Moonlight on Plum Blossoms

Mei Xiao E looked at the new algorithm and suddenly understood. "No wonder he spent forty-nine days being forged in Lord Laozi's furnace. He wasn't forging a copper head and iron arms. He was forging a pair of eyes that could see through the true nature of value!"

Bajie clapped beneath a peach tree. "Brother Monkey! From now on, you should call those Fiery Golden Eyes a 'Value Detector'!"

Wukong gazed into the distance. There, Tang Sanzang's Ultimate Sutra of Bubbles had turned to a fresh page on its own. A glowing annotation appeared:

[Note: Once capital learns the seventy-two transformations, the Fiery Golden Eyes must be upgraded to version 3.0. They must see through not only demons and monsters, but also distinguish which growth comes from genuine creation, and which prosperity is merely an illusion conjured by leverage.]

At the edge of the black hole, just before the final remnant of Xu Pidai's "castle in the air" vanished, someone seemed to hear him murmur:

"Back then... I really did want to build proper homes."

But no one heard him. On the real Liangshan, Lu Zhishen's monk's staff was smashing into the last of the "silicon-based reapers," while Wu Song's fists crushed the alien fleet's "emotion detector." And all of it was labeled by Wukong's upgraded Fiery Golden Eyes:

"Authenticity: 100%. Source of value: loyalty-and-righteousness algorithm × flesh-and-blood bodies."

As the capital era draws to its dusk, the true Fiery Eyes have only just opened.