He came home on a cloud and found the mountain quiet.
Not peaceful. Quiet. The way a house is quiet.
A few monkeys came out of the rocks when he called, thin ones, and told him what had happened while he was away being a broom. A Demon King of Havoc had come down out of the north, moved into the Water Curtain Cave, taken the young ones for servants, and eaten the ones who argued. They had held the cave for a while. They had not held it long.
Why didn't you fight him?
He was very big, said a monkey, apologetically.
went north and found the demon, who was indeed very big, thirty feet at least, and who came out of his cave with a scimitar and laughed at him.
You're four feet tall and you haven't got a weapon.
I've got two hands, said Wukong, which is the sort of thing that sounds better afterwards.
Then he pulled a fistful of hair out of his own belly, chewed it, spat, and there were three hundred small monkeys in the air, all screaming, all biting. The demon went down under them like a man in a hailstorm. Wukong took the scimitar and cut him in half from the crown down, and then went into the cave and brought his children out, one at a time, carrying the smallest ones on his back.
He put the mountain back together. It took a season.
The Weapon
Then he had an idea, which with him is always the beginning of the trouble.
He raided the armoury of the nearby human kingdom, blew the sentries off the walls with a wind spell, and carried out sabres, halberds, bows, and armour by the cartload. He drilled his monkeys into an army. He appointed marshals. Within a year Flower-Fruit Mountain could put forty-seven thousand monkeys in the field, and the wolves and tigers of seventy-two caves came in and swore to him, and the mountain was strong in a way that mountains are not usually required to be.
And he sat on his stone chair, surrounded by soldiers, and was miserable, because the sabre was flimsy and the halberd bent, and there was nothing in the world heavy enough for him to hold.
An old monkey mentioned the Eastern Sea.
He went in through the water with a spell that parted it, walked to the Dragon Palace, and told , Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, that as a near neighbour he had come to ask a small favour.
Ao Guang, who was a diplomat, brought out a sabre. Wukong said he didn't do sabres. Ao Guang brought out a nine-pronged fork weighing three thousand six hundred catties. Wukong spun it, tossed it, caught it, said it was light. Ao Guang, sweating now, brought out a halberd of seven thousand two hundred catties. Wukong danced with it for a while and complained.
The Dragon Queen leaned over to her husband and said, quietly, that there was the thing in the treasury that nobody could move, that had been glowing for the last two days.
The Pillar
It stood in the middle of the sea-floor treasury: an iron pillar, twenty feet long, thick as a barrel, blazing at both ends with a golden light. Yu the Great had used it to measure the depth of the flood, four thousand years ago, and then put it down and never picked it up again.
Nobody can lift it, said Ao Guang. I'm telling you so that you'll stop asking.
Wukong put a hand on it.
It's a bit long, he said. And a bit thick.
The pillar shrank.
He looked at it for a while. Then he said, out loud, to a piece of iron, smaller, and it got smaller, and then he said bigger and it got bigger, and the whole ocean began to slop against its own ceiling.
Written on it, in a script nobody had bothered to read for four millennia: THE AS-YOU-WILL GOLD-BANDED CUDGEL. THIRTEEN THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED CATTIES.
He brought it down to the size of a needle and put it behind his ear.
Then, because he was in a good mood, he mentioned that he didn't have any shoes.
Ao Guang, ashen, sent for his three brothers. The Dragon King of the Southern Sea brought a cap of phoenix feathers. The Dragon King of the Western Sea brought chain mail of golden threads. The Dragon King of the Northern Sea brought cloud-treading boots. Wukong put on the entire outfit, admired himself in the water, thanked them all sincerely — he did thank them, this should be recorded — and walked out through the parted sea.
The four brothers looked at each other for a while. Then they sat down and drafted a memorial to Heaven.
robbed of a hat, a coat, a stick, and a pair of boots
by a small thing with a good manner.
They took it very badly.
Two Officers
He had a banquet. It went on some days. At the end of it he lay down under a pine tree, extremely drunk, and slept.
And in the sleep two men in black came up the path with a piece of paper, and put a rope around his soul, and led it away.
He woke up walking. He was somewhere else. There was a city wall ahead of him with three characters over the iron gate:
THE WORLD OF DARKNESS.
What is this, said Wukong, and the officers said, briskly, that his time was up, that they had a warrant, and would he come along quietly.
Wukong took the needle from behind his ear.
He was quite calm about it. He killed both officers and walked through the gate of the underworld swinging an iron pillar and shouting for whoever was in charge, and out of the courts came the Ten Kings of the Dead, all ten, in their robes, in a hurry.
There has been an error, said the first of them, meaning it.
Bring me the book, said Wukong.
The Names
They brought the registers. There were many. There was a book for every kind of living thing, and a clerk for every book, and the clerks were shaking.
Wukong could not read the classifications, so he made them read the classifications. Bald creatures. Furred creatures. Feathered. Crawling. Scaled. He was in none of them, because a monkey is a monkey but a stone is not.
At last a small king brought out a thin volume marked SOULS.
Number one thousand three hundred and fifty. Sun Wukong, stone monkey, born of heaven and earth. Life span: three hundred and forty-two years. Manner of death: a good end.
He read it twice.
A good end, he said.
He took the clerk's brush and drew a line through his own name, and the ink went through the paper and through the table under it.
Then he turned the page.
Every monkey on Flower-Fruit Mountain was in that book, one after another, in a column, in a small neat hand, each with a number of years beside the name. He went down the column with the brush. He crossed out the old ones and the young ones and the fat one who cooked and the thin ones who had told him about the demon. He crossed out the marshals of his army. He crossed out the ones he had carried on his back.
It took him some time. He did it carefully, so that no name was missed.
Then he threw the book on the floor and said, That's done. Now none of us are on any list of yours, and walked out through the gate of the underworld, and tripped over a root, and woke up under the pine tree with his soldiers shaking him and asking if he had had a bad dream.
He told them what he had done. They cheered until their voices went.
The Ten Kings of the Dead swept up the loose pages. Then they sat down and drafted a memorial to Heaven.
By that afternoon there were two of them on the Jade Emperor's desk.