Kicking Over the Alchemy Furnace

In Doushuai Palace, within the Bagua Furnace, Samadhi True Fire burned in silence.

This was no ordinary flame, but Dao fire born when Laojun took the Great Dao as kindling and drew upon the origins of the Three Powers—Heaven, Earth, and humanity.

Its flames refined the Primordial Spirit in particular, burning the heart and transforming one's nature.

At first, Sun Wukong only felt as if he had been thrown into a boundless purgatory.

Countless scenes from the past, obsessions, resentment.

Even the laughter on Flower Fruit Mountain, the defiance in the Underworld, the misery of the human world, the questioning in Ling Xiao Palace... all came surging in one after another.

"I, Old Sun, did nothing wrong!"

"The Heavenly Dao is unjust!"

"The human heart is greedy!"

Roars and illusions wove together inside the furnace.

The unruly demonic aura that came from the Chaos Stone Womb, along with the obsessive Karma he had been stained with while walking the mortal world and forcefully changing cause and effect, turned into wisps of green smoke within the Dao fire.

The process was agony like scraping bone and drawing marrow.

Sun Wukong's Primordial Spirit trembled.

He struggled in a towering rage, slamming the Bagua Furnace until it hummed and rang.

Gradually, the furnace quieted down.

When the demonic aura had fully dispersed, only that most original speck of stone-born spiritual clarity remained—pure, scorching, unyielding—yet after being tempered thousands of times by the Dao fire, it had gained an inward, crystalline gleam.

The forty-nine days were about to come to an end.

That core of spiritual clarity, under the continuous forging of the Dao fire and the circulating reflections of the Yin-Yang Qi and Qian-Kun trigrams within the Bagua Furnace, quietly began to transform.

At the positions of his two eyes, spiritual light gathered