---
The platform was gone.
The realm had dissolved it back into meadow — the ancient stone and the runes and the clouds below all returned to the grass and the flowers and the sourceless gold of the light, as though the platform had been borrowed for the morning and had been returned.
The meadow held them now.
The tree at the center. The lotus. The branches with Wukong somewhere in them.
Astra was against the tree.
Back against the bark, legs out, the posture of someone who had given a significant portion of themselves to the morning and was now in honest negotiations with the afternoon.
He flexed his hands.
His knuckles communicated their full report.
He breathed.
The cuts on his face had been eased — not healed, eased, the specific quality of Buddha's touch taking the demanding edge off the communication without removing the communication itself. The bruises remained. The honest record of the fight remained in every place the fight had found him.
He looked at his hands.
They looked like the hands of someone who had been doing physical work.
He breathed.
Astra : "Fighting without the power is honest."
He said it to the grass in front of him.
Tenkai, a few feet away, cross-legged, arms on his knees :
Tenkai : "Honest."
Astra : "Everything lands where it lands. Nothing is distributed. The hit finds you and you feel the hit because that's where the hit is."
He breathed.
Astra : "I haven't felt this kind of tired in a long time. Maybe never like this. The other tired is the tired after the power is spent. This tired is the tired of the body."
He flexed his hands again.
Astra : "It's different."
Tenkai looked at his own hands.
At the bruised knuckles.
At the evidence of the same fight on his hands.
Tenkai : "I thought I would feel smaller."
He said it.
Astra : "Smaller."
Tenkai : "Without the cosmic energy. Without the domain and the range and the scale of it. I thought removing that would reveal something diminished."
He breathed.
Tenkai : "It revealed something quiet."
He looked at his hands.
Tenkai : "Not small. Quiet. The way a foundation is quiet. It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't produce light or sound. It just holds."
He breathed.
Astra : "Blu told me that once."
He said it.
Astra : "He told me: the body is not the power. The power is what the body carries. I wrote it down in my head when he said it and I thought I understood it."
He breathed.
Astra : "I didn't understand it until today."
Tenkai : "Understanding the sentence is not the same as knowing the thing."
Astra : "No."
He breathed.
Tenkai : "Buddha's trials have a consistent quality."
He said it with the expression of someone who has noticed a pattern.
Astra : "What quality."
Tenkai : "They give you the experience that makes the sentence true. Not the sentence — the truth inside the sentence. The experience that the sentence was trying to point at."
He breathed.
Tenkai : "Knowing the sentence and knowing the truth are separated by having been inside the thing."
Astra : "That's what Wukong said about testimony versus instruction."
Tenkai : "Yes."
He breathed.
They sat in the quiet that had developed between them — not the quiet of nothing to say, the quiet of people who had been through something and were in the settling of it.
From the branches, the specific sound of someone eating a peach.
Astra looked up.
Wukong was in the branches. Settled in the way he settled — the tail hanging down, the staff across the knees of whatever position branches offered, the peach in hand.
Looking down at them with the expression of someone who had been watching the post-fight settling and had found it exactly what he expected it to be.
Wukong : "You two sound like monks."
He said it cheerfully.
Astra : "Is that bad."
Wukong : "Ask me how many of the monks I traveled with for fourteen years survived the journey."
He bit the peach.
Wukong : "The good ones sound like monks. The bad ones just try."
He ate.
He looked down at them.
Astra looked back up.
He had been thinking about something since the previous day — since Wukong's story about Erlang, since the quality of the telling, since the way the story had been shared with the specific honesty of someone who had lived the thing and was giving you the living of it rather than a summary.
He had been thinking about how much more was in Wukong than what had been said.
Astra : "Wukong."
Wukong : "Mm."
Astra : "You've told us pieces."
Wukong : "Pieces of what."
Astra : "Of your story. The mountain. Erlang. The illusions. But pieces."
He breathed.
Astra : "How did it start? Not the fight with heaven — the beginning of it. How does a monkey born from a stone on a mountain become someone the Jade Emperor sends armies after?"
Wukong stopped chewing.
He looked down at Astra.
Something in his expression moved — the specific movement of something being decided about.
Wukong : "That is a longer story than you might want."
Astra : "We have time."
He looked up at the branches.
Astra : "And you are in the branches eating a peach. You clearly have time too."
Tenkai looked up.
Tenkai : "I want to hear it."
He said it directly.
