The real mythology behind Black Myth

The oldest telling of the legend is not a story at all. It is a note. Around 1090 the polymath Shen Kuo described a painting of Zhong Kui in the palace collection, attributed to the great Tang painter Wu Daozi, and copied out the Tang inscription at the head of the scroll. In it the emperor Xuanzong, sick with fever, dreams of a small ghost running laps of the hall with his jade flute and Lady Yang's scent bag. A large ghost catches it, gouges out its eye and eats it, and introduces himself: 武舉不捷之士, "a man who failed the military examination." He has sworn to rid the realm of monsters. The emperor wakes cured and has the painter draw what he saw.

Notice what the note bothers to describe. The large ghost wears a cap and blue robes, has one arm bared, and has both feet wrapped in raw hide. It says nothing whatsoever about his face, and nothing about how he died. Then the legend grows, one layer at a time:

So the fans who say he should be a soldier have the oldest text on their side, and the fans who say he should be ugly have a novel. The scholar arrives with the suicide, in a book now known only from a Ming quotation; the ugliness arrives last, as the reason the emperor rejects him. One honest caution: some modern reprints of Shen Kuo read "a jinshi who failed the military examination," which is a muddle of both careers. The Siku Quanshu text reads simply "a man."

Shen Kuo, to his great credit, did not believe a word of it. In the same entry, without drawing breath, he notes a tomb inscription dug up at Nanjing for the mother of the fifth-century general Zong Que, which records that Zong Que had a sister named Zhong Kui, and adds a Li Zhong Kui of the Northern Wei and two Sui generals of the same name. The name, he concludes, is old; only the painting begins with the Tang. You do not name your daughter after a demon hunter who has not been invented yet.

The likeliest explanation came later. The Rites of Zhou describes the emperor's great jade tablet as having a "zhongkui head," and in the old dialect of Qi a zhongkui was a mallet. The Qing scholar Gu Yanwu put it bluntly: the ancients drove out ghosts with a mallet. He also found a man of the Northern Wei, Yao Xuan, whose original name was Zhongkui and whose courtesy name was Bixie, "ward off evil." The mallet came first. The man was built to explain it. Our full page on Zhong Kui has the rest: the 1072 New Year prints, the bat over his head and the sister he marries off.

What the game has shown. Game Science revealed Black Myth: Zhong Kui at Gamescom Opening Night Live on August 19, 2025, and released a fifteen-minute look at a work-in-progress build in August 2026. The studio describes it as built on the folk tale of Zhong Kui banishing evil, with life and death as its theme. As of October 13, 2026 there is no release date. That is a sensible source to choose. With no canonical text, there is no single version to get wrong.

The 2024 game is set after the novel ends. Released on August 20, 2024, it sold ten million copies in its first days and twenty million in its first month, and took Best Action Game at The Game Awards. Its premise is that the Monkey King, having reached Buddhahood, turned his back on Heaven, was brought down by Erlang Shen and sealed in stone, his six senses scattered as six relics for the player to recover. Everything the player fights along the way is borrowed from the book, and almost everything is borrowed with a twist.

The novel's ending is quieter than the game's. In chapter 100 the Buddha names Wukong the Victorious Fighting Buddha. Then he thinks of the band on his head and asks the monk to recite the loosening spell, and the monk tells him to feel for it. It is gone. He accepts the title, and there the book stops. The refusal, the second war with Heaven and the stone are the game's own sequel. Our Sun Wukong page covers the novel's monkey from the stone egg onward.

The game's opening duel is chapter 6 turned inside out. In the novel Heaven's armies have already failed when Guanyin recommends the Jade Emperor's nephew, a god living at Guankou who, she says, will answer a call to arms but not a summons to court. Erlang and Wukong fight through a famous chain of transformations, the monkey at one point disguising himself as a small temple and struggling to hide his tail, which ends up as a flagpole behind it. Erlang does not win alone: Laozi drops his steel snare on Wukong's head and Erlang's hound bites him in the leg. And the novel's portrait gives Erlang a handsome face and bright eyes, not a third one. The third eye, now the image millions of players have of him, is a later addition, dated on our Erlang Shen page.

The game frees Bajie from a pair of golden cymbals when a star general crashes into them. Readers of chapter 65 will smile: in the novel the false Buddha Yellowbrow drops those cymbals over Wukong, and the rescuer is Kang-jin Long, the dragon spirit of the Neck mansion, one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions, who forces his horn in under the rim; Wukong drills a hole in the horn's tip, shrinks into it, and is pulled out. The game has swapped the prisoner and kept the jailer and the rescuer. Its love story between Bajie and the Violet Spider is new: the novel's spider spirits, in chapters 72 and 73, are seven sisters with a senior brother called the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord, and no past with the pig. The novel's Bajie was thrown out of Heaven for grabbing the moon goddess while drunk, which is a different sort of romance. More on our Zhu Bajie page.

The game's fifth chapter, on the Flaming Mountains, keeps the novel's household intact: the Bull King, his wife Rakshasi with her plantain fan, and their son Red Boy. Chapters 59 to 61 are the family's story in the book too, told as a long fight over the fan. What the novel adds is the end of the fight, when the Bull King, cornered, drops his disguise and becomes what he is: a white bull with a head like a mountain and horns like two iron towers. Our Bull Demon King page has the rest of him, including the cartoon he starred in in 1941.

She is only mentioned in the game, in its sixth chapter, in a way many players read as a lost love of the Monkey King's. The novel gives that reading nothing to stand on. In chapter 27 she is a corpse demon who tries three disguises on the monk, and Wukong strikes at her each time on sight; when she is finally dead, a line of writing on her spine reads "Lady White Bone." See our White Bone Spirit page.

The game's serpentine loong bosses are a fair picture of the Chinese dragon, a water god rather than a fire-breathing beast. The staff they are fighting has a dragon history too. In chapter 3 Wukong takes it from the treasury of the Dragon King of the East Sea, where it is a lump of divine iron that Yu the Great once used to sound the depth of rivers and seas.

Plenty of players go looking for Nezha, and the published summary of the game's plot does not name him; its heavenly opponents are Erlang and the Four Heavenly Kings. He belongs to the novel's earlier war. In chapter 4 his father, the Pagoda-Bearing Heavenly King, leads the first expedition against the monkey, and Nezha and Wukong both turn into three heads and six arms. The monkey wins by a trick, leaving a double to fight while he circles round and clubs Nezha on the arm.

It is not a guide to the games. There are no bosses, routes or builds here, and nothing about Black Myth: Zhong Kui beyond what its studio had shown publicly by October 13, 2026. And it is not a complaint. Every one of these figures was rewritten many times before a game studio got to them, by novelists, playwrights, painters and printers. Changing them is the tradition. Knowing which layer you are looking at is the fun part.