Every Journey to the West Reference in Black Myth: Wukong Chapter 5

Chapter 5 of Black Myth: Wukong is the game at its most personal and its most devastating.

Every chapter before this one dealt with enemies and strangers. This one is about family.

Titled “Golden Child, Crimson Blood,” this chapter draws from multiple sections of Journey to the West, primarily chapters 40-42 and 59-61. It brings together the Bull Demon King, his wife Rakshasi, and their son Red Boy in a story about brotherhood, guilt, and the cost of being connected to Sun Wukong.

The Flaming Mountains: Born From Wukong’s Own Rebellion

The Flaming Mountains are one of the most iconic locations in Journey to the West.

In the novel, they were created when Sun Wukong kicked over Laozi’s Eight Trigrams Furnace during his rebellion against Heaven.

Flaming bricks fell from the sky, struck the earth, and became a mountain range that burns without end.

The novel’s local Earth God confirms this origin directly to Wukong, making it one of the few times the Monkey King has to confront the collateral damage of his own actions.

The pilgrims can’t cross without extinguishing the flames, and the only tool that can do it is the Plantain Fan held by Princess Iron Fan.

The game preserves this origin and adds a new layer.

The Celestial Court banished the young attendant who was supposed to be guarding the furnace, sentencing him to serve as the Keeper of the Flaming Mountains for eternity.

You’ll explore three main areas: Woods of Ember, Furnace Valley, and the Field of Fire, each one hotter and more hostile than the last.

The Bull King: Wukong’s Sworn Brother Turned Reluctant Enemy

The Bull Demon King is arguably the most important antagonist in all of Journey to the West.

He and Sun Wukong were once sworn brothers, fellow rebels who defied Heaven together during Wukong’s younger days.

Their friendship fractures during the Flaming Mountains arc. Wukong needs the Plantain Fan from the Bull King’s wife, Rakshasi. He tricks her into handing it over by disguising himself as the Bull King.

The real Bull King retaliates by disguising himself as Zhu Bajie to steal it back.

This escalating chain of deception eventually erupts into a massive battle where the heavenly forces, including Nezha and the Four Heavenly Kings, arrive to subdue the Bull King by force.

In the novel, the Bull King is defeated, forced to submit, and his family is scattered. It’s presented as a necessary victory for the pilgrims.

The game completely reframes this.

The Bull King now lives on the Flaming Mountains in broken despair.

After the events of the novel, he submitted to the Celestial Court and even helped kill Sun Wukong during the prologue’s events.

He carries enormous guilt for betraying his sworn brother.

He possesses the Grieved Body relic (which contains Wukong’s physical body) and initially tries to hand it over peacefully to the Destined One.

But before the transfer can happen, Red Boy intercepts it.

The straightforward hero-versus-villain dynamic from the novel is gone. In its place is a story about a broken man who lost everything because of forces far bigger than himself.

Rakshasi: A Mother Caught Between Worlds

In the novel, Princess Iron Fan (called Rakshasi in the game) is the Bull King’s wife and the owner of the Plantain Fan.

She despises Wukong because he had her son Red Boy captured and forced into service under Bodhisattva Guanyin.

The game expands her backstory enormously. Rakshasi was originally from the Rakshasa Kingdom, a nation of Yakshas that was destroyed by Mount Lingshan (the seat of Buddhist power).

She became a disciple of Taishang Laojun (Laozi) and was assigned to help guard the Eight Trigrams Furnace alongside the boy who would become the Keeper.

The Celestial Court later forced her to drink from the River of Childbearing, resulting in her pregnancy with Red Boy.

This wasn’t a choice. It was a manipulation by forces that treated her as a tool in a larger political game between Buddhism and Daoism.

In the game, she’s a tragic figure trying to hold her family together.

Her husband is consumed by guilt. Her son is consumed by rage. And when the Destined One arrives, she watches her world collapse once again.

After Red Boy’s defeat, she pleads for mercy and offers the Plantain Fan, echoing the novel but with far more heartbreak behind the gesture.

Red Boy: The Last Yaksha’s Rage

In Journey to the West, Red Boy appears in chapters 40-42 as one of the most dangerous enemies Wukong ever faces.

He’s the son of the Bull King and Rakshasi, and his Samadhi Fire is so powerful it nearly kills Sun Wukong. Guanyin herself has to intervene, subduing Red Boy and forcing him into her service as a disciple.

The game brings Red Boy back and adds a revelation that changes everything.

Red Boy is not the Bull King’s biological son.

Rakshasi was forced to drink from the River of Childbearing, and Red Boy is actually a Yaksha, the last survivor of a people destroyed by Buddhism.