Tenkai : "How a monkey from Flower Fruit Mountain became someone who declared himself Equal to Heaven. That's not a short road. I want to understand the road."
Wukong looked at both of them.
He looked at the peach.
He looked at the branches.
He looked at Buddha on the lotus.
Wukong : "Buddha."
Buddha : "Mm."
Wukong : "Do you want to tell it or should I."
A pause.
Buddha : "I will tell the parts you would skip."
Wukong : "I don't skip anything."
Buddha : "You skip the embarrassing parts."
Wukong : "The embarrassing parts are private monkey business—"
Buddha : "They are the most instructive parts."
Wukong looked at the peach.
He looked at the sky.
He looked like someone calculating whether the argument was winnable and arriving at an honest conclusion.
Wukong : "Fine."
He dropped from the branches.
He landed.
He sat.
He looked at Astra and Tenkai.
Wukong : "You are going to enjoy this in the wrong way and I want you to know I am aware of that in advance."
Astra : "I'm sure it'll be fine."
Wukong : "It will not be fine."
He breathed.
Buddha's voice came from the lotus.
Calm. Warm. With a quality in it that was almost but not quite amused.
Buddha : "From the beginning."
---
Buddha : "He was born from a stone."
He said it.
Buddha : "Not a metaphor — a stone. Flower Fruit Mountain had been holding something in itself for an uncountable number of years. The mountain and the water and the light of that place had been combining in the specific way that produced, eventually, an egg of stone. And from the egg, Wukong."
He breathed.
Buddha : "He came into the world fully formed. Not as an infant — as himself. Looking at everything for the first time. Already with the physical capability that he would carry. Already with the specific quality that would define him — which was an absolutely unrestricted curiosity about everything that existed."
He looked at Wukong.
Buddha : "He became king of the monkeys on Flower Fruit Mountain not through conquest. Through exactly that curiosity. He found a place that others feared and he went through it because he wanted to know what was there. And what was there was a cave of water. And the water cave became the monkeys' home."
He breathed.
Buddha : "They made him king because he was the one who had gone to find out."
Wukong : "That part I don't mind telling."
He said it.
Wukong : "That part is accurate and flattering."
Buddha : "The next part is where it becomes instructive."
Wukong's expression did the thing.
Buddha : "He became aware of death."
He said it simply.
Buddha : "He had been king for some years. He had everything the mountain could offer. His subjects loved him. He was the strongest thing on the mountain. He had found and opened the water cave and made it a home."
He breathed.
Buddha : "And one day he sat among his subjects and he watched an old monkey die. Just — die. The way old things died. The simple, unremarkable death of something that had lived its time."
He breathed.
Buddha : "And Wukong — who had been born from a stone, who had never been young, who had arrived in the world already himself — encountered the concept of ending for the first time."
He looked at Wukong.
Wukong was looking at the grass.
Not with his usual ease.
With the expression of someone who was back in a moment that was further away than most moments but which remained present in the way that formative things remained present.
Buddha : "He wept."
A pause.
Wukong : "I did not weep."
Buddha : "You wept."
Wukong : "I had something in both eyes."
Buddha : "At the same time."
Wukong : "Simultaneous eye irritation."
Buddha looked at him.
Wukong : "Pollen."
Buddha : "There was no pollen."
Wukong : "The mountain had pollen."
Astra : "Did you weep."
Wukong looked at him.
A long pause.
Wukong : "The mountain had significant pollen."
He said it with great dignity.
He said it looking directly at Astra with the full weight of the Monkey King behind the statement.
Astra : "Sure."
Tenkai was doing something with his expression that appeared to be the expression of someone maintaining composure through effort.
Buddha : "He wept."
He said it with the gentleness of someone who was stating a truth that mattered precisely because it showed something important about the person.
Buddha : "Because he understood what the monkey's death meant. That everything on the mountain was temporary. That the home he had found and the subjects he had gathered and the king he had become — all of it was going to end."
He breathed.
Buddha : "And he could not accept that."
He looked at them.
Buddha : "This is the beginning of the journey. Not the ambition or the power or the chaos in heaven. It begins with one monkey sitting beside a dead companion and being unwilling to accept that this was the shape of things."
He breathed.
Buddha : "He left the mountain. He went to sea. He traveled until he found a teacher who could teach him immortality. He studied. He mastered ninety-two transformations. He mastered flight. He mastered the combat arts that had been waiting for him to find them."
He breathed.
Buddha : "He became someone extraordinary. Not because he wanted power — because he wanted to stay."
