Supplement to the Journey to the West
Tong Yue
 During the battle with the Raksasha Lady Iron Fan, Monkey transforms into an insect and enters her stomach. He forces her to give him the magic fan that he needs to quell the heavenly fire of the Flaming Mountain blocking their path to India. However, it is while he is in her stomach that he becomes aroused with passion. This becomes a chink in Monkey’s emotional and spiritual armor as he is otherwise without weakness. It is months after the pilgrims bypass the mountain that he falls prey to the magic of the Qing Fish demon, an embodiment of desire. The demon uses its powers of illusion to trap him in a dream world so nothing will keep it from eating the Tang Priest. The story from this point reads disjointedly as the dream world does not adhere to the rules of the physical world. While on a mission to find food, Monkey comes upon a large city flying the banner “Great Tang’s New Son-of-Heaven, the Restoration Emperor, thirty-eighth successor of Taizong.” This strikes him as odd as it was Taizong who had originally sent them on their mission to retrieve the Buddhist scriptures in India. This either means that the pilgrims’ journey had taken hundreds of years, or the city is a fake. He flies to heaven in order to learn more about the Great Tang, but finds that the gates are locked because an imposter Monkey has stolen the Palace of Magic Mists. The situation becomes stranger when he returns to the city and learns that the king has sent someone to invite the Tang Priest to become a general of his military. But when Monkey tries to intercept the messenger, the person is nowhere to be found, and he instead comes upon mortal men flying on magic clouds picking at the foundations of heaven with spears and axes. From them he learns that Little Moon King (小月王), the ruler of the neighboring Kingdom of Great Compassion, has put up a great bronze wall and a fine mesh netting so as to block Monkey’s path to India. But because he feels sorry for the Tang Priest, the Little Moon King forced the men to dig a hole in the firmament of heaven so that Xuanzang could hop from the Daoist heaven to the Buddhist heaven to complete his mission. But in the process, the men accidentally caused the Palace of Magic Mists to fall through to earth (hence the reason why heaven blamed it on him). Monkey goes to the Emerald Green World, Little Moon King’s imperial city, in order to fetch his master, but is blocked from entering once inside the main gate. When he uses his great strength to bust open the wall, he falls inside of a magic tower full of mirrors that act as gateways to different points in history and other universes. Monkey travels to the “World of the Ancients” (the Qin Dynasty) by drilling through a bronze mirror. He disguises himself as Beautiful Lady Yu, concubine of King Xiang Yu of Chu, in order to retrieve a magic “Mountain-removing Bell” from the first Qin Emperor so that he can use it to clear the group’s path to India of any obstacles blocking their way. But Monkey later learns that the Jade Emperor had banished the emperor to the “World of Oblivion,” which lies beyond the “World of the Future.” Xiang Yu takes him to a village housing a set of Jade gates that lead to the World of the Future. Monkey leaps through and travels hundreds of years forward in time to the Song Dynasty. After resuming his normal form, some junior devils appear and tell him that King Yama has recently died of an illness and that Monkey must take his place as judge of the dead until a suitable replacement can be found. He ends up judging the fate of the recently deceased Prime Minister Qin Hui. Monkey puts Qin through a series of horrific tortures, after which a demon uses its magic breath to blow his broken body back into its proper form. He finally sends a demon to heaven to retrieve a powerful magic gourd that sucks anyone who speaks before it inside and melts them down into a bloody stew. He uses this for Qin's final punishment. Meanwhile, Monkey invites the ghost of Yue Fei to the underworld and takes him as his third master. He entertains Yue until Qin has been reduced to liquid and offers the general a cup of the Prime Minister's "blood wine." Yue, however, refuses on the grounds that drinking it would sully his soul. Monkey then does an experiment where he makes a junior devil drink of the wine. Sometime later, the devil, apparently under the evil influence of the blood wine, murders his personal religious teacher and escapes into the "gate of ghosts," presumably being reborn into another existence. Yue Fei then takes his leave to return to his heavenly abode. Monkey sends him off with a huge display of respect by making all of the millions of denizens of the underworld kowtow before him. After leaving the underworld, Monkey is able to return to the tower of mirrors with the help of the New Ancient, a man who had been trapped in the World of the Future for centuries. However, when he tries to leave the tower through a window, Monkey becomes entangled by red threads (a representation of desire). He becomes so worried that his very own spirit leaves his body and, under the guise of an old man, snaps the threads. He later discovers from a local Daoist immortal that the Qin Emperor has loaned the Mountain-removing Bell to the founder of the Han Dynasty, his former enemy. In addition, he learns that the Tang Priest has given up the journey to India, dismissed his other disciples Pigsy and Friar Sand, taken a wife, and accepted the position as a general of the imposter Great Tang military. Xuanzang begins to amass a huge army to fight the forces of desire led by King Paramita, one of Monkey’s five sons born to Lady Iron Fan. Monkey is eventually made a junior general and faces his son in battle. Confusion eventually sets in causing the clashing armies to attack both friend and foe. This shock causes Monkey to slowly stir from the dream. Somewhere between the dream world and the world of reality, he learns from the disembodied Master of the Void that he has been bewitched by the Qing Fish demon. Both Monkey and the Qing Fish have a connection because they were born at the same time from the same primordial energies at the beginning of time. The only difference is that Monkey’s positive Yang energy is offset by the demons far more powerful negative Yin energy. The demon is in effect the physical embodiment of Monkey’s desires. When he finally awakens, having dreamed the entire adventure in only a few seconds, he discovers that the demon has infiltrated the Tang Priest’s retinue by taking on the form of a young and beautiful Buddhist monk. Monkey instantly kills him with his iron cudgel, thereby killing his desire. He explains everything that had transpired, to which the Tang Priest commends him for his great effort.