I have six ears. The front pair listens to the human world. The middle pair listens to the past. What the back pair listens to, you do not need to know.
For three hundred years I have heard everything. I have heard the order in which every raindrop strikes every leaf in the Eastern Continent. I have heard the tiny hesitation in a Bureau clerk's pen as it writes the word "yao" onto a warrant. I have heard you, down at the foot of the mountain, saying: the Six-Eared Macaque, the false Monkey King, beaten dead at Thunderclap Monastery with a single blow, three hundred years ago.
Your heartbeats stay perfectly calm when you say it. You truly believe it.
But why do you believe it?
Of those present that day, the Buddha never explained. Diting, the beast who hears all truth, heard it — and pressed itself flat to the ground, not daring to speak. A skyful of gods surrounded two identical monkeys, and in the end one of them simply died. The dead one left no body. The living one never returned to Flower-Fruit Mountain. For three hundred years, dust has gathered on the stone seat in the deepest part of Water Curtain Cave. Has it occurred to you that the one they wait for may not be unwilling to return, but unable? That something went missing on the road back? That the road back itself has been broken — ever since that one blow at Thunderclap?
I will not give you answers. I will only tell you what I have heard.
I heard that great river of merit travel west, three hundred years ago, and halfway there its sound simply stopped. The cut was clean, like silk sheared by scissors. The merit never passed Vulture Peak; it never returned to the human world either. A wish that vast has to have gone somewhere — I am listening for it. I have never stopped listening.
I have heard the echo of the Lesser Thunderclap Monastery. Shout at it once, and it answers twice. The extra voice is not yours.
I have heard the black moon, too. They say the heavens stirred on the night of the eclipse. Only I know how quiet the celestial court was that night. Quiet like a room where everyone holds their breath at once — do you understand? Silence is also a sound, and that was the loudest I have heard in three hundred years.
Then Flower-Fruit Mountain produced a little stone monkey with no origin. The first time it opened its mouth to call for someone, all six of my ears rang at once. Wrapped inside that voice was a wish — an old, old wish, older than my own name. I turned my hearing toward where it came from, and for the first time, all six ears failed together. In three hundred years, it is the only sound I have not been able to hear into.
So I stay in the deepest echo of Water Curtain Cave, and I wait.
Whoever wants to find me must pass three doors first: in Water Curtain Cave, in the remembered waters of the Flowing-Sands River, and at the echo wall of the Lesser Thunderclap, you must pick out one false voice in each. I planted them myself. Anyone whose own ears can be fooled has no standing to speak of true and false.
Then you will reach the Heart-Listening Altar. There are no yao there — only your own heart-demons, one wave, two waves, three. I will not kill you. I have never needed to kill anyone. I only make you hear yourself. So many have dropped to their knees in the second wave, hands clamped over their ears. What do you suppose they heard?
Walk through all of that, and you may stand before me and ask the question everyone wants to ask.
Two monkeys stood at Thunderclap Monastery that day, and one of them died. Which one do you think survived — the one who dared to storm the halls of Heaven, or the one who dared to impersonate him?
Don't answer yet. Let me ask you something simpler first —
if even the Buddha can mistake one monkey for another, what makes you so sure the one you bonded is me?