When Red Boy discovers his true heritage, he’s consumed by a desire for revenge against Mount Lingshan.

He demands the Bull King hand over Wukong’s relic so he can use its power, but the Bull King refuses. Red Boy then takes matters into his own hands.

He disguises himself as Pingping, the Bull King’s actual daughter (born to the fox spirit Princess Fair Fox), to get close to the Destined One.

When the Bull King tries to hand over the relic peacefully, Red Boy drops the disguise, intercepts the relic, and consumes it. He becomes the chapter’s final boss.

After his defeat, Red Boy does something almost unheard of in the game.

He refuses to submit and kills himself rather than surrender.

It’s a defiant, tragic end for a character the novel treated as a child who simply needed discipline.

The game turns him into a revolutionary who would rather die than bow to the forces that destroyed his people.

The Keeper of the Flaming Mountains: The Furnace Boy’s Unrequited Love

In the novel, the local Earth God of the Flaming Mountains is a minor character who explains the mountains’ origin to Wukong and helps guide him. He gets a handful of lines and then disappears from the story.

The game transforms him into a full character with one of the chapter’s most unexpectedly emotional backstories.

The Keeper was once a young Daoist boy who served alongside Rakshasi under Laozi, guarding the Eight Trigrams Furnace together.

When Wukong kicked over the furnace, the boy was banished to the Flaming Mountains as their permanent guardian.

Over the centuries, he developed romantic feelings for Rakshasi that were never returned. This creates a one-sided love triangle that the game handles with surprising tenderness.

In one of the chapter’s best comedic moments, you find the Keeper trying to convince “Rakshasi” to run away with him.

But it turns out to be Zhu Bajie in disguise, which infuriates the Keeper and triggers his boss fight.

It’s a moment of levity in an otherwise heavy chapter, and it directly mirrors the novel’s tradition of characters using disguises to deceive each other during the Flaming Mountains arc.

The “Destiny” Ending Animation and the Theme of Grief

Chapter 5’s animated cutscene, “Destiny,” is the most emotionally intense ending animation in the entire game.

It tells the full story of the Bull King’s relationship with Sun Wukong from brotherhood to betrayal.

The animation opens with Erlang distributing Wukong’s relics after his death.

The Bull King receives Wukong’s body because he was the one closest to the Monkey King. It’s both an honor and a punishment.

Through a series of flashbacks, you see the Bull King fighting alongside Wukong during the rebellion against Heaven.

You see Rakshasi confessing that Red Boy isn’t his biological son.

You see Red Boy demanding the relic to avenge the Yakshas. And you see the moment from the novel where Wukong, now serving Tang Sanzang, confronts the Bull King and tells him to “find a master to serve” because it’s the only path for beings like them.

That single line recontextualizes the entire novel’s ending.

Wukong wasn’t just giving advice. He was speaking from experience about the impossible choices that powerful beings face in a world controlled by Heaven.

The relic from this chapter represents the body (the Grieved Body), connecting to the theme of physical pain, grief, and the burden of carrying someone else’s legacy.

The Bull King has been carrying Wukong’s literal body for centuries, and the weight of that duty has slowly crushed him.

Smaller References and Easter Eggs

The Yin-Yang Fish that appears during the Keeper’s boss fight connects to Daoist cosmology and the balance of opposing forces. It reflects the Keeper’s original role as a guardian of the Eight Trigrams Furnace, which was itself a tool of Daoist alchemy.

The bull guai enemies throughout Furnace Valley echo the Bull King’s dominion over this territory. Even the common enemies remind you whose land you’re walking through.

Bajie disguising himself as Rakshasi is a direct callback to the novel’s chain of deceptions during the Plantain Fan arc. In the original story, Wukong disguised himself as the Bull King to trick Rakshasi, and then the Bull King disguised himself as Bajie to trick Wukong. The game continues this tradition of shapeshifting trickery with Bajie taking his turn.

Ma Tianba, an NPC you can encounter across multiple chapters, reaches his storyline’s conclusion in Chapter 5. If you’ve spoken with him in every previous chapter, he offers a unique transformation reward. But miss him before the Keeper fight, and it’s gone forever.

Chapter 5 brings the game’s emotional arc to its peak. Before you head to Mount Huaguo for the final chapter, you’re left with a single devastating truth: everyone who ever loved Sun Wukong paid a terrible price for it.

The Bull King lost his family.

Rakshasi lost her freedom.

Red Boy lost his people.

And the Flaming Mountains themselves exist only because Wukong once kicked over a furnace without thinking about the consequences.

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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.