How Black Myth: Wukong makes the Yaoguai Portraits a second story route

In Black Myth: Wukong, the Yaoguai Portraits are not a completed encyclopedia handed to the player at the beginning. The Journal fills as the Destined One meets characters, defeats enemies and advances quests. Its divisions for lesser yaoguai, chiefs, kings and characters reflect different kinds of encounters, while unfilled positions make absence visible. Reading therefore follows action: a name that first appeared as a health bar or a brief conversation can acquire a history only after the player has passed through its part of the world.

The form of each entry changes how that history is received. A portrait, a compact verse and a prose vignette sit beside classification data, but the prose rarely behaves like a neutral list of statistics. It may begin before the encounter, follow a local witness or end on a moral reversal. Main-path dialogue and cutscenes carry the immediate conflict; the Journal can move sideways into a servant’s grievance, a family’s earlier loss or the consequence that remains after a boss falls. The menu becomes a place where an obstacle is allowed to become a person.

Unlock timing turns that reading into a second progression system. The Tiger’s Acolyte, Mad Tiger and Old Rattle-Drum thread becomes clearer when combat, the quest object and the associated entries are considered together. Elsewhere, optional figures and secret routes leave gaps until the player performs the relevant meeting or fight. The Journal does not replace exploration: it records what exploration has made legible. A missing entry is thus both a completion clue and a warning that the current version of the regional story may be incomplete.

That does not make every portrait an unquestionable statement from an omniscient narrator. Bilibili creator 竹字头的笙 uses the idea of a Rashomon-like structure to argue that the portraits, the Old Monkey and other pieces of text may be unreliable. The observation is valuable because Black Myth: Wukong often separates what the player sees, what one character reports and what an entry chooses to emphasize. The stronger claim—that a particular passage is an intentional lie—remains the creator’s view unless another released scene or record directly disproves it.

Our reading is more limited: the Yaoguai Portraits are designed around narrative distance. Verse compresses judgment, illustration fixes a memorable pose, and prose chooses whose circumstances deserve attention. Differences between these layers can signal perspective, omission, irony or uncertainty; they do not all mean deception. The player has to compare the entry with the fight, the location and neighboring records. That act of comparison produces editorial work inside play, rather than asking the player to accept a single lore summary.

This is why the Journal forms a second story route through Black Myth: Wukong. The first route is spatial and mechanical—arrive, explore, fight and move forward. The second loops backward—unlock, read and reinterpret what just happened. Because the portraits appear through play but require a deliberate return to the menu, their stories reward attention after victory. They make completion more than collecting names: finishing the catalogue means revisiting the judgments formed while those names were still enemies, strangers or empty spaces.