He looked at Wukong.
Buddha : "To stay with the people who needed him. To not have the mountain end."
The quiet that settled after this was the quiet of something that had been said and which was true and which required the sitting with.
Wukong was looking at the grass.
His tail was still.
Not the lazy sway — still.
Astra looked at him.
He thought about the monkey king looking at the dead companion.
He thought about his own versions of that moment.
About Dano.
About the erasing.
About the dead world he had landed on in Volume 4 with all of it gone and only himself remaining to decide what to do with the remaining.
He breathed.
Astra : "You left to protect them."
He said it.
Wukong looked up.
Astra : "You didn't leave to become the Great Sage. You left to find a way to stay. To find a way to not lose them the way you lost the old monkey."
Wukong : "Yes."
He said it simply.
Wukong : "And somewhere between leaving and becoming what I became — the staying became secondary. The becoming became the point. And by the time I was declaring myself Equal to Heaven, the mountain was something I visited between victories rather than something I was protecting."
He breathed.
Wukong : "The very thing I left to protect became the thing I was too busy being the Great Sage to go back to."
He looked at them.
Wukong : "That is the flagpole."
He said it.
Wukong : "Not the transformations. Not the cleverness. That is the real flagpole. The thing that gives away the whole architecture. The moment when you forget what the power was for."
---
Tenkai : "And in heaven."
He said it.
He had been quiet through all of it — receiving, the way he received things that were true.
Wukong looked at him.
Tenkai : "When you were fighting the armies. When you were the Great Sage in full declaration. Was there a moment when you thought of the mountain?"
Wukong held the question.
He breathed.
Wukong : "Once."
He said it.
Wukong : "In the middle of the fight with Erlang. Three days in. Both of us exhausted in the way that fight exhausted. We had paused — not called a truce, just both of us needing a moment before the next exchange."
He breathed.
Wukong : "And in that pause I thought about the mountain. About why I had left. About the old monkey."
He was quiet.
Wukong : "And I thought: if I win this. If I become the ruler of heaven. If I have everything the flag says I should have."
He breathed.
Wukong : "I cannot remember why that was the answer to the old monkey dying."
He said it.
The simplicity of it.
The specific simplicity of someone who had found the center of something very large by approaching it from the inside rather than from the outside.
Wukong : "In that pause, in the middle of a fight that had lasted three days, I could not remember why winning heaven was supposed to address the fact that the old monkey had died."
He breathed.
Wukong : "And then the pause ended and the fighting resumed because that is what happened in the pause and I did not have the wisdom to stop and sit with what the pause had shown me."
He breathed.
Wukong : "The mountain showed me."
He looked at the tree above them.
Wukong : "Five hundred years gave me the time to do what the pause could not. To sit with it until I understood what it was showing me."
He breathed.
Wukong : "The answer to the old monkey dying was not winning heaven. The answer was what I already had. The mountain. The subjects. The water cave. The home I had found and opened and shared."
He looked at them.
Wukong : "That was already the answer. I left it looking for something bigger. And bigger was not the answer."
---
The silence after this was a specific kind of silence.
The kind that existed after something genuinely important had been said.
Not reverence — presence. The presence of people who had received something and were in the reception of it.
Astra was looking at the grass.
He was thinking about Dragon Unite.
About the kingdom built in one day.
About the metro lines and the hospital and the farms and the children in the park.
About the slime who had been in the crowd because of a wave.
He breathed.
He thought about what he had left to build it.
He thought about Yuki and Blu.
He thought about the answer.
He breathed.
Then:
Astra : "Did you ever—"
He stopped.
He looked at Wukong.
He looked at the quality of the story that had just been told — the honesty of it, the willingness to be in the embarrassing and the painful parts of it.
He breathed.
Astra : "Was there ever someone? On the mountain. Or later. Someone who mattered the way — not the mountain, not the subjects, a person."
The question hung.
Tenkai turned to look at Astra.
His expression changed.
It changed the way Tenkai's expression changed when something had happened that required a response and the response had not been pre-cleared.
Tenkai : "How dare you."
He said it.
Astra : "What."
Tenkai : "How dare you ask something that personal. To him."
He stood up.
He was standing.
He looked at Astra with the expression of someone who had identified a breach of conduct and was prepared to address it.
Tenkai : "He is a legendary figure. He fought heaven. He was sealed under a mountain for five hundred years. He traveled the fourteen-year journey to the west and protected the monk through every demon in existence. He is the Monkey King."
