Black Myth: Wukong Chapter 4, How a Comedy Scene Became a Love Story

Chapter 4 of Black Myth: Wukong is the game at its most emotionally devastating. What starts as a creepy trek through spider-infested caves becomes a tragic love story that reframes one of Journey to the West’s most comedic scenes into something genuinely heartbreaking.

Titled “Rosy Cheeks, Gray Hair,” this chapter draws from chapters 72 and 73 of the novel. But the game adds layers of romance, betrayal, and sacrifice that the original story never explored.

The Webbed Ridge: Gossamer Cave and Its Insect-Infested Legacy

In Journey to the West, Cobweb Ridge is home to Gossamer Cave (Pansi Cave), where seven spider spirits live. Tang Sanzang stumbles into their lair while begging for food and is immediately captured. Nearby sits the Yellow Flower Temple, run by a centipede demon who serves as the spiders’ protector.

The game splits this setting across several areas. You start at the Estate of Zhu in the Village of Lanxi, descend into the Webbed Hollow (an expansive underground spider realm), and eventually emerge at the Temple of Yellow Flowers for the chapter’s climax.

The entire environment is crawling with insect and arachnid-themed enemies: puppet spiders, grasshopper guai, dragonfly guai, and beetle captains. This stays true to the novel’s setting, where the spider and centipede demons ruled a region defined by webs, poison, and deception.

The Violet Spider: A Love Story the Novel Never Told

In the novel, the seven spider spirits are relatively straightforward antagonists.

They capture Tang Sanzang, clash with Wukong and Bajie, and eventually flee to their “senior brother,” the centipede demon, for protection. T

hey emit silk from their navels to trap their victims, and the novel treats them more as obstacles than fully developed characters.

The game transforms this entirely. The Violet Spider (Zixia) becomes the matriarch of a spider family and the center of Chapter 4’s emotional core.

In the game’s version, the Violet Spider was originally a celestial maiden in the Heavenly Court who fell in love with Marshal Tianpeng, Zhu Bajie’s original identity before his banishment.

When Bajie was exiled to the mortal realm and transformed into a pig demon, she followed him, abandoning her immortality. She was cursed to become a spider demon as punishment.

During the novel’s events at Gossamer Cave, Bajie recognized her.

They had a secret affair, and when Wukong ordered him to kill the spider spirits, Bajie spared her life.

He continued on the pilgrimage without looking back. The Violet Spider later gave birth to six daughters, the spider sisters you encounter throughout the chapter.

She’s a boss you must fight in the Webbed Hollow, and defeating her is one of the game’s most bittersweet moments.

The Hundred-Eyed Daoist Master had been sustaining her life with one of Wukong’s relics, and her story doesn’t end well.

Bajie and the Bathing Scene Reimagined

One of the most famous scenes in Journey to the West takes place at Gossamer Cave. Sun Wukong steals the spider spirits’ clothes while they bathe in a spring.

Zhu Bajie, upon learning the demons are women, transforms into a fish and swims among them. The novel plays this entirely for comedy, with Bajie’s lecherous antics serving as comic relief.

The game takes this exact scene and completely reframes it.

The Chapter 4 ending animation, titled “Listen Not,” depicts the bathing scene from the novel.

But instead of slapstick comedy, it shows a reunion between two lovers.

Bajie enters the water as a fish, and the Violet Spider immediately recognizes him as the marshal she followed across realms. They embrace, and the animation reveals their affair and the birth of their child.

It’s a stunning reinterpretation. A moment that readers have laughed about for centuries becomes one of the game’s most tender and tragic sequences.

The game also explains why Bajie ultimately walked away from her.

He knew that everyone connected to “people of destiny” suffered.

The Bull Demon King lost his family.

Elder Jinchi lost his temple.

Bajie couldn’t bear to drag the Violet Spider and their daughters into the same fate. The kindest thing he could do was pretend she meant nothing to him.

The Hundred-Eyed Daoist Master: The Centipede Who Fears Roosters

In the novel, the Hundred-Eyed Demon King is a giant centipede yaoguai who runs the Yellow Flower Temple. He’s the “senior brother” of the seven spider spirits, and when they flee from Wukong, he takes them in and poisons Tang Sanzang’s group with tainted tea.

His signature ability is terrifying: he can emit blinding golden light from his thousand eyes, making him nearly impossible to fight. Sun Wukong cannot defeat him alone.

The solution comes from Bodhisattva Vairambha, who provides the Weaver’s Needle, a weapon crafted from the eyes of the Pleiades Star Lord.

