All the Journey to the West References in Black Myth: Wukong Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of Black Myth: Wukong is where the game’s story shifts into a higher gear.

You enter a frozen wasteland, meet an old ally of Sun Wukong, and face a villain whose grudge stretches back further than the novel itself.

Titled “White Snow, Ice Cold,” this chapter draws primarily from chapter 65 of Journey to the West. But it also weaves in characters and mythology from across the novel to build one of the game’s richest and most layered storylines.

The New West: A Frozen Take on the Lesser Western Heaven

Chapter 3 takes place in a region called The New West.

The name comes directly from chapter 65 of Journey to the West, where the Lesser Western Heaven and its Lesser Thunder Monastery serve as the setting for one of the pilgrims’ most humiliating defeats.

In the novel, this is where a demon impersonates the Buddha himself, tricking Tang Sanzang’s entire group into walking straight into a trap.

The game reimagines this location as a snow-covered mountain region rather than the temperate monastery of the novel.

You’ll explore five areas: Snowhill Path, the Pagoda Realm, Bitter Lake, the Valley of Ecstasy, and the New Thunderclap Temple.

That last name is a direct callback to the Lesser Thunder Monastery. The entire region has been transformed into a cult stronghold under the rule of a very familiar antagonist.

Yellowbrow: The Rebellious Disciple Who Wanted to Be Buddha

In Journey to the West, Yellow Eyebrows (known as Yellowbrow in the game) was originally a page boy serving Maitreya Buddha.

His job was simple: strike Maitreya’s stone chime. But ambition consumed him.

He stole three of Maitreya’s most powerful treasures: the Seedsack (a magical bag that could trap anything), the Golden Cymbals, and a mallet. He fled to the mortal world and established the Lesser Thunder Monastery, where he impersonated Tathagata Buddha himself.

When Tang Sanzang’s group arrived, they fell for the disguise completely. Yellowbrow captured the monk and trapped Sun Wukong inside the Golden Cymbals.

It was one of Wukong’s most humiliating moments in the entire novel.

He could only escape because Kang-Jin (Metal Dragon), one of the Twenty-Eight Celestial Constellations, drilled a hole through the cymbals with his horn.

Maitreya eventually arrived in person to clean up the mess.

He had Sun Wukong disguise himself as a ripe watermelon, which Yellowbrow ate.

Wukong then wreaked havoc inside Yellowbrow’s stomach, forcing him to surrender.

In the game, Yellowbrow has returned to the Lesser Western Heaven and stolen Maitreya’s weapons once again.

But this time he’s not impersonating Tathagata. He’s taken on the form of Maitreya himself, the Future Buddha, and has built a full-blown religious cult around himself in the New West.

He possesses one of Wukong’s six relics, the Hubris Nose, which he’s submerged in a frozen lake.

The game also gives him a fascinating set of disciples. Non-Void, Non-Able, Non-Pure, and Non-White are dark mirrors of Tang Sanzang’s pilgrimage group.

Their names are deliberate inversions of the Buddhist names given to Wukong and his companions in the novel.

Zhu Bajie: The Pig Finally Joins Your Journey

Chapter 3 is where you finally meet Zhu Bajie, and it’s treated as a major event for good reason.

In Journey to the West, Bajie is one of the most beloved characters in all of Chinese literature.

In the novel, he was originally Marshal Tianpeng, a high-ranking commander of 80,000 celestial naval forces in the Heavenly Court.

He was banished to the mortal world and transformed into a pig-like creature after drunkenly pursuing the moon goddess Chang’e.

He eventually joined Tang Sanzang’s pilgrimage alongside Wukong and Sha Wujing as one of the monk’s three protector-disciples.

Bajie’s personality in the novel is defined by his laziness, appetite, and cowardice, but also by a genuine warmth and loyalty to his companions.

He’s flawed in deeply human ways, which is exactly why readers love him.

In the game, Bajie has been trying to collect Wukong’s relics on his own for years, sending out monkey after monkey to do the dangerous work.

He was eventually captured by Yellowbrow and imprisoned inside the Golden Cymbals, the same weapon that trapped Wukong in the novel.

He’s freed when Kang-Jin Star crashes into the cymbals during your boss fight with her, shattering his prison by accident.

It’s a brilliant callback: in the novel, it was the same celestial constellation that freed Wukong from those exact cymbals.

From this point on, Bajie becomes your companion for the rest of the game.

Kang-Jin Star and Kang-Jin Loong: Celestial Allies Turned Bosses

In the novel, Kang-Jin (Metal Dragon) is one of the Twenty-Eight Constellations, a group of powerful celestial generals who serve Heaven.

His role in the Yellowbrow arc is specific but crucial: he used his horn to drill a hole through the Golden Cymbals, creating an opening small enough for Wukong to crawl through and escape.

