Chapter 1 - THE FOURTH PILGRIM
The first thing Mingkong learned after convincing the three disciples to follow him was that legends were terrible traveling companions.
Zhu Bajie complained before sunrise.
Sha Wujing did not speak at all.
Sun Wukong disappeared whenever he pleased.
By the second day, Mingkong had begun to understand why Tang Sanzang had spent so many years reciting sutras under his breath.
It was either devotion or self-defense.
The road west had once been lined with prayer stones, inns, mountain shrines, and villages that survived on the traffic of pilgrims. Now the stones had been overturned. The inns were burned. The shrines had been hollowed out and filled with nests.
At noon, they passed through a village where every doorway had been sealed with human teeth.
Mingkong stopped.
Bajie did not.
“Don’t stare,” the pig demon said.
“What happened here?”
“The same thing that happened everywhere.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the only answer left.”
Bajie walked on.
His old humor appeared only as bitterness now.
The Nine-Toothed Rake rested across his shoulder. Dried blood darkened three of its blades. Mingkong did not ask whose.
Wujing moved behind them carrying no luggage except his crescent spade and a black gourd tied at his waist. Once, stories said he had carried the pilgrims’ baggage across deserts and rivers without complaint.
Now he carried silence.
Wukong was nowhere visible.
Mingkong had stopped asking.
By evening, they reached a ruined monastery standing beside a cliff.
Half the roof had fallen in.
The Buddha statue inside had been decapitated.
Someone had painted eyes on the empty neck.
Bajie refused to enter.
“Why?”
“Because anything still standing after this long either has teeth or rent collectors.”
Wujing studied the sky.
“Storm.”
The clouds had turned black-red.
Lightning spread across them in horizontal lines.
Not natural.
Wukong appeared on the broken monastery gate.
He had not been there a second earlier.
“Inside.”
Bajie looked at him.
“You just agreed with the monk.”
“I agreed with the sky.”
That was enough.
They entered.
Mingkong lit a single oil lamp.
The flame burned green.
Bajie immediately put it out.
Mingkong frowned.
“Why?”
“Because I enjoy being alive.”
Wukong sat cross-legged on the broken altar where the Buddha’s feet remained.
He had said almost nothing since Mount Huaguo.
The burned prayer beads were wrapped around his wrist.
Mingkong noticed he kept touching them without seeming aware.
“Wukong.”
His eyes opened.
“I need to know what happened to Tang Sanzang.”
Bajie groaned.
“Here we go.”
Mingkong ignored him.
“You all know something.”
Wujing looked at the floor.
Bajie found a cracked wine jar in the corner, sniffed it, and looked offended by the emptiness.
Wukong stared at Mingkong.
“You saw the bones.”
“I saw his staff.”
“You saw the robe.”
“Yes.”
“You saw what we left.”
“What did you leave?”
Wukong’s jaw tightened.
Mingkong pressed.
“You say he died. But no one tells me how.”
Bajie said quietly:
“Because the story is wrong.”
Wukong turned toward him.
Bajie held his gaze.
For a moment, the ruined monastery felt too small for both of them.
Mingkong said:
“What story?”
Wujing spoke from the shadows.
“The one Heaven tells.”
He recited the decree sent to surviving temples three centuries ago:
“The holy monk Tang Sanzang completed his karmic burden and returned willingly to the Western Pure Land after his mortal body failed beneath the Red Sky.”
Mingkong frowned.
“That is not how the relic record describes it.”
Bajie laughed.
“Relic record.”
“What?”
“You still think records mean truth?”
Mingkong reached into his robe and produced the torn kasaya.
“You think I found this in a temple archive?”
Bajie’s expression changed.
“I found it beneath the Hall of Empty Bells,” Mingkong said. “Under seven locked stones. Wrapped around a severed hand.”
Wujing looked at him sharply.
Wukong stood.
“Whose hand?”
“I don’t know.”
“Show me.”
Mingkong unwrapped the cloth.
The three names were still visible.
SUN WUKONG.
ZHU BAJIE.
SHA WUJING.
But there was another mark on the reverse side.
Mingkong had assumed it was blood.
Wukong took the cloth.
His face went still.
Bajie leaned closer.
Wujing stepped from the darkness.
The mark was not blood.
It was writing.
Faded.
Burned.
Almost invisible.
Wukong read it aloud.
“Do not let the fourth pilgrim kneel.”
Mingkong’s skin turned cold.
“What does that mean?”
No one answered.
Outside, the storm reached the monastery.
Thunder did not strike.
It spoke.
A deep voice rolled across the mountains.
“KNEEL.”
The monastery shook.
Mingkong nearly dropped to one knee instinctively.
Wukong moved first.
His staff slammed beneath Mingkong’s chin and forced him upright.
“Do not.”
Mingkong stared.
The voice came again.
“KNEEL.”
Bajie planted the Nine-Toothed Rake into the stone floor.
Wujing drove his crescent spade into the doorway.
The pressure intensified.
Not physical.