The Star Lord’s true form is a rooster, and since chickens eat centipedes, the needle’s power naturally counters the Hundred-Eyed Demon King. It pierces through his golden light and renders him helpless.

In the game, the Hundred-Eyed Daoist Master is the final boss of Chapter 4 and possesses the Envious Tongue relic.

His backstory is expanded significantly. He previously gave the relic to the Violet Spider to sustain her failing body.

But when the Destined One arrives, he cruelly absorbs the relic back, mortally wounding her in the process.

The Weaver’s Needle appears in the game as a vessel item that helps you in this fight, preserving the novel’s logic of using a rooster-derived weapon against a centipede demon.

It’s a satisfying detail for anyone who knows the original story.

The Scorpionlord and the Poisonous Enemy Connection

One of the game’s cleverest moves in Chapter 4 is weaving together multiple separate novel storylines that originally had nothing to do with each other.

In Journey to the West, the Scorpion Spirit of Poisonous Enemy Mountain appears in chapters 55-56, a completely different adventure from the spider/centipede arc.

She captures Tang Sanzang and is eventually defeated by the Pleiades Star Lord’s rooster crow.

The game connects these two storylines through the Scorpionlord, the Scorpion Spirit’s lover.

He harbors a deep grudge against the Pleiades Star Lord for killing his partner. The Hundred-Eyed Daoist Master shares this grudge, since the same Star Lord’s power (via the Weaver’s Needle) was used to defeat him in the novel.

The Scorpionlord also tried to arrange marriages between his sons and the Violet Spider’s daughters, but the Hundred-Eyed Daoist Master blocked the arrangement out of fear of losing control over his territory.

These layered rivalries and alliances transform what were isolated novel episodes into a single interconnected web of grudges.

The Fourth Sister: A Mysterious Ally in the Dark

The Fourth Sister is one of Chapter 4’s most intriguing characters, and she has no direct counterpart in the novel. She’s one of the Violet Spider’s daughters, but unlike her hostile sisters, she secretly helps the Destined One throughout the chapter.

She appears only at night, offering healing items and guidance. Every time she shows up, she has visible tear marks on her face.

She smiles only once in the entire chapter, the moment she first sees the Destined One.

The game strongly implies she has a connection to previous Destined Ones who attempted this same journey before you.

Each monkey that came before walked this path and met the Fourth Sister, and each one presumably died trying to complete the quest. Her tears suggest she’s been through this loss more than once.

She embodies the game’s approach to adapting Journey to the West: take something that barely existed in the source material and build a quietly devastating character around it.

The “Listen Not” Animation and the Theme of Desire

The chapter’s ending animation “Listen Not” tells the complete story of Bajie and the Violet Spider across their two lifetimes.

It begins in the Heavenly Court, where Bajie (as Marshal Tianpeng) attends a celestial gathering and catches the eye of a maiden.

It follows his banishment, her choice to follow him, and their eventual reunion at Gossamer Cave.

The relic from this chapter represents the tongue (the Envious Tongue), connecting to themes of jealousy and desire.

The entire chapter is built around wanting what you can’t have. Bajie wants the Violet Spider but can’t protect her.

The Hundred-Eyed Daoist Master wants power and control. The Scorpionlord wants revenge.

At the chapter’s end, Bajie and the Violet Spider share one final glance.

Then Bajie turns away and walks toward the relic, choosing the mission over the woman he loves. It’s the game’s most heartbreaking moment, and it only works because the game took a comedic novel scene and found the genuine emotion hiding underneath.

Smaller References and Easter Eggs

The Estate of Zhu at the start of the chapter may reference Bajie’s name (Zhu means “pig” but is also a common surname), hinting at his past connection to this region. In the novel, Bajie famously terrorized Gao Village before joining the pilgrimage, and the game echoes that domestic chaos here.

The Venom Daoist, an optional boss fought twice during the chapter, reflects the novel’s pervasive theme of poison running through the spider and centipede storylines. In the novel, the Hundred-Eyed Demon King’s first move against the pilgrims is to poison their tea.

Bajie briefly fights the Destined One early in the chapter before recognizing you as an ally. This echoes a recurring pattern from Journey to the West where characters attack first and form alliances later. Bajie himself joined the pilgrimage only after Wukong subdued him in combat.

Chapter 4 proves that Black Myth: Wukong’s greatest strength isn’t just its combat or its visual spectacle. It’s the game’s ability to find hidden human stories inside centuries-old mythology and make you feel every moment of them.

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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.