Wukong, I'm Done Being the Victorious Fighting Buddha!

"Holy Monk, in your previous life you were my second disciple, named Golden Cicada. Because you refused to listen to my teachings and slighted my great doctrine, I demoted your true spirit and sent you to be reborn in the Eastern Land. Now you have gladly taken refuge, upheld my teachings, and followed my doctrine. You retrieved the true scriptures and earned merit by subduing demons and monsters along the way. Your accomplishments are considerable. I hereby elevate you to a high rank and grant you the title Victorious Fighting Buddha."

Tang Luo: "???"

Sun Wukong: "???"

Something seemed wrong, but at the same time, nothing seemed wrong.

"A dream?"

His frozen thoughts began to stir again. Tang Luo's eyelids felt impossibly heavy, too heavy to open.

The moment he woke, excruciating pain coursed through every part of his body.

It was as if he'd been thrown into a blender and chopped up a thousand times over.

His scattered consciousness slowly gathered, like a mass of storm clouds, as the pain receded.

Tang Luo, male, a typical transmigrator from Earth.

The one he'd transmigrated into was Xuanzang.

Not the historical Xuanzang, but Tang Seng from Journey to the West—the Tang Xuanzang who said, "This humble monk comes from the Great Tang in the Eastern Land."

When he first transmigrated, Tang Luo had been scared stiff.

Who was Tang Seng? Golden Cicada in his previous life, and one of Tathagata's disciples.

Wouldn't someone like him, a transmigrator, be mistaken for some kind of outsider demon and slapped to death?

If possible, Tang Luo would have liked to return to secular life.

Unfortunately, events didn't unfold according to anyone's will—or at least, not Tang Luo's.

In the end, he still set off on the Journey to the West.

And then... then he succeeded!

At the Great Thunderclap Temple, Tathagata had kindly assured him that Tang Luo was indeed Golden Cicada reborn, and that there was nothing wrong with him.

Well, if even Tathagata said so...

Tang Luo accepted it.

After all, an arm couldn't wrestle a thigh.

Besides, from a certain perspective, if someone had the power to kill you outright, why would they bother pretending otherwise?

Of course, he'd persevered and studied hard all the way. He couldn't give up halfway.

Tang Luo had never coasted through life!

On the Journey to the West, he'd shouted "Wukong, save me!" fewer than eighty times.

And then... there was no then.

Tang Luo's memories ended with a retreat.

Without warning, everything before his eyes went black. A sudden blow had struck him.

He'd only had time to do one thing before falling unconscious.

Now that he'd woken, he had no idea what was going on.

Only two things were certain.

First, he was badly injured. Very badly—worse than any injury he'd suffered on the Journey to the West.

Second, he'd been buried alive.

He couldn't shout "Wukong, save me!" this time. He'd have to save himself. Dig!

He had indeed been buried alive, but the soil around him wasn't especially firm. If anything, it was somewhat loose.

He was a man who'd trained, at least.

No matter how badly he was hurt, he still had some strength left.

It was the darkest hour before dawn.

Lightning flashed and thunder roared in the sky as violent winds and rain lashed the earth.

A hand suddenly thrust out from beneath the muddy ground.

Its fingers spread toward the sky. Just then, a bolt of lightning flashed, illuminating the pale hand as if some terrifying monster were about to emerge.

Then—

A bald head broke through the earth!

"Ptooey!"

Tang Luo had successfully "dug himself out." He spat repeatedly, trying to get all the dirt out of his mouth and nose.

Torrential rain pelted him.

It almost felt like a wash—though the rain wasn't exactly clean, either.

His robe was in tatters and no longer covered him. It clung to his body under the rain, so Tang Luo simply tore it off.

All he had left was a pair of pants.

He tilted his head back and opened his mouth to catch some rainwater. After rinsing a couple of times, he managed to get rid of the earthy taste.

He wiped his face and, completely ignoring the warning not to shelter beneath a tree during a thunderstorm, walked over to one nearby.

The surroundings were pitch-black. He could barely make out that he was in some desolate, unfamiliar wilderness.

Apart from the tattered pants he wore, his only possession was a small jade lotus hanging around his neck.

It wasn't shaped like a blooming flower.

Instead, its petals were folded inward, leaving it somewhere between a bud and a fully opened blossom.

A red cord ran through it.

Tang Luo took off the jade lotus and held it in his palm. Before long, it gave off an extremely faint, warm glow.

But the glow lasted less than half a second before fading completely.

Not much staying power.

"It's all used up," Tang Luo murmured.

The item was called the Merit Jade Lotus, a magic treasure Guanyin had given him.

It could gather the power of merit and had many uses.

The power of merit was an elusive concept. No one could say exactly what it was.

It was somewhat like incense offerings or the people's aspirations, but not quite the same.

To put it simply:

Do good deeds, and you accumulated merit. You could use it to heal the injured, save lives, and so on.

Tang Luo had accumulated quite a lot of merit on the Journey to the West.

But now, the Merit Jade Lotus held none.

Years of accumulation had been used up in an instant. He was back to square one.

Tang Luo wasn't especially surprised by the result.

The place where he'd been in seclusion before wasn't here. This was somewhere completely unfamiliar to him.

Whether the world had changed drastically or he'd been transported elsewhere, it proved he'd suffered a severe blow.

If he hadn't used the Merit Jade Lotus at the last moment to shield himself with the merit he'd accumulated over the years, his injuries would have been far worse.