Spiritual.
The command entered bones.
Mingkong’s knees trembled.
He heard every teacher from his childhood telling him reverence was virtue.
Every sutra hall.
Every bell.
Every bowed head.
Kneeling had been safety.
Kneeling had been discipline.
Kneeling had been how a child survived adults with authority.
Now the sky itself used the gesture as a weapon.
Wukong bared his teeth.
“You picked the wrong four.”
The red clouds opened.
An enormous golden hand descended from above the mountain.
Five fingers.
Each the width of a city wall.
Mingkong’s breath stopped.
Bajie whispered:
“That again?”
Wukong looked up.
Hatred old enough to be myth burned through his face.
Once, Buddha had trapped him beneath Five Elements Mountain with a palm.
Now another palm descended.
But the skin was rotting.
Golden flesh split by black cracks.
Prayer wheels turned beneath the fingernails.
Faces were embedded in the palm.
Thousands.
Monks.
Demons.
Children.
Kings.
All whispering:
“Kneel.”
Wukong grew.
In one breath he became a towering ape-shaped warrior, gray fur whipping in the storm, Jingu Bang expanding in both hands.
He leapt.
The staff struck the descending palm.
The sound split the valley.
BOOM.
The monastery exploded outward.
Mingkong hit the ground.
Bajie dragged him behind a broken wall.
Wujing stood in the open and raised his spade as black rain began falling.
Not water.
Ink.
Each drop formed a character where it struck stone.
SIN.
DEBT.
SUBMIT.
The giant palm pressed lower.
Wukong roared.
His staff bent.
Mingkong had never imagined the Ruyi Jingu Bang could bend.
Bajie saw it too.
His face lost color.
“That’s not Buddha.”
Wujing answered:
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
The giant palm opened an eye.
Right in the center.
Red pupil.
Golden iris.
The eye looked directly at Mingkong.
A voice entered his skull.
FOURTH PILGRIM.
Mingkong clutched his head.
Bajie grabbed him.
“What did it say?”
Mingkong could barely breathe.
“It knows me.”
Wukong shouted from above:
“EVERYTHING KNOWS YOU WHEN YOU WALK AROUND WEARING A DEAD MAN’S PRAYER BEADS!”
The palm pushed down again.
Wukong fell thirty feet.
His feet smashed into the mountain slope.
Blood ran from his mouth.
Mingkong saw something in the eye.
A reflection.
Tang Sanzang.
Alive.
Standing inside a hall of white light.
Chains around his wrists.
Mingkong gasped.
Wukong saw his face.
“What?”
“I saw him.”
The mountain stopped.
Even the storm seemed to hesitate.
Wukong’s eyes changed.
“Who?”
Mingkong looked at him.
“Tang Sanzang.”
The giant palm smiled.
Not metaphorically.
The skin beneath the central eye split into teeth.
Wukong screamed.
Not fear.
Rage.
The Jingu Bang expanded another hundred feet.
He struck upward with everything he had.
The golden palm shattered.
Fragments of rotting light rained across the valley.
The pressure vanished.
The four collapsed among ruins.
For several moments, no one spoke.
Then Wukong landed in front of Mingkong.
Small again.
Blood at the corner of his mouth.
He grabbed the young monk by the robe.
“What did you see?”
“A hall.”
“What hall?”
“White stone. No doors. Tang Sanzang in chains.”
“Alive?”
“Yes.”
Wukong’s grip tightened.
Bajie whispered:
“That’s impossible.”
Wujing said:
“No.”
They all looked at him.
Wujing’s face had gone pale.
“I saw the same hall.”
“When?” Wukong demanded.
Wujing looked at the broken prayer beads on Wukong’s wrist.
“The night Master died.”
Silence.
Bajie took one step back.
“You never told us.”
Wujing’s voice cracked for the first time.
“Because in the hall, he was kneeling.”
Mingkong looked at the kasaya.
Do not let the fourth pilgrim kneel.
Wukong released him.
Then the Great Sage looked west.
The red horizon pulsed like an open wound.
“Where is that hall?”
Wujing answered:
“Western Heaven.”
Bajie turned on him.
“You knew and said nothing for three centuries?”
Wujing did not defend himself.
“I knew a place. Not a truth.”
“That distinction kept us apart.”
“Yes.”
The admission silenced Bajie more effectively than anger could have.
Mingkong looked among the three disciples and understood something the old stories never emphasized. Their greatest enemy after Tang Sanzang’s death had not been one demon or one failed battle. It had been separate grief. Each had carried one fragment and mistaken isolation for loyalty.
Wukong looked at Wujing.
“If you hide another vision from me—”
“I will not.”
Wukong’s threat died unfinished.
That mattered too.
For the first time since Mount Huaguo, the three former disciples were not standing together because of a dead master’s relic.
They were sharing information.
In the world that remained, that was almost sacred.
Wukong smiled.
Not kindly.
“Good.”
May you like
He rested the Jingu Bang on his shoulder.
“Then we stop wasting time.”
