WU KONG

Chapter 4: Masks of the Divine

The air above the Sea of Chaos thickened into a viscous soup of half-formed realities. Sun Wukong stood at the prow of a ghost ship cobbled together from broken promises and dead stars, his fur crackling with the static of unraveling timelines. Tang Sanzang knelt amidships, fingers tracing the grooves of his nine-ringed staff as he muttered sutras that solidified the vessel’s ephemeral hull.

“You’re certain this relic exists?” Wukong squinted at the horizon where the sky bled into a jagged scar of void. “The Ninefold Yin Stamp hasn’t been seen since the Dragon-Phoenix Schism.”

“Certainty is the first casualty of celestial wars.” Tang didn’t look up from his chanting. “But the Palace of Forgotten Virtues remembers what heaven wishes to erase. If the stamp was used to forge the Jade Emperor’s seal…”

“Then someone’s been digging through heaven’s graveyard.” Wukong’s tail lashed, scattering droplets of liquid time that froze into crystalline memories midair—a general’s last stand here, a star goddess’s suicide there. “Why involve a mortal monk?”

The ghost ship lurched as they breached the Veil of Collective Amnesia. Tang’s sutras flared gold, repelling tendrils of sentient fog that sought to rewrite their memories. “Because mortal eyes see truths immortals filter out. You noticed the anomalies—the extra pearl in the forged seal, the hellfrost in the vault. But did you consider why?”

Wukong snorted. “Arrogance. Every forger leaves a signature.”

“Or a message.” Tang rose, his robes fluttering in winds that blew from no direction. “The Ninefold Yin Stamp doesn’t merely replicate. It inverts. That extra pearl? In the original seal, it represents the Mortal Realm’s tribute. By adding another, the forger declares mortals equal to heaven.”

The revelation hung between them as the ship entered the corpse-light glow of the Forgotten Quarter. Here floated the ruins of heaven’s discarded epochs—palaces where moth-winged angels crumbled to dust, coliseums housing the petrified screams of disgraced war gods, and at the center, the Palace of Forgotten Virtues.

Its once-gilded domes had rusted into cancerous growths. The bridge leading to its gates was a spine of broken ideals, each vertebra carved with commandments revoked by successive Jade Emperors. Wukong’s torc burned colder as they approached, its flames reduced to faint blue wisps.

“Suppression field,” Wukong growled. “The whole place reeks of inverted karma.”

Tang pressed his palm against the palace doors. The eight trigrams engraved there pulsed crimson. “Sealed by the Blood Oath of the Twenty-Eight Mansions. To pass, we must—”

Wukong smashed the doors with a single staff strike. The ancient wards screamed like slaughtered children before falling silent. “Or that.”

The interior stank of preserved hubris. Hallways stretched into impossible geometries, their walls hung with portraits of erased deities whose eyes followed visitors with desperate hunger. The floor tiles shifted underfoot, each step triggering ghostly reenactments of dead scandals—a thunder god accepting bribes to redirect rain clouds, a love goddess selling cursed matchmaking threads.

“There.” Tang pointed to a mural depicting the stamp’s creation—a skeletal craftsman hammering at a forge filled with black suns. “The vault should lie beneath the Hall of Broken Oaths.”

They descended staircases that coiled like intestine loops, past archives where scrolls slithered away from the light. The air grew thick with the sweetness of rotting ambrosia. Wukong’s third eye itched as they entered a circular chamber whose ceiling dripped stalactites of solidified sin.

At the chamber’s center stood an altar of voidstone. Upon it rested the Ninefold Yin Stamp—a cube of swirling darkness that drank the light around it. The sight made Wukong’s stomach lurch; the artifact didn’t exist so much as *un-exist* everything nearby.

“Don’t touch it directly,” Tang warned. “Even a stone monkey’s soul isn’t immune to—”

A blade pierced Tang’s shoulder from behind. The monk collapsed as six Mourning Stars materialized from the altar’s shadow, their tear-masks flowing like mercury.

“Persistent roaches,” Wukong spat, summoning his staff.

The lead assassin bowed mockingly. “The Throne thanks you for locating its lost property.” Her sword gleamed with time-shard edges. “Your deaths will be recorded as tragic accidents during routine inspections.”

The fight that followed defied mortal comprehension. Mourning Stars moved through folded space, their attacks arriving before the thrust. Wukong’s staff became a blur of counter-strikes, each impact producing shockwaves that shattered the chamber’s ghostly echoes. Tang dragged himself behind a pillar, blood sizzling where the cursed blade had struck.

“The stamp!” he croaked. “It inverts reality near its presence!”

Wukong ducked a decapitation strike that erased a portion of the wall. “Speak plainly, monk!”

“Create a paradox! It destabilizes their—”

A Mourning Star’s kick sent Tang skidding across the floor. Wukong roared, splitting into four clones that corralled the assassins toward the altar. As the lead Mourning Star raised her blade for a killing strike, Wukong grabbed the Ninefold Yin Stamp.

Agony.

The stamp didn’t burn—it *unburned*, reversing the very concept of heat. Wukong’s arm became a fossilized outline as the artifact’s power raced toward his heart. With a scream that shook dust from millennia-old rafters, he slammed the stamp against the assassin’s blade.

Reality inverted.

The Mourning Star’s sword became a feather. Her armor flowed backward through time, reverting to ore in the ground. The assassins’ screams cut off as their existence unraveled to pre-conception nothingness.

Wukong collapsed, his right arm a petrified husk. The stamp rolled away, its dark surface now fractured with golden veins. Tang limped over, tearing a strip from his robe to bind his wound.

“Clever,” the monk rasped. “Using the stamp’s power against itself.”

“Shut up and check the altar.” Wukong’s voice came out gravelly. “There’s an inscription.”

Carved in the voidstone were phrases that wriggled like gutted worms:

*Let the pretender’s seal become the truth*

*Let the stolen thrones burn with virtue’s youth*

*When the monk betrays and the sage forgets*

*The inverted dragon consumes its own debts*

Tang traced the letters. “Not a warning. A recipe.”

Wukong forced himself upright. “For what?”

“For replacing heaven.” The monk’s eyes held storm clouds. “Someone isn’t just forging seals. They’re overwriting celestial history. With the Ninefold Yin Stamp and enough soul energy…”

“They could make the forgeries real.” Wukong stared at his petrified arm. “Turn a puppet Jade Emperor into the genuine article. Or worse.”

A low rumble shook the palace. Dust rained from the ceiling as ancient wards flared to life, bathing the chamber in corpse-light.

“They’re locking us in,” Tang said. “The entire palace is a soul cage.”

Wukong grinned through the pain. “Then let’s give them a show.”

He slammed his staff against the floor, triggering a harmonic resonance that cracked the altar. As the chamber collapsed around them, Wukong grabbed Tang and the stamp, leaping into the maelstrom of disintegrating reality.

The last thing he saw before the void claimed them was the mural upstairs—the monkey and monk now standing side by side, their weapons raised against a faceless army of stars.

**Next Chapter: "The Weight of Virtue" – Trapped in a collapsing pocket dimension, Sun Wukong and Tang Sanzang confront the true architect of the celestial coup—a face from the monk’s shrouded past.**