There were five-hundred entries. Ten had made it through the preliminaries.
Their names scribbled on charts in sharpie.
One of those ten people wasn't a person at all or not a human being anyway.
His name or the name he had given them had been one character.
猴
"Monkey"
Monkey looked upon the crowd his large eyes in awe and wonder of the spectators of the Martial Arts Tournament.
He had never seen this many people in his entire life and he was five-hundred years old!
So many kinds of people.
Rich women carrying umbrellas to keep in the shade, rich men with fancy hats and fancy suits, monks in loose robes, country hicks, poor families in rags and turbans, and a little girl with a cone of strawberry gelato.
Everyone was here to see the tournament that would decide the fate of this realm.
Hopping over with simian-curiosity, Monkey knelt down beside the little girl and petitioned, "Could I have a taste of that?"
The bright red ribbon hung over the entrance for the contestants.
The entrance to the Mountain.
Two men in robes and fezzes calmly stepped out; both carrying and supporting an enormous pair of scissors.
It took the two of them just to open the scissors. Together, they snipped the ribbon.
...
"Lei Dian the drunken Bobcat".
It was a name that had brought contestants to West City's "Strongest of this Realm" time and time again; a name worth the money and a name worth a great fight.
And then, at some point, the lightning had gone out of champion Lei Dian.
The arena was forgotten, its entrance sealed off.
It was, after all, located inside a mountain and was once strictly an underground event.
An underground event that "everyone" had heard of but "nobody" had heard of because, of course, such fighting could not be approved of nor respected in a respectable community.
That was until Lao Lei or "Old Lei" rediscovered it by "accident", needing a place to stay after drinking a bit too much in the midst of a storm.
Lao Lei's story was that he had spent his whole life fishing.
Old Lei had never had any passion in particular so he did what his father had done, he became a fisherman. And even upon reaching a ripe old age, marrying, and watching his children grow old he still hadn't found this life's passion.
Or perhaps he had only forgotten it.
That was until he discovered Sun Wukong.