When the bronze door of the Disha Hall was pierced through by the Ruyi Jingu Bang, seventy-two pairs of ox-headed and horse-faced guards turned their heads in unison. Sun Wukong, hovering on his Somersault Cloud before the Mirror of Retribution, swept his Fiery Eyes of Truth across every identical ghostly face: "Bah! You think you can fool your Grandpa Sun with such petty illusions!" His staff swept out with the force of a thousand armies, but it shattered only empty shadows—the true bodies had long since blended into the ranks of the magistrates, where the bloody characters "Six-Eared Macaque erased" were being marked by a cinnabar brush.
"Great Sage, please, look clearly!" the ox-headed guard on the left suddenly knelt, a steel fork piercing his own chest. "This subordinate is the real..." Before he could finish, the horse-faced guard on the right lashed out with a soul-snatching rope, binding Wukong’s ankle: "Do not believe him! The Book of Life and Death is in my..." The moment the rope touched the Somersault Cloud, bronze rust from fragments of the Donghuang Bell seeped through the cloud’s patterns, coalescing in the void into half a page of the Investiture of the Gods!
Wukong erupted into action, the hairs at the back of his head transforming into seventy-two clones of the Ruyi Jingu Bang. Each staff, inscribed with the ancient "Dunyi" seal glowing like the scorching sun, softened instantly upon contact with the guards—these ghost officials were embedded with hairs fr…
Chapter 214