Lin Bei, a modern man who transmigrates into Tang Sanzang, realizes the moment he opens his eyes that Journey to the West is a complete fraud. The Eighty-One Tribulations are scripted, the merit ledger is a set of books, and immortality is an industry that extracts years from mortal lives. The immortals and Buddhas sit high upon their lotus thrones, yet feast on the flesh and blood of the human world.
The System awakens with the Nine Calamities of the Golden Cicada Body-Tempering Art. No pills, no sudden enlightenment. Want to get stronger? Take a beating. At death’s door? Break through. Gravely wounded with no cure? Congratulations, you’ve triggered a Nirvana critical hit. Others cultivate immortality on spiritual energy. He becomes a sage through sheer toughness.
Beneath Five Elements Mountain, he tells the monkey who has been pinned there for five hundred years: “Protect me, and come with me to Spirit Mountain. We’re going to flip the Buddha’s table.”
At Gao Village, he tells the pig demon who has given up on himself: “If even a mortal like me isn’t afraid of death, what are you, Marshal Tianpeng, afraid of?”
In the Flowing Sand River, he joins the condemned man at the riverbed, enduring the punishment of flying swords piercing his heart every seven days. “You’re not a criminal. You’re a witness.”
From Five Elements Mountain to Spirit Mountain, from Spirit Mountain to Kunlun, he leads three “inferior disciples” abandoned by the Three Realms, fighting his way through the gods and Buddhas of the heavens while exposing a conspiracy ten thousand years in the making. When the immortals and Buddhas curse him as a demon from beyond the realms, when the Buddha sits upon his lotus throne and looks down on all living things, when Yuanshi Tianzun grips the Heavenly Lock and sneers in silence
He tears open his kasaya to reveal a bandage-wrapped torso, clenches his fist, and lets out a laugh.
“This humble monk knows a little martial arts.”
“All Buddhas, prepare to die.”