He looked at Astra.
Tenkai : "And you are asking him about his love life."
He said it with the quality of someone who found this both objectionable and incomprehensible.
Astra looked at Tenkai.
He looked at the standing.
He looked at the vein that was appearing.
Astra : "Tenkai."
Tenkai : "Show some respect for your senior—"
Astra : "Tenkai."
Tenkai : "He deserves—"
Astra : "Are you defending Wukong's honor."
A pause.
Tenkai : "I am defending the dignity of the conversation—"
Astra : "You are standing up to defend the Monkey King's honor from a personal question."
Tenkai looked at him.
He looked at his own standing.
He sat down.
He said nothing.
He looked at the grass.
He said nothing more.
From the branches — the sound.
The full, unmanaged sound of Wukong laughing.
The specific Wukong laugh that went all the way — sharp teeth, gold eyes, the full body involvement of someone who had found something genuinely, completely funny.
He dropped from the branches.
He landed.
He was still laughing.
Wukong : "HAHAHAHAHAHA—"
He looked at Tenkai.
He pointed.
Wukong : "He stood up. He STOOD UP to defend me."
He kept laughing.
Wukong : "The Cosmic Dragon stood up for the monkey—"
Tenkai : "It was a matter of principle—"
Wukong : "The principle of my personal honor—"
Tenkai : "Of respecting your seniors—"
Wukong : "I am not your senior—"
Tenkai : "You are older than me—"
Wukong : "I am older than most mountains—"
Tenkai : "EXACTLY—"
Wukong : "HAHAHAHAHAHA—"
He was holding his stomach.
Astra was laughing too — not as fully as Wukong, the laughter of someone who had watched something happen that was both unexpected and completely earned.
Astra : "I've never seen you move that fast outside of combat."
Tenkai : "I was not fast—"
Astra : "You were on your feet before he finished the sentence."
Tenkai : "I was simply—"
Wukong : "You were defending my honor."
He said it warmly.
He said it with the specific warmth of someone who had been defended in a way they did not require and which had moved them anyway.
Tenkai looked at him.
His jaw was still set in the way of someone who had not fully resolved the position he had taken.
Then, very quietly:
Tenkai : "It is a personal question."
Wukong looked at him.
He stopped laughing.
Not stopped — the laugh completed and settled into something warmer.
Wukong : "Yes."
He said it.
Wukong : "It is."
He breathed.
He sat back down between them.
He looked at the peach that had ended up in the grass during the laughing.
He picked it up.
He looked at it.
Wukong : "There was someone."
He said it.
The laughter was gone — not replaced by sadness, replaced by the quality of something being told honestly.
Wukong : "On the mountain. Before the seeking and the immortality and all of it."
He looked at the peach.
Wukong : "She was strong. Stronger than most of the monkeys on the mountain and she was very clear about the fact that she knew it. She did not take my nonsense. Not from the beginning — from before the beginning, before I'd done anything worth calling nonsense, she had already decided I was going to be a source of it and she had prepared accordingly."
He breathed.
Wukong : "We argued constantly. About everything. What the mountain needed, how to handle problems in the group, whose turn it was to do the thing that nobody wanted to do. Constantly."
He breathed.
He smiled.
Not the grin — the small, interior one.
Wukong : "And we also laughed constantly. Because the arguing was never actually about the arguing. The arguing was just how we talked. How we found out what the other person thought about things. The disagreement was the conversation."
He breathed.
Astra looked at him.
He said nothing.
Wukong : "When I told her I was leaving. That I was going to find the way to stay — to find immortality, to end the problem of the old monkey dying, to protect the mountain from ending—"
He was quiet.
Wukong : "She stood in front of me and she looked at me with the look she used when she had something true to say and was deciding whether to say it."
He breathed.
Wukong : "And she said: the reason you're leaving is the right reason. But the person you'll become on the way back is not going to be the person who left."
He breathed.
Wukong : "I laughed. I told her she was wrong. That I would come back exactly as I was, just with more."
He looked at the grass.
Wukong : "She said: the more is what I'm worried about."
He was quiet.
A long quiet.
Wukong : "I left."
He breathed.
Wukong : "I came back a few times, early on — before the seeking had fully consumed me, before the Great Sage declaration, before the heavenly garden and all of it. I came back and she would look at me with the same look. Each time I came back, the look was a little more of what she had seen already and a little less of what she had hoped to be wrong about."
