White Jade Purification Bottle

羊脂玉净瓶 / White Jade Purification Bottle
Postcelestial Dharma Treasure, Cosmos Storage and Purification Vessel (后天法宝，乾坤收纳与净化之器)
Artifact Tier: Postcelestial Dharma Treasure (后天法宝)
Current Holder: None (originally owned by Tai Shang Lao Jun; once wielded by the Silver Horn King)
Current Status: Presumed returned to the Eight-Trigram Furnace or the Celestial Court treasury; last known location in Journey to the West narrative.

None. No surviving physical relic or inscribed stone records are known to exist in the mortal realm. The only textual reference is contained within the narrative of Journey to the West and its related commentaries (Journey to the West Supplement, The Record of the Journey).

The White Jade Purification Bottle belongs to the same treasure set as the Purple-Gold Red Gourd and the Banana Leaf Fan, all forged by Tai Shang Lao Jun during the early Honghuang Era and later used by his demon-disciples on Mount Pingding. Its purification function is closely tied to the Tai Yin Yue Po fragment, which was taken from the Queen Mother of the West's Jade Lake, linking the bottle to the broader network of Celestial Court resources and the theft of divine assets. The bottle's karmic cost mechanism is an example of the law described in the Scroll of Artifacts: every use of stolen power demands a payment from the user's own lifespan or fortune.

Artifact Tier: Postcelestial Dharma Treasure. The bottle possesses two core functions: (1) Cosmos Storage: when the mouth of the bottle is aimed at a target, it generates a suction force that draws objects and even living beings into an internal void. Unlike the Purple-Gold Red Gourd, the bottle does not require the target's true name—it preferentially seizes "ownerless things" or "passive beings." (2) Purification: the sacred water held within can wash away all defilements—deadly poisons, curses, and evil energies that stain spiritual tools. A single drop of this water can restore purity to a corrupted artifact or revivify withered spiritual trees. The power does not demand a specific cultivation threshold for basic use, but each activation of the storage function deducts a portion of the wielder's merit; excessive capture of innocent lives will trigger Heaven’s karmic backlash and erode the wielder’s fortune.

The bottle is carved from a single block of Kunlun Mountain’s ten-thousand-year aged mutton-fat jade marrow (羊脂玉髓). The mining process requires the heart-blood of nine pairs of virgin boys and girls to irrigate the jade vein for seven full days; if the blood sacrifice is not performed, the jade core shatters on its own. After carving, the bottle was soaked for forty-nine years in San Guang Shen Shui (三光神水), the Essence Waters of Sun, Moon, and Stars, which are stolen from the source of the Celestial River. Each theft reduces one day of rainfall in the mortal realm. A Tai Yin Yue Po (太阴月魄), a Moon Soul fragment stolen from the Queen Mother of the West's Jade Lake, is embedded into the bottle's base to enable the purification function. The removal of this fragment permanently diminishes the Jade Lake's spiritual energy by ten thousand years of accumulation.

The White Jade Purification Bottle possesses no conscious Qi Ling (器灵). Its "spirit" is not a bound soul but the residual will of the lunar soul fragment (Tai Yin Yue Po) combined with the law-echo of the Three Light Divine Waters. The Moon Soul fragment has no ego—it acts only as a concentrated source of pure Yin purification principle. The bottle's responsiveness is mechanical, not sentient, and its purification power functions automatically when the correct ritual is performed. This absence of a trapped soul makes the bottle less prone to berserk backlash than artifacts built via human sacrifice, though its material costs were still paid in blood.

The bottle does not require a formal "Master Recognition" (认主) ritual. It responds to the wielder who possesses the correct talisman or ownership seal. In the Journey to the West narrative, the Silver Horn King was able to wield it because his demonic treasure set was originally stolen from Tai Shang Lao Jun's furnace; the bottle recognized the ownership seal, not the soul of the wielder. When the bottle is used to store living beings, the user's personal merit is deducted for each successful capture. This merit loss is not tied to the bottle's internal mechanisms but is a cosmic law response: the bottle consumes the wielder's karmic fortune as fuel. If innocent lives are captured in excess, Heaven's backlash manifests as a reduction of the wielder's lifespan and luck. There is no direct "master-devouring" (噬主) mechanism, but the indirect karmic cost can be just as fatal.

Only one stable wielder is recorded in the primary myth: the Silver Horn King (银角大王), a demon-king who obtained the bottle as part of a treasure set stolen from Tai Shang Lao Jun's Eight-Trigram Furnace. He used the bottle to capture Sun Wukong, successfully trapping the Monkey King inside. However, Sun Wukong tricked him into opening the bottle and escaped, after which the bottle fell back into the hands of its original divine owner. A secondary wielder is Tai Shang Lao Jun himself, who retrieved the bottle and used its purification water to save the Ginseng Fruit Tree (人参果树) at Mount Wanshou. No wielder died from the bottle's direct backlash, but the Silver Horn King was ultimately captured by Sun Wukong and returned to the furnace, which may be interpreted as a form of karmic consequence for using stolen treasures to imprison innocent beings.

The bottle's most famous full-power activation occurred when the Silver Horn King aimed its mouth at Sun Wukong and drew him into the internal void. The act demonstrated the bottle's ability to contain a being of Da Luo Jin Xian-tier cultivation despite the target's resistance. A second notable use was the purification of the Ginseng Fruit Tree: one drop of the sacred water was sufficient to revive a tree that had been uprooted and left to die, an act that required a vast amount of accumulated purification power. The bottle has no explicitly recorded usage limit or self-damage threshold; its constraint is purely karmic—each storage activation consumes the wielder's merit, and excessive use triggers Heaven's correction. No record exists of the bottle being overused to the point of self-destruction.

The White Jade Purification Bottle is one of five treasures refined by Tai Shang Lao Jun along with the Purple-Gold Red Gourd (紫金红葫芦) and the Banana Leaf Fan (芭蕉扇). It shares the same basic "cosmos suction" mechanic as the Purple-Gold Red Gourd, but differs in activation condition: the Gourd requires the target's true name, while the Bottle does not. The Bottle cannot absorb targets who are actively resisting with full protective consciousness, whereas the Gourd can capture any being whose name is spoken. No direct counter-treasure is recorded; however, the Bottle's purification water can neutralize curses and evil energies that might otherwise corrupt other artifacts.

After the events of Journey to the West, the bottle was reclaimed by Tai Shang Lao Jun and presumably returned to the Eight-Trigram Furnace or stored in the Celestial Court treasury. No records indicate it was destroyed or lost. Its current status in the mythic timeline is dormant—it requires a wielder who possesses the original owner's seal to be reactivated, and it does not actively seek a new host. The bottle's purification water is replenished from the Three Light Divine Waters, but the source has been diminished due to the initial theft, so its long-term availability is unknown.