I'll Just Burn It All Down

Sometimes, he missed it.

If you could even call it missing someone. Sun Wukong had never been much good at making sense of his own feelings.

The pilgrimage had been a wretched, exhausting slog. On the road to India for the scriptures they had been dragged into every disaster imaginable, and every single time he was the one who paid for it. The memory still made his teeth grind.

And yet, every so often, the past would surface before his eyes, faint and distant. Those days sealed beneath Wuxing Mountain. Sanzang's pale face, coming to find him and holding out a hand. The White Dragon, carrying Sanzang in faithful silence across tens of thousands of li. Bajie, who caused nothing but trouble, talked back at every opportunity, and never stopped blowing his own horn — and who, somehow, hadn't been all that unpleasant. Wujing, loyal and dependable, and every now and then just irritating enough to make you want to hit him. And Sun Wukong himself, still unable to fully bury the malice and savagery smoldering in the deep of his chest, baring his fangs at Sanzang.

Master, huh.

He had called Sanzang master, yes — but it had all been a performance, a lie he put on to have his sins forgiven. How was he supposed to take some crybaby of a monk, stubborn as a mule and dense as a brick, as his teacher?

And yet, in the moment they reached India and found the scriptures, Sun Wukong realized the fire of savagery he had always carried in his chest was simply... gone.

Still not his master, though.

He refused to admit it. How could that foolish crybaby possibly be his teacher?

Sun Wukong slowly nodded at the voice ringing in his ears from a lifetime ago. A voice he had despised with every fiber of his being whenever it chanted the spell that tightened the Golden Tightening Fillet.

Fine. A friend.

Sanzang, you are my closest friend. Just not my master. Taking you as my master would be a bit beneath me, wouldn't it? I'm the Great Sage, Heaven's Equal. A Great Sage.

Sanzang...

Sanzang smiled with such tenderness. Sun Wukong smiled back, faintly.

"...iling?"

...So there was no need to hate the world, huh?

That wasn't Sanzang's voice.

The smile hovering before his eyes thinned and faded. A flood of dazzling light poured in. Beyond the sunlight shattering through a canopy of green, a pair of humans were staring straight at him.

One had small, triangular sparrow-eyes. The other was a hulking brute with a filthy set of sideburns.

What the hell are these two?

"Boss, this bastard's smiling."

This bastard?

Sun Wukong needed a moment to catch up.

Right. He'd been running from what was, for all intents and purposes, an order from Guanyin, and he'd ducked into the Jade Emperor's storehouse to hide. Then, because his chest felt tight, he'd emptied a few of the wine jars sitting around in there, and...

"Leave him. He's probably having a nice dream."

Sideburns flicked Wukong on the head, twice.

Aha! Guanyin sent celestial generals after me again!

Trying to catch him with another pack of sneaky divine soldiers, was she? And they'd waited until he was dead drunk and passed out, then trussed him up like this!

Sun Wukong snorted.

"Uh, boss. He's smiling again."

"What's wrong with this bastard, he got a hole in his lungs? Why's he giggling?"

Wukong's eyes narrowed on instinct. These miserable whelps dared look down on him — a Hunyuan Shangzhen, highest of the Nine Celestial Ranks?

"You left a monster like Erlang Shen sitting at home and sent clowns like you to catch me?"

If you wanted to take him in, you needed someone at least on Erlang Shen's level.

"Erlang Shen? Hey. Triangle. What's an Erlang Shen?"

"Uh, whatsit. I feel like I've heard it. Some kind of god, I think."

"A god? So like a Buddha? Like the Jade Emperor?"

The answer that came back was a pair of smirks.

Only then did Sun Wukong take another look around. Green forest. A rather beautiful stretch of woods, but it was nothing like the groves of Heaven. And staring at him, Sparrow-Eyes and Sideburns.

...Bandits?

They were bandits, no question. The same look as the ones who'd thrown themselves at him on the pilgrimage to India, too stupid to know better.

"Why are there bandits?"

This was Sun Wukong. From a seated position he could see thousands, tens of thousands of li in every direction, and hear the beat of a fly's wings at the same distance. A man of unshakable nerve, a master of reading a situation and answering it — that was Sun Wukong.

