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Chapter 72

The Mountain in Sight

徑回東土 五聖成真Straight back to the eastern land; the five saints attain the true.
世德堂本 1592, juan 15
Narration

The full-cast narration for this chapter unlocks with the book.

And then, after fourteen years, they came to the mountain.

The book slows here, deliberately, and I will slow with it, because after everything — the fire and the fan and the cages and the eaten kingdom and the thousand eyes and the three banishments and the whole long catalogue of the road — the pilgrims came, one ordinary morning, over a rise, and saw ahead of them the sacred mountain of the west, the Spirit Vulture Peak, the Thunderclap Monastery, the true one this time, the actual seat of the actual Buddha, the place the pinch of dust and the fourteen years and the ten thousand li had all been pointed at from the beginning.

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