Beneath Spirit Mountain, Zhu Bajie, the Clean Altar Envoy, indulges in endless offerings and pleasures. No one knows that beneath his greedy, lazy exterior lies a hatred that has burned for five hundred years, along with earth-shattering secrets. The battle between the real and fake Monkey Kings was no false alarm. It was a carefully laid killing trap by the Tathagata: the true Sun Wukong had long since fallen, and the one who traveled west was merely a Buddhist puppet. Tang Sanzang was trapped in endless reincarnation, Sha Seng was sealed by his Buddhist rank, and all those who once journeyed to fetch the scriptures became pawns sacrificed in the power struggle between the Heavenly Court and the Buddhist order. Only Bajie saw through it all. He endured for five hundred years, waiting for the day he could take revenge. When he finally broke free of Buddhism’s restraints, shed his disguise as the Clean Altar Envoy, and revealed his true wild-boar form, he took out the three life-saving hairs that his elder brother Monkey had entrusted to him. His determination to resurrect the Great Sage blazed into a wildfire. From then on, Bajie left Spirit Mountain alone and embarked on a path defying Heaven. He would travel across the Three Realms and rally Yang Jian, Nezha, the Bull Demon King, and a host of other immortals, gods, demons, and monsters who resented the Buddhist court’s tyranny. Using the hairs as his guide, he would defy Heaven and resurrect the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, launching an epic counterattack against Buddhism and the Heavenly Court and making the lofty gods and Buddhas repay their blood debt of five hundred years.