"Is anyone there?"

After checking himself over and clearing his throat, Tang Luo called out.

"Is anyone there?"

"I retrieved the scriptures! I bled for the great doctrine! I earned merit! I want to see Tathagata! I want to see Tathagata!"

That was a classic example of slighting the great doctrine.

Whenever Tang Luo said something like that at Spirit Mountain, one or two bald heads would emerge from the crowd and stare at him sternly.

They were the Discipline Monks—Discipline Monks who could do nothing but glare at Tang Luo.

Sorry, but a former Golden Cicada, Tathagata's second disciple, and current Victorious Fighting Buddha could do whatever he wanted.

This time, the ones who showed up weren't Discipline Monks who could only try to kill with their eyes. They were several men in uniforms who looked like disaster-relief workers.

They hurried to lay Tang Luo on a stretcher.

Tang Luo didn't resist. He was too shocked.

Just as shocked as he'd been when he first transmigrated.

It was the sort of shock that would make a random passerby gasp in one of those over-the-top shock stories, or leave a Saint in disbelief, crying, "Nani? Impossible!"

Had he... transmigrated into a modern city?

What was going on?

A day later, dressed in a cheap, dark-colored tracksuit and carrying a few hundred yuan donated by kind strangers in his pocket, Tang Luo set off for home.

He hadn't merely transmigrated into a modern city.

After transmigrating into a world filled with gods and Buddhas, he'd suddenly returned to his hometown on Earth.

It was two months after the day he'd transmigrated.

That was actually possible?

This was practically a rebirth-in-the-city cultivation story!

I, Tang Luo, had no need to explain myself to anyone.

The Victorious Fighting Buddha would not be insulted!

Was this what the rest of his life would be like?

Tang Luo's transmigration had been strange. It hadn't exactly been a physical transmigration or a soul transmigration.

Even after all these years, he still remembered it clearly.

That day on the rooftop, the sky had been clear when a bolt of lightning struck him—though he hadn't been swearing any oaths at all.

The lightning had blasted Tang Luo into a concentrated ball of light, or perhaps a particle?

Then he'd transmigrated.

So even though he'd ended up in the body of the infant Tang Seng and grown up from there, Tang Luo's appearance had remained much the same as before.

Of course, there had been some changes.

To be precise, the people who knew him would be surprised, the sort of change that made them say, "You're a different person after just three days." It wasn't enough to make them ask, "Good sir, where have you come from?"

With legal identification and the status of an unfortunate victim of a landslide, wanting to get home as soon as possible was only natural.

After arranging temporary travel documents at the station, Tang Luo boarded the train home.

In four hours, he'd truly be home.

Watching the scenery rush past outside the train window, Tang Luo didn't feel particularly excited.

Instead, his expression was calm, and he seemed somewhat troubled.

Although he'd somehow "returned home," there were still plenty of problems to deal with.

The most important was his injuries.

They weren't visible on the outside, but injuries this severe wouldn't be easy to recover from.

Moreover, Tang Luo could feel that the energy on Earth was extremely thin.

Recovering through ordinary cultivation was impossible.

Finding rare natural treasures and taking them to heal himself was also unlikely.

Tang Luo wasn't counting on either of those options.

Because the Merit Jade Lotus was still with him.

The power of merit had virtually no offensive potential, but it was ideal for healing injuries.

Tang Luo hadn't had a choice before. Now, he wanted to become the Sandalwood Merit Buddha.

From today on, he'd help others and be a good person.

He'd stop casually smashing the heads of monsters and evildoers.

Wukong, I'm done being the Victorious Fighting Buddha!

Just as Tang Luo was preparing to become a good person—no, a good Buddha—the clean, transparent window beside him somehow began to grow mottled.

It looked as if it had been weathered for years without ever being cleaned.

It wasn't just the outside. The inside was the same, and the carriage began to fall into ruin at an alarming speed.

Tang Luo reached out and wiped the window. His fingertip came away covered in dust.

The dust fell as Tang Luo rubbed his fingers together.

A chattering sound rose in his ears. It was noisy, like a demonic melody drilling into his brain.

He couldn't make out what it was saying. He only knew it was terribly loud.

Tang Luo turned his head. The passengers who had been sitting beside him had vanished without a trace.

The seats on the other side of the aisle were empty, too.

The entire carriage looked abandoned, as if it had been left to decay for years.

The dust on the window beside him was wiped away, and some writing slowly appeared.

It was as if an invisible hand were writing on the glass.

At the same time, the chattering in his ears became clearer.

Before long, a sentence "appeared" before Tang Luo's eyes and in his ears—

Find Jack the Ripper.

An inexplicable change, a sudden mission—he'd jumped straight from a modern cultivation drama to an infinite-flow one?

Fortunately, Tang Luo was a man who'd seen all sorts of things.

He remained calm, cleared his throat, and called out, "Is anyone there? I want to see Tathagata! I want to see Buddha!"

If there was a problem, he'd ask Tathagata!

"Don't bother. Your Buddha can't save you."

A slightly hoarse voice sounded from behind Tang Luo.

A new book begins! Please add it to your collection and vote for it!

The first passage is from Journey to the West, chapter one hundred. I added the line about earning merit by subduing demons and monsters along the way, originally referring to Sun Wukong, and changed the title from Merit Buddha to Fighting.