He breathed.
Wukong : "The last time I came back before heaven. Before all of it became what it became. She looked at me and she said—"
He stopped.
He breathed.
Wukong : "She said: I don't know who this is. I knew who left. I don't know who this is."
He breathed.
The tree's leaves moved.
The realm held its light.
Wukong : "She wasn't wrong. The person who had left was someone who was afraid of losing the mountain. The person who came back from the seeking was someone who had decided that the seeking was the point and the mountain was where you kept your flags."
He breathed.
Wukong : "She stayed on the mountain when I went to heaven. She stayed when I was sealed. She stayed when the journey west began."
He looked at the peach in his hand.
Wukong : "I do not know if she is still there. Time moves differently in different places. By now, regardless."
He breathed.
He did not finish the sentence.
He did not need to.
The end of the sentence was visible in the quality of what preceded it.
He looked up.
He looked at Astra.
He looked at Tenkai.
Wukong : "Power can make you lose the people who matter. Not by taking them — by making you someone they don't know. By growing the more until the more is what you are and the person who loved the things worth loving is somewhere inside it, unable to get out."
He breathed.
Wukong : "She saw it happening. She told me. I didn't listen because I was certain I was right and she was worried for no reason."
He looked at them.
Wukong : "I was not right."
He said it simply.
Wukong : "I was very confident. I was very powerful. I was very wrong."
He tapped his staff.
Wukong : "Don't make my old mistakes."
He said it the way he had said it in the previous chapter — but with more of the inside of it visible now, the full weight of what the instruction was carrying.
---
Astra breathed.
He thought about Astria.
About the mirror — about her on the ground, her face against his jacket, her hands holding on.
About the frozen ocean where they had started.
About every moment between the frozen ocean and the mirror.
He thought about what she had said to him in the flower field.
About journeys with you are beyond imagination and endless.
He thought about what he would be if he forgot what the power was for.
If the kingdom became the point and the people in it became the place where he kept his flags.
He breathed.
He thought: I know why I built it.
He thought: I will not forget why I built it.
He breathed.
Tenkai looked at his hands.
He was thinking about Piko.
He was thinking about since Planet Sin.
About the capsule registry — her name confirmed, the specific relief of a name confirmed.
About every volume since then — her in the lab, her with the floating hands, her in the armor.
About the prank. About the lab floor. About the rose. About Tetro saying I won't let him not visit.
About the specific quality of someone who had been calling him Tenkai-sama since before calling him that was anything other than a child's admiration.
He breathed.
He thought about what Wukong had said.
I don't know who this is.
He thought about whether Piko would look at him in five hundred years and say that.
He thought: she would not.
He thought: she has been watching me since Planet Sin and she has always known who this is.
He thought: I am the one who has not been watching back.
He breathed.
He said nothing.
He looked at the grass.
He said nothing for a long time.
Then:
Tenkai : "The person on the mountain."
He said it to Wukong.
Wukong : "Mm."
Tenkai : "She told you who you were becoming. She saw it clearly."
Wukong : "Yes."
Tenkai : "You had someone who could see you clearly. Who knew the difference between who you were and who you were becoming."
Wukong : "Yes."
Tenkai : "And you left."
Wukong : "Yes."
Tenkai was quiet.
Then:
Tenkai : "I have someone like that."
He said it.
Not to Wukong specifically.
Not to Astra.
Just — said it. The way you said things when saying them was part of how they became real.
Wukong looked at him.
He said nothing.
Astra looked at him.
He also said nothing.
They gave Tenkai the space.
Tenkai : "She has known me since Planet Sin. Since before the declaration and the training and the domain. She knew the person before all of that. And she has been watching everything after."
He breathed.
Tenkai : "She does not say anything. She does not call me by what I became. She calls me Tenkai-sama with the same voice she used when we were on the burning planet and she was getting people into capsules before she got into her own."
He breathed.
Tenkai : "She calls me that like nothing I have become has changed what the name means to her."
He was quiet.
Wukong : "What is her name."
Tenkai : "Piko."
He said it.
Wukong : "And you have been—"
Tenkai : "Not watching back."
He said it.
He said it before Wukong finished the question because the answer was ready and the answering was part of the thing.
Tenkai : "I have been watching forward. Always forward. The next threat, the next preparation, the next development. Planet Sin is behind me and Piko is beside me and I have been looking forward."
He breathed.
Tenkai : "She has been beside me this entire time."
He breathed.
