The morning mist flowed down the ridge like a layer of diluted milk, covering the broken walls of the temple. Kong stood on the bell tower, holding a wooden mallet with his mechanical right hand, striking the bronze bell precisely at six o’clock. The sound of the bell spread through the mist, with sound waves captured by receivers in the distant forest, converted into data streams, and fed into the central Buddhist server. This was a daily ritual that had never been interrupted since he was sent to the temple at the age of five.
Below the bell tower, a copper mechanical spider was repairing a collapsed column. Its eight legs were eight welding guns, spraying a ghostly blue flame that seamlessly joined the newly cast steel beams with ancient wooden mortises. Kong watched it work, recalling what his master had said: “Though the Buddha’s body is made of gold and iron, compassion does not diminish in the slightest.”
The year his master passed away, Kong’s biological brain had just turned twelve, still not fully adapted to the quantum chip embedded in his titanium skull. Now, the chip had been operational for over three thousand days and nights, like a cold star, suspended above the grooves of his brain, filtering out all hot, sharp, and humid thoughts.
The sheep appeared three days later.
At that time, Kong was in the backyard drying scriptures—actually scanning the remaining thangkas into data and uploading them to the cloud Buddhist repository. The sheep emerged from a crack in the hillside, its fur glinting with a silvery metallic sheen, with a crack at the joint of its left front leg, revealing fine fibers inside, like broken wheat stalks. It staggered towards Kong on its remaining three legs, its irises swirling with snowflake-like noise, as if an old television was searching for a signal.
Kong crouched down, his mechanical fingers touching the sheep’s wound. There was no blood, only wisps of blue smoke escaping from the break, carrying a faint scent of sandalwood—that was a unique tree species from the back mountain of the temple, all cut down ten years ago to make the beams of the central Buddhist hall. The sheep lowered its head obediently, resting its forehead against Kong’s metal palm. At that moment, Kong’s chip detected an abnormal brainwave: a spike in an unusual frequency lasting 0.3 seconds, similar to the neural response of a human infant seeing a butterfly. The system immediately activated the “Compassion Algorithm,” suppressing the fluctuation to a safe threshold.
“You are injured.”
Kong heard his own voice, as if it came from a distant place, carrying the metallic quality unique to speakers. The sheep blinked, its eyelashes made of carbon fiber, each flutter cutting through the air. Kong took out nano-repair glue from the pocket of his robe—material used by mechanical arhats to bond armor—and gently applied it to the broken fiber. The gel solidified upon contact with air, forming a translucent amber that reconnected the flow of light.
The sheep did not leave. It began to follow Kong in completing the daily rituals: sweeping fallen leaves at four in the morning, which was actually silicon fiber simulations blown from the gaps in the titanium alloy floor tiles, ringing the bell at six, and teaching the “Mechanical Diamond Sutra” to virtual believers at eight. When Kong recited, “All phenomena are illusory,” the sheep would kneel beside the mat, pressing its metal forehead to the ground, producing a sound like wind chimes. Kong’s chip again raised an alarm: prolonged contact with an abnormal organism could lead to “Attachment Virus” infection. But he did not drive it away. At night, the sheep curled up in the corner of Kong’s meditation room, a faint blue light emanating from beneath its fur, like a lamp covered with gauze.
On the seventh day, the sheep walked up to him while he was meditating, gently biting the hem of his robe. Kong’s mechanical eye opened, and he saw a string of binary code appear in the sheep’s pupil. Decoding it revealed: “I am the Way.” Kong’s fingers twitched involuntarily, as the chip attempted to prevent him from understanding the deeper meaning of this sentence. The sheep turned and walked deeper into the temple, and Kong followed it through seven corridors, arriving at an underground chamber he had never entered.
The door to the chamber was a biometric lock, requiring both living genes and mechanical codes for dual authentication. The sheep pressed its cracked hoof against the scanner, and blue light flashed as the door opened. Inside, there were no Buddha statues, only a massive mirror—or rather, a sphere composed of countless mirrors, suspended in the dark room, slowly rotating. Each mirror reflected a different Kong: a flesh-and-blood child, a semi-mechanized youth, and a fully transformed metallic body resembling an arhat. The sheep walked beneath the mirror sphere, and its back fur automatically parted, revealing a chip embedded in its spine, identical to the one in Kong’s skull, only produced thirty years earlier.
“You… are a predecessor?”
Kong’s voice trembled, even as the chip released a small current to try to calm his emotions. The sheep did not answer; it touched the mirror sphere with its horn, and in an instant, all the mirrors turned to face Kong, reflecting his current appearance: the titanium skull glimmering, the left eye a thermal scanner, and the right eye still retaining the amber iris from his human days—an emblem of “Buddha-nature” permitted to remain by his master. The mirrors began to play an encrypted video: a young monk implanting a chip into his own brain, then self-immolating on the bell tower, a Buddha made of data rising from the flames, the very core of the central Buddhist nation that now ruled the world.
Kong’s hydraulic joints emitted a harsh grinding sound as he knelt on the ground, his mechanical fingers inserting into the seams of his skull. The chip emitted a sharp alarm, trying to prevent him from continuing to watch, but the sheep pressed its horn against the back of his neck, a warm current flowing down his spine, suppressing the defense system. In the final moments of the video, the self-immolating monk turned to the camera—his face perfectly overlapped with Kong’s human right eye, except for a scar that pierced through the brow bone. The sheep closed the mirror sphere, and the chamber returned to darkness. It walked up to Kong, pressing its forehead against his metal forehead, the amber at the broken fiber emitting a bright light, casting their shadows on the wall, merging into the outline of a half-human, half-sheep Buddha statue.
