After falling off a cliff, twenty-year-old college student Lin Zhou is mistakenly reaped by a scatterbrained King of Hell. To make it up to him, the King of Hell promises to send him somewhere “close to immortality,” but instead dumps him in a hunter’s home in the world of Journey to the West, where he becomes a six-year-old boy called “Little Stone.”
Only when he hears rumors of “Five Elements Mountain” and “the unruly monkey trapped beneath it” does Lin Zhou realize the truth: he’s just one mountain away from the Great Sage Equal to Heaven Sun Wukong!
Armed with wild peaches, he ventures into the mountain and meets a mud-covered figure in a valley, with a monkey face and a thunder-god’s mouth, yet a gaze still full of defiance. “Little brat, aren’t you afraid I’ll eat you?” Sun Wukong’s taunt hides five hundred years of loneliness, and the wild peach Lin Zhou offers him becomes a glimmer of light that breaks the silence.
From then on, a figure braves wind and rain to visit beneath Five Elements Mountain. In spring, he brings mountain peaches; in summer, wild berries; in autumn, sweet persimmons; in winter, warm clothes. Sun Wukong grumbles as he takes them, but when Lin Zhou shivers with cold, he shields him from the wind with his furry hands. When Lin Zhou is bullied, he bares his teeth and warns, “Try touching him again and see what happens.” And every evening, he lets his guard down and tells Lin Zhou about the splendor of the Peach Garden and the thrill of Havoc in Heaven, making the boy’s eyes light up.
“Want to become an immortal?” Sun Wukong asks as he bites into a peach.
“I do!” Lin Zhou nods emphatically. “I want to live freely for a thousand years, just like the Great Sage.”
He knows how Journey to the West ends. He knows this monkey will eventually embark on the pilgrimage to fetch the scriptures and never return. So he clings desperately to their bond, becoming Sun Wukong’s only listener and his only reason to stay attached to this world. As Tang Monk’s footsteps draw near, Sun Wukong looks at him and suddenly says, “The peaches on Flower-Fruit Mountain are even sweeter than the heavenly peaches.”
