Immortal Sword: Journey to the West

"Seventy, seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three Golden-Purple Alms Bowls." Su Lin surveyed the pile, took out his own Golden-Purple Alms Bowl, and gave it a shake. "Add this one in my hand, and that makes seventy-four."

"Is this world a wholesale market for Tang Xuanzang knockoffs?"

No one could answer him. The graves were all cenotaphs, containing nothing but a monk's robe as plain as plain could be.

"So we're the seventy-fourth group to head west?" As Meng Qi pondered this, his right hand suddenly closed. Following the threads of karma, he tried to trace whatever had clouded the workings of heaven.

The starry sky rippled like the surface of a lake.

In an instant, Meng Qi saw scenes of heaven and earth playing in reverse. First came one Xuanzang after another, setting out from the Great Tang for the Western Paradise to seek the true scriptures, never to be heard from again.

Then came more Xuanzangs and their disciples, leaving Huasheng Temple only to die before they could even get out of Chang'an. They fell to soldiers of the Military Strategists bearing the Human Sovereign's fortune, and to the Minor Supervisor of the Bureau of Astronomy.

Some were impervious to blades and spears. Others could turn into monsters or wield immortal and demonic arts to summon all manner of strange objects. They seemed capable of destroying heaven and earth, of plucking stars and seizing the moon. Yet every Xuanzang met the same end.

Half never made it out of Chang'an City. Even those who left Chang'an died to one calamity or another.

"That's not right," Meng Qi murmured. "No time passed?"

He sensed something amiss. By now, he was no longer the ordinary Human Immortal he had been when he first mastered the Primordial Golden Chapter. The Secret Heavenly Dao, the