Jin Chanzi faces tribulation from the start, but a slip of the hand leaves a pair of bandits dead. As luck would have it, one was the pilgrim chosen by Heaven's Will to journey for the scriptures, and the other was a well-connected favorite personally selected by a bodhisattva. The System crashes on the spot and kicks him out of the Buddhist group chat. The road to the Western Heaven is barred, and all the gods and Buddhas in the skies gang up to force him to confess.
On Mount Ling, the Buddhist sect is even more cutthroat than the Heavenly Court. Buddhas and bodhisattvas scheme against one another for official posts and offerings. Driven into a corner, Jin Chanzi decides to flip the table. He takes on the identity of one of the slain bandits, shaves his head, and dons a splendid kasaya. If they won't let him become a Buddha, he'll follow their script and walk the path all over again. This time, though, he won't be anyone's pawn.
From Great Tang to Mount Ling, he kills ghosts wherever he finds them and subdues monsters wherever they appear. He crushes the eighty-one trials laid out by his former colleagues. Every person the Buddhist sect sends to make trouble for him ends up defeated. Guanyin secretly backs a false pilgrim to replace him, only for him to snatch the plan from under her nose.
At last, beneath Mount Ling, he stands before the Tathagata, covered in monster blood and burdened with countless sins, with a million monsters following behind him. The Buddhas who once looked down on all creation finally panic. Looking down upon the human world, Heaven's Will discovers that there is more to Jin Chanzi than meets the eye: his twenty-fourth reincarnation is directly tied to the greatest secret of the world of Journey to the West.
More astonishing still, after investigating to the end, Heaven's Will learns that the bandit who died in the first trial was supposed to be Tang Sanzang, while the true reincarnation of Jin Chanzi was... Zhu Bajie, the one he had beaten to death with a single blow?
Mysteries pile upon mysteries, and every game of chess hides another. Just as everyone thinks Tang Sanzang is merely a monk trying to defy fate, Heaven's Will finally discovers...
