“Eighty-one tribulations later he is still the cleverest thing on any number of legs he feels like.”
A Cinnabar immortal of The Mortal Realm
4 known connections · an open question
Born from stone, schooled by a Daoist immortal, unschooled by everyone else. He ate the Peaches of Immortality, drank the elixir, erased his name from the ledgers of death, and made heaven send its entire army — then its best general — then the Buddha himself. Eighty-one tribulations later he is still the cleverest thing on any number of legs he feels like.
He is leaning on his staff right now, somewhere west of somewhere, grinning at a demon who has no idea what it has walked into. The grin is the warning. The demon never learns.
When the eighty-first tribulation is truly done — not just walked, but finished, the way a story is finished — he will lay down the staff, and the stone he came from will still be there, and he will sit on it, and the cleverest thing in the world will finally rest. The staff will miss him. Everything will miss him.
“He broke into the underworld and crossed his name out of the ledgers himself — the most famous vandalism in heaven. The clerks check it every century: still crossed out, still his. Last check, the ink was wet. The brushstroke — the clerks swear — was fresh. Wukong laughed when told. The Fighting Buddha did not laugh. He looked at the ledger for a long time.”
The name Wukong crossed out is still crossed out. The brushstroke is fresh.
They started human. Mostly. The Monkey King, the sea goddess Mazu, Guan Yu and his long beard, the Kitchen God filing his annual report — and the First Emperor’s clay guardian, who has stood his two-thousand-year watch without blinking.
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