Between Beast And Buddha: A Drunken Monkey’s Journey to Immortality

Orange-crest is a monkey with simple desires. He likes warm summer days lazing about with his brothers and sisters, sampling the variety of fruit and grubs Mount Yuelu provides its simian inhabitants. He does not like tigers, or that one green fruit that makes one’s shits white and runny. Unlike his brothers though, orange-crest is endlessly curious. And no subject arouses that curiosity more than the many mysteries of fermentation. One fateful night, he finds himself enjoying an experimental brew a little more potent than his usual work.

Daoist Scouring Medicine is a man disgraced. Caught between the pressures of a vision for pill refining he will not compromise, and the politics of a world that discards its ideals the moment they stand in the way of profit; his once rising star has long since stagnated. After a disciple from a prestigious and wealthy family cripples himself by misusing the daoist’s work, he finds himself wandering the slopes of an unfamiliar mountain, hitting the gourd a little harder than any self-respecting daoist should, cursing the Heavens and the Zhang family alike.

From a pair of poorly considered drunken decisions, a sequence of events are set into motion that will one day shake the very heavens.

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