I stood on the ground piled up by countless human faces, and I could hear sobs one after another with every step I took. Those faces embedded in the ground were decaying at a speed visible to the naked eye. When my shadow passed the seventh twisted face, the whole ground suddenly collapsed into a flowing vortex.
Turbid liquid, carrying star sand, gushed out from the cracks and merged into a phosphorescent river in an instant. Bronze masks floated on the river, and blue flames burned in the eye sockets of each mask. I squatted down and tried to touch the water, but I saw a golden pattern cracking between my eyebrows in the reflection - it was a sign that the swallowed memory was reshaping the soul.
"You need to pay for the ferry."
The sound of wooden oars breaking water came from the mist, and the ferryman wearing a twelve-tassel crown paddled a bone boat to the shore. The hem of his robe was immersed in the river water, revealing the white leg bones. When I saw the sheep-fat jade bottle hanging on his waist, my blood suddenly froze - this is the standard magic weapon of the bottle-holding boy in Guanyin Temple.
The ferryman's rotten jaw opened and closed: "Pay a memory, you can cross the river of oblivion." He raised his right hand, which was only a skeleton, and held a cracked copper coin in his palm, "If you pay any of the three souls, I can send you to the ruins of Zhuxiantai outside the thirty-three heavens."
I stared at his empty eye sockets and suddenly reached out to clasp his wrist bones. Those swallowed memories surged in my throat, and what came out of my mouth was a Sanskrit mantra. The ferryman's crown shattered with a sound, revealing three shining relics on the top of his head.
"It's really a running dog of the heaven." I sneered, and green flames ignited at my fingertips. Those relics suddenly screamed and turned into three black-scaled centipedes that pounced on my face. The river suddenly raised huge waves, and thousands of bronze masks rose into the air, each mask spewing out a foul blood mist.
At the moment when the blood mist obscured my vision, I jumped onto the bone boat, grabbed the oar and stabbed it into the ferryman's chest. A large group of golden nematodes burst out from under the rotten robes. These spiritual creatures, which should have listened to the sutras in front of the Buddha, now exuded the sulfur smell of the devil. When the last centipede was crushed by me, the entire bone boat suddenly turned around and rushed upstream.
"How dare you destroy the eyes of Ziwei Palace." A cold female voice came from the bow. I don't know when a woman in green stood there. The oil-paper umbrella she held had a picture of the twenty-eight constellations painted on it, but the ribs were white bones. "But that's just what I want."
I remembered the tears I had seen in the fragments of memory, and my throat suddenly tightened: "You are..."
"Hush--" She lowered the edge of the umbrella, revealing the hideous sword scar on her neck. There was no flesh and blood in the wound, only flowing starlight, "Don't call out that name, it will wake up the listening beast at the bottom of the river."
The bone boat sailed into a silent water area at this time, and countless crystal coffins were suspended under the water. Each coffin contained a corpse wearing armor, and the weapons stuck in their chests were engraved with the marks of various departments of the heavenly court. The woman in green lightly touched the water surface with the tip of her umbrella, and the nearest crystal coffin opened in response, revealing a corpse that looked 70% similar to me.
"This is the 108th you." She stroked the flame pattern on the corpse's forehead, "Every time you awaken in reincarnation, Ziwei Palace will create a fake to continue playing the Monkey King. Those stories of making trouble in the Heavenly Palace and being pressed under the Five Fingers Mountain are just repeated pieces in the puppet show of the Heavenly Dao."
I suddenly had a splitting headache, and the broken memories stirred my brain like a sharp blade. In a trance, I saw myself wearing a chain mail golden armor, but holding a half-broken flag instead of a golden hoop. Outside the South Heaven Gate, in front of the array of 100,000 heavenly soldiers and generals, stood a black-robed general with a vertical eye between his eyebrows.
"Stop, my lord!" I shouted in my memory, "If the Demon-Slaying Halberd falls today, no one in the world will dare to look directly at the darkness of Heaven."
The black-robed god's eyes shed blood and tears, but the halberd in his hand was still moving: "Heaven needs heroes who are upright and aboveboard, not lunatics who know the truth."
The moment the broken flag pierced my chest, I heard my real self roar like a beast. The green-clothed woman suddenly covered my head with an oil-paper umbrella, and the star map on the umbrella began to rotate counterclockwise: "Keep your mind steady! What you just saw