Just now, though, he was thrown.

These weren't celestial generals. They were some bizarre pair of bandits, and there were no bandits in Heaven to begin with.

At his reaction, Sideburns and Sparrow-Eyes burst out laughing.

"Whew. We really picked up a weird one."

"No kidding, boss. We find some golden-haired, golden-eyed foreigner passed out drunk in the woods, tie him up, and look at the show he puts on!"

The situation was finally starting to come into focus.

He'd fallen asleep drinking in the storehouse.

A forest, huh.

This was no forest of Heaven. One look at these bandits told him that.

Which meant...

Guanyin, you have actually lost your mind.

While he'd been dead drunk and out cold, she had simply picked him up and hurled him into the mortal world.

Anger started to boil in his gut.

"Hey, hey. Forget Erlang Shen — the scariest thing around is the chief of Hayeon Mountain, the yaksha who hunts tigers! Hayeon Yacha himself, sitting right here, our boss!"

"Hahaha. That's enough. At this rate the poor thing's going to piss himself. If he stinks, Master Gui won't want him. You know how picky that cut-sleeve is about keeping things clean. If we want to sell this one for a good price, we'd better keep him tidy."

What? A cut-sleeve?

"Ha."

They said that when something was too absurd for anger, a hollow laugh came out instead.

Sell him to a cut-sleeve? Him? The Great Sage, Heaven's Equal?

"What? Finally sinking in, is it? Scared of where you've ended up?"

"Don't worry. I hear Master Gui is gentler than you'd think."

"Hey. You two."

"Hey? Tsk. You look younger than either of us. Watch that mouth."

Sparrow-Eyes grinned, slow and nasty. A sigh slipped out of Wukong on its own. The Great Sage, Heaven's Equal, reduced to this in front of a pair of filthy mortal bandits.

Ordinarily he wouldn't have given trash like this the time of day, but for the first time in a long while he could feel his patience hitting the floor.

That was when Sparrow-Eyes suddenly swung a hand at the back of his head.

Well, well. The Great Sage really has gone to seed. A bandit, swinging at me without a shred of fear?

Wukong's pupils tracked the hand. The entire motion shattered into fragments — the shift of muscle, the arc of the swing, the flow of the air, the speed of the strike. All of it broken down into hundredths, into thousandths, calculated with ruthless precision inside his mind—

...Never mind.

It's not like I'm going all-out against U-mawang.

A wet crack.

"Nngh?"

Sparrow-Eyes' wrist was locked in Wukong's grip.

"H-how did you get the ropes off?"

"The Eight Trigrams Furnace couldn't hold me. You thought a bit of twine would do it?"

A grinding crunch, then another.

Sparrow-Eyes' mouth fell open on a scream that made no sound. His eyes rolled back until only ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the whites showed, and foam gathered at his lips. His body jerked, once, twice.

"You pass out over a broken wrist, you lunatic. Hey. You're faking, right?"

"Tri— Triangle!"

"Oh?"

Sideburns let out a strangled yell and charged.

"AAAAAAH!"

He was incomparably faster than Sparrow-Eyes. For a man that size, the speed was almost unbelievable. It did nothing for Wukong, of course. He caught the incoming wrist with lazy, almost bored ease.

Hm?

...What was that?

The flow of the man's punch shifted, all at once. The movement Wukong had already calculated in his head changed. Something a human being should not have possessed flared for an instant and drove the fist to a speed that was simply wrong.

It was almost like—

Yoryeok?

The same impossible power demons used to wield. Not quite the same, though. There was none of that rank, sour unpleasantness.

How does a human have a power like that?

The sheer absurdity of a human wielding yoryeok made Wukong's grip slip, just for a moment.

A clean, precise blow detonated against his skull.

A sound like a hammer striking steel rang out, and Sideburns screamed as he went down.

"Th-this bastard. H-his head is r-rock. A rock... a rock-head..."

Clutching his own wrist, Sideburns howled and rolled across the ground.

Sun Wukong let out a long breath.

"Ah. How am I supposed to tell anyone about this without dying of shame."

Getting cracked in the head by some nobody. He hoped nobody had seen that. Truly.

"You two could use a lesson from this Great Sage."

"S-spare..."

"Sure. I'll let you live."

