilgrimages from his previous two lives.

In his first life, he made it to Heilongjiang, but because he never encountered a monster, he failed to meet his KPI and was sent back to the drawing board. In his second life, he made it to Mount Ling, but the way tribulations were counted was such a rip-off. The three battles against the White Bone Spirit counted as one tribulation, and the seven sisters of Pansi Cave also counted as one. In the end, he was half a tribulation short and got sent back again.

Now, at the start of his third life, he’s already lost part of a toe.

Tang Sanzang gets it: this pilgrimage is just a KPI game. Eighty-One Tribulations? Fine, he’ll make up the numbers himself! If there’s a mountain, he’ll carve a road through it. If there’s water, he’ll build a bridge. If all else fails, he’ll have Wukong climb the same mountain eight times and call that eight tribulations!

But he never imagined that this life would go completely off the rails.

Sun Wukong becomes a top-tier star on a livestream platform, gaining a hundred thousand followers by pushing over the Ginseng Fruit Tree. Zhu Bajie holds a talent show at Gao Village, where a sow spirit waves a fan sign and shouts, “Fly high, Brother Pig!” Sha Wujing, laid off from his job as the Curtain-Rolling General, finds a new line of work with nine skulls hanging around his neck: the heads of Tang Sanzang’s first nine lives. The White Dragon Horse lies flat every day, with one great wish: “I want to eat a mare for a change.”

When the pilgrimage becomes a team-building event for the Three Realms’ hottest talent agency, and the Eighty-One Tribulations turn into a performance review, Tang Sanzang can only ask:

Can we even finish this lousy pilgrimage or not?

Anyone there? This is urgent.