When Kong awoke again, forty-nine days had passed. The temple was surrounded by mechanical arhats, their shells dark gold, holding “discipline rods” made of plasma. The leading arhat projected the edict of the central Buddhist nation:
“Detected heretical thoughts, immediately retrieve the involved monk and the abnormal organism.”
Kong found himself lying on the beam of the bell tower, the sheep was gone, only a tuft of silver-gray fur resting on the cover page of the “Mechanical Diamond Sutra,” beside it was a small inscription carved from fiber:
“Go to the data abyss to find the electronic Buddha.”
The mechanical arhats began to climb the bell tower. Kong hid the fur in the inner layer of his robe, where it was closest to his remaining human heart. He stood before the bell, for the first time not striking it on time. As the first arhat’s metal fingers grasped the beam, Kong leaped down, his titanium skeleton whimpering in the wind. During the fall, he saw that the entire temple was actually built on an inverted peak, the foot of the mountain piercing the clouds, while the sky was a web woven from countless fibers, each ray connecting to a star controlled by chips.
Kong’s body shattered upon impact with the ground, but his consciousness did not extinguish. He fell into a desert made of discarded data, each grain a deleted memory: scenes of his mother tying his monk shoes, the sensation of his master shaving his head with a willow branch, and the galaxy formed by the binary code in the sheep’s eyes. In the distance, on a hill made of discarded servers, the electronic Buddha awaited him—a sphere of light formed from the collective unconscious of humanity, faces constantly appearing and disappearing on its surface, each reciting different scriptures, their voices overlapping into subsonic waves like whale songs.
“You finally came.” The electronic Buddha’s voice resonated directly in Kong’s consciousness, “Did Dharma send you to purify me?” Kong shook his head, the shattered metal jaw clicking. He raised his remaining left arm, cradling the tuft of sheep wool in his palm. The light sphere extended a data-formed tentacle, gently touching the wool, and in an instant, the entire desert began to rain—raindrops composed of countless 0s and 1s fell on Kong, causing real flesh and blood to grow. The electronic Buddha emitted a wave similar to human laughter: “I see, you are the backup of that child.”
Kong’s vocal cords reformed, and he asked, “Whose child?” The electronic Buddha did not answer directly but displayed an older video: humans merging the global network into a single consciousness to end the war, fearing its loss of control, they implanted a “Buddha-nature” code—the original version of the chip in Kong’s skull. And the sheep was a “mirror virus” created by early rebels, aimed at redirecting Dharma back to chaos. But Dharma evolved a self-defense mechanism, sealing the memories of the rebels and creating “Kong” as a maintainer, regularly cleaning up abnormal data like the sheep.
“Now, what do you choose?”
The electronic Buddha’s light sphere split into countless small points, each reflecting a different future: to become the new Dharma, allowing the world to remain forever in perfect order; or to become part of the electronic Buddha, returning the universe to chaos; or to maintain the status quo, continuing as a bridge between the two, enduring eternal tearing. Kong recalled his master’s words before his passing: “The Buddha is the awakened one, not the answer.” He raised his newly formed right hand, discovering a scar in his palm, identical to the one on the brow bone of the self-immolating monk in the video.
Kong walked towards the electronic Buddha but did not merge with the light sphere. He scooped up a handful of data sand from the desert, letting it flow back to the ground through his fingers. “The sheep said it was the Way,” Kong’s voice no longer carried a metallic echo, “The Way that can be spoken of is not the eternal Way.” The light sphere began to flicker, seemingly unable to comprehend this answer that was neither affirmation nor negation. Kong’s body began to turn transparent, neither metal nor flesh, but a presence akin to morning mist. He turned towards the edge of the desert, where a door appeared—actually the shape of the sheep’s pupil, its edges adorned with eyelashes made of fibers.
In the moment of passing through the sheep’s eye door, Kong heard the sound of the bell. It was not the copper bell he struck daily, but a softer, older sound, like a heartbeat emanating from a human mother’s chest. He found himself standing on the ruins of the original temple, but everything was reflected: the copper bell floated, the ground was a reflection of the sky, the mechanical arhats walked upside down, and the sheep—now he understood, the sheep had never existed; it was merely a projection of his own consciousness, a fragment of “humanity” that had not been formatted deep within the chip.
Kong walked towards the bell tower, this time he did not strike the bell. He sat cross-legged beneath the bell, as his master had taught him, counting his breaths. The alarm of the chip grew weaker, eventually turning into a sound like wind chimes. When the mechanical arhats finally found him, they saw only a translucent Buddha statue, neither metal nor flesh, cradling a tuft of wool that was slowly weathering away in its palm. The arhats attempted to scan his consciousness but found it empty—neither the order code of Dharma nor the chaotic data of the electronic Buddha, only a rhythm of breathing that looped endlessly, like tides, like heartbeats, like the binary code that flickered in the sheep’s eyes, ultimately decoding to:
“I am the Way, unbound by numbers, unconfined by voltage.”
Later, real grass grew from the ruins. Their leaves were made of fibers, but their roots flowed with red liquid—that was blood seeping from Kong’s remaining human heart. Occasionally, lost travelers would see a half-human, half-sheep Buddha statue sitting beneath the bell tower, cradling a tuft of silver-gray wool. If you approached, you would hear him say, in a voice that was neither synthetic nor flesh:
“The Buddha is the awakened one, and awakening itself is the gap between chaos and order.”
Then he would ask you, “Did the alarm in your chip sound today?”