"So. You're telling me you built up internal energy and learned martial arts. That's what you're saying."

"Th-that's right. I-I may not look it, but I was once a lay disciple of Shaolin. I learned the orthodox arts properly."

"Lay disciple of Shaolin, whatever. Ah, my pride."

Sun Wukong twisted a lock of his sleek, rippling golden hair around one finger.

This was genuinely humiliating.

Not even a celestial general — he'd let an attack land from a miserable bandit like this. Of course, that was only because he hadn't accounted for humans possessing a power called "internal energy" that hadn't existed in the old days, and the surprise had caught him off guard, but still.

They said that once Heaven and the mortal world were divided, the restrictions on power would take hold.

More than anything, he could feel it in his bones: a considerable portion of his own strength had been sealed.

It was only because he was Sun Wukong that he had managed to manifest here at all. Celestial generals and lesser gods would be lucky to whisper a few words through some shaman's dream.

Well. I can still handle an upper-tier demon without much trouble, and a great demon... depends on which one.

He laid the situation out with cold clarity. Even among great demons the range was enormous. Wukong himself had been a great demon, and so had U-mawang, but the gap between great demons outside the Seven Great Sages was vast. Even the weakest of them would have required an immortal to step in.

"I heard there are humans who ascend to immortality just by swinging a sword long enough."

A handful of humans like that would be the strongest things in the mortal world right now. With Heaven's power sealed as it was, they were the ones he'd have to watch for.

Never thought I'd live to see the day the Great Sage, Heaven's Equal, had to be careful of a few nobodies on the verge of ascension.

His teeth ground, faintly, at the thought. He didn't particularly care, though. Out of this many humans, how many of those would he even run into? He wasn't afraid of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠them in the slightest. They'd just be a nuisance. Mosquitoes weren't frightening. The whining was just pathetic, and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠irritating.

It was interesting, though.

"Are there a lot of humans who've built up internal energy like you?"

"Any man living in the martial world of Murim has internal energy and martial arts, yes."

"And where do you sit among them? Not that a bandit's level is hard to guess."

"If I look like an ordinary bandit to you, you've got the wrong idea. I may not look it now, but there was a time I was infamous throughout Murim..."

"Infamous?"

Wukong's eyes narrowed. The look he ran up and down the man was openly unimpressed. Sideburns bristled.

"When I step out into the martial world, I can hold my own just fine."

"Oh, is that so."

And a man like that was out here playing bandit in this sorry state. A chief, he'd called himself, and the only underling he had was the sparrow-eyed one lying next to him. Wukong sighed, then pushed himself to his feet.

At this point, he had no choice but to go along with Guanyin's request.

Now then. Where had she said?

"Ah. The Namgung Clan."

"Pardon? The Namgung Clan?"

"You know where it is?"

"How could I not? The greatest sword family under Heaven. Famous for all sorts of reasons."

"Which way?"

"We're in the heart of Hubei right now, so you'd want to head east."

East. Wukong thought for a moment. Finding Sanzang wouldn't take long. There was something else he ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠needed to take care of first.

"Which way is Mount Potalaka, in the South Sea?"

"Mount Potalaka? That's across the eastern sea."

"Heh heh heh. Of course it is."

Guanyin. You made a real mistake this time.

You threw him into the mortal world without even putting on the Golden Tightening Fillet?

Her relics were on Mount Potalaka right now, weren't they?

He was going to burn every last one of them.

"Which is farther, Mount Potalaka or the Namgung Clan?"

"Mount Potalaka, by several times over. You'd be on horseback for a good month and a half, and you'd need a ship after that..."

"A month and a half, nothing. This Great Sage, Teacher Sun, will be there before a cup of tea goes cold."

"..."

Sideburns and Sparrow-Eyes both narrowed their eyes. Wukong snorted and let them. They wouldn't believe it until they saw it with their own eyes anyway.

"Hoo..."

Wukong's finger pointed at the sky. He drew a great breath, filled his lungs to the brim, and roared from the pit of his gut with everything he had.

Uh...?

"So— Somersault Cloud!"

"..."

"..."

...Uh. Hm. Why isn't it coming?

A single bead of cold sweat formed on Sun Wukong's brow.