The game splits this character into two separate figures. Kang-Jin Loong is a male dragon and the first Yaoguai King you encounter in Chapter 3.

Kang-Jin Star is a female dragon who came to the New West to investigate the disappearance of the Pleiades Star Lord, another celestial figure.

According to the game’s lore, Kang-Jin Star was devoted to Sun Wukong and came searching for answers about his fate. But Yellowbrow recruited her into his service.

During your boss fight with her, she crashes into the Golden Cymbals and accidentally frees Zhu Bajie.

This is one of the game’s most elegant callbacks.

The novel established that the Kang-Jin constellation was the key to escaping the cymbals. The game keeps that connection intact but reframes it through entirely new circumstances.

The Macaque Chief and the Four Monkey Kin

In chapter 58 of Journey to the West, Guanyin reveals that four types of primates exist outside normal cosmic categories.

One of them is the red-rumped macaque (liuhou), a creature with enough power and cunning to rival Sun Wukong himself.

The game brings this obscure piece of novel lore to life through the Macaque Chief, a recurring enemy in Chapter 3 who serves Yellowbrow. According to the game’s journals, the Macaque was once connected to Wukong’s circle but had no real standing of his own. After Wukong’s death, he was left adrift.

Yellowbrow exploited this vulnerability and tempted the Macaque into his service.

You fight Macaque Chiefs multiple times throughout the chapter, and one even appears as a mid-boss during the Yellowbrow fight itself, interrupting the battle in its second phase.

It’s a small detail that connects to a larger theme in the novel: the monkey demons of the world exist in Wukong’s shadow, and without him, they’re left vulnerable to manipulation by more powerful forces.

The “Nonsense!” Ending Animation and the Theme of Hubris

Chapter 3’s animated cutscene is called “Nonsense!” and reveals the deeper backstory between Yellowbrow and Jinchanzi, the previous incarnation of Tang Sanzang.

The animation shows that the two were Dharma brothers studying Buddhism under the same lineage.

They had a fundamental philosophical disagreement about human nature.

Yellowbrow believed humans are inherently evil and that greed will always win.

Jinchanzi believed in the possibility of goodness.

To prove his point, Yellowbrow descended to the mortal world in the form of a giant turtle spirit and allowed fishermen from an impoverished village to capture him.

He then showered the villagers with miracles: tearing his own flesh to produce pearls, healing a sick boy, granting youth and beauty, and summoning vast amounts of fish from the sea.

But eventually, the villagers’ greed overwhelmed their gratitude. They attacked the turtle, tearing him apart to claim more of his supernatural gifts.

Yellowbrow got his proof that humans are inherently selfish. The cost was his own body.

This obsession with being proven right is what defines Yellowbrow throughout the game. His cult in the New West, his brutal philosophy of “follow your nature”, and his willingness to brainwash and murder his own followers all stem from this single, centuries-old argument with Jinchanzi.

The relic from this chapter represents smell (the Hubris Nose).

The connection to the Buddhist concept of pride is clear.

Yellowbrow’s sin isn’t cruelty for its own sake. It’s the arrogance of believing he alone understands the truth about the world.

Smaller References and Easter Eggs

Cyan Loong, one of the toughest boss fights in the entire game, draws from chapter 43 of the novel. He’s identified as one of eight sons of the Dragon King of Jinghe River. In the novel he’s only briefly mentioned, but the game turns him into a fearsome standalone encounter.

Yin Tiger is revealed after defeat to be one of the Six Ding and Six Jia, celestial protector deities who secretly guarded Tang Sanzang during his pilgrimage in the novel. These guardian spirits appear throughout Journey to the West but rarely take center stage.

The Pagoda Realm serves as Yellowbrow’s multi-layered prison and training ground. Inside, you’ll find connections to earlier chapters, including the Third Prince Zhang from the Kingdom of Sihali (Chapter 2), who came to investigate Yellowbrow and was defeated and imprisoned.

Yellowbrow’s “Blind Zen” monks are a disturbing game-original creation. These monks gouged out their own eyes on Yellowbrow’s suggestion, supposedly to achieve a state of perfect meditation. It’s a dark perversion of genuine Buddhist practice that reflects how Yellowbrow twists real spiritual concepts to serve his ego.

Finally, Maitreya himself appears at the chapter’s conclusion. After you defeat Yellowbrow and he tumbles into the frozen lake, Maitreya arrives to fish the relic out of the water and hand it to the Destined One. It mirrors the novel perfectly, where Maitreya always arrived in person to clean up after his wayward servant.

Chapter 3 marks a turning point for Black Myth: Wukong.

With Bajie at your side and the game’s philosophical ambitions on full display, the journey west starts to feel like something much bigger than a simple relic hunt.

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The featured image for this article was created by the author and the screenshots were captured by the author and used under Fair Use.