Tenkai : "And I have not once looked to the side."
The tree moved in the realm's wind.
The lotus was still.
Wukong looked at the sky.
Wukong : "You know what I would give."
He said it quietly.
Wukong : "To have one more argument with her about something that didn't matter. About whose turn it was for the thing nobody wanted to do."
He breathed.
Wukong : "Not because I was right. Because the arguing was how we were together."
He looked at Tenkai.
Wukong : "You have someone beside you who has been there since the burning. Who still calls you by the name you had before everything that came after the burning."
He breathed.
Wukong : "Look to the side, Tenkai."
He said it with everything the instruction contained.
Wukong : "Just — look to the side."
---
Behind the tree, Buddha.
He had been there since the story began.
Not moving. Not directing. Present in the way he was present — completely, without the need for any particular position in the space.
He watched Wukong tell the story of the mountain girl.
He watched Astra receive it.
He watched Tenkai receive it and then say Piko in the voice that meant something had been found.
He breathed.
He had known this was where the story would go — not because he had planned it, because he knew Wukong, because he knew the way Wukong's honesty about his own mistakes tended to find the specific places in the people listening where the same mistake lived.
He breathed.
He looked at the three of them.
At Wukong sitting with the old thing that had not fully settled even now, even with the mountain and the journey west and everything since — the specific old thing of a lost thing, which settled differently from other things.
At Astra breathing slowly with the mirror somewhere in him.
At Tenkai looking at his hands.
Buddha : "Wukong."
From behind the tree.
Wukong turned.
Found him.
Buddha : "Thank you."
He said it.
Wukong held his eyes.
Buddha : "For the whole of it."
He breathed.
Buddha : "The embarrassing parts and the true parts. Both."
Wukong : "They're the same parts."
Buddha : "Yes."
He said it.
Buddha : "That is why they are instructive."
Wukong looked at him.
At the teacher who had put him under the mountain.
At the teacher who had received him at the end of the journey.
At the specific quality of the relationship between them which was not student and teacher in the conventional sense but something that had been built through specific centuries of the most particular kind of trust.
Wukong : "Old friend."
He said it.
Buddha : "Old friend."
He said it back.
The realm held them.
---
The afternoon moved.
Not tracked by sun — felt. The quality of the light shifting toward the quality it had at the end of productive days, the warmth settling rather than arriving.
Astra was still against the tree.
He had been quiet since Tenkai said Piko.
He was thinking about what Wukong had said.
About the more becoming what you are and the person who loved the things worth loving being somewhere inside it, unable to get out.
He thought about the things worth loving.
He named them.
Astria.
Yuki.
Blu.
Tenkai beside him.
Piko with her floating hands.
All of them.
The Oni children.
The slime and the wave.
He named them.
He breathed.
He named them again.
He breathed.
Astra : "Wukong."
Wukong : "Mm."
Astra : "You said you would give anything for one more argument with her."
Wukong : "Yes."
Astra : "What did you argue about most?"
Wukong looked at him.
The question.
The specific quality of the question — not asking about the power or the heaven or the mountain's end. Asking about the argument. The specific texture of the thing.
Wukong was quiet for a moment.
Then he smiled.
The interior one.
Wukong : "Whose turn it was to do the thing nobody wanted to do."
He breathed.
Wukong : "Which was never actually about whose turn it was."
He breathed.
Wukong : "It was about both of us wanting the other person to acknowledge that we saw the thing that needed doing and had chosen to do it anyway. Not because it was our turn. Because we chose to."
He breathed.
Wukong : "That was the actual argument. Every time."
He looked at the peach.
Wukong : "She usually won."
Astra : "How."
Wukong : "Because she was right more often than me."
He ate the peach.
He looked at the sky.
Wukong : "She would have loved this realm."
He said it quietly.
He said it the way you said something when it arrived true and you had not decided to say it, it just arrived.
Wukong : "The light. The tree. The lotus."
He breathed.
Wukong : "She would have found something to argue with Buddha about within five minutes of arriving."
He was smiling.
Buddha, from behind the tree:
Buddha : "I look forward to it."
He said it simply.
Wukong's smile widened.
He looked at his staff.
He breathed.
The realm held them.
All of them.
The tree and the lotus and the light.
Astra breathing.
Tenkai looking at his hands.
Wukong with the peach and the staff and the old thing that lived in him and which had taught him everything worth knowing.
Buddha behind the tree.
Present.
Quiet.
Glad.
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