The silence shattered like crystal striking stone.
Sun Wukong moved with grace, his form blurring as the Cloud-Stepping Boots carried him through space that folded like origami at his passage. The Ruyi Jingu Bang materialised in his grip—not the simple staff of legend, but a weapon that hummed with the accumulated mischief of eleven years spent dancing on the edges of reality.
In the space between one heartbeat and the next, the staff extended. Not gradually, not with the mechanical precision of mortal engineering, but with the sudden, violent expansion of a star going nova. The weapon grew from the length of a man's arm to span the breadth of three celestial palaces, its golden surface rippling with inscriptions that rewrote themselves with each passing moment—ancient jokes that became prophecies, casual observations that hardened into universal laws, puns so terrible they made reality groan in sympathetic embarrassment.
