Eerie purple rays rippled across the waters of Yaochi, and the golden hairpin at the Queen Mother's temple suddenly transformed into the corpse of a Nine-Tailed Fox. Wielding my spear, I slashed apart the tree roots entangling Yang Chan, and with the Heavenly Eye I gazed deep into the root system of the Flat-Peach Mother Tree—the desiccated corpse of Lu Ya was being pierced through its seven apertures by thousands of tendrils, each root-tip bearing the visage of Zhunti.
"What a paragon of motherhood!" shouted Sun Wukong as he smashed the Ruyi Jingu Bang toward the canopy, though his Seventy-Two Avatars were crushed by a sudden barrage of falling flat-peaches. Nezha sped across the branches on his Wind and Fire Wheels, his Fire-Tip Spear piercing the trunk while the Universal Heaven Ribbon suddenly coiled around his right arm: "Yang Jian... this tree is devouring my lotus..."
The Xiaotian Hound assumed human form and leaped to the treetop, the bark split by his dark-iron folding fan revealing bare, bleached bones. Those bone fragments embedded in the tree rings were shockingly the skulls of immortals who had perished in past Flat-Peach banquets, every single bone pattern inscribed with the Sanskrit of the "Western Paradise." As the ninth layer of bark peeled away, the entire Mother Tree shrieked, and from its root system surged the golden bodies of three hundred arhats, every one of them pierced at the center of the brow by a branch of the Seven-Treasure Miao Tree.
Chapter 257