Let’s be real: when Wu-Tang said “Wu-Tang is for the children,” we didn’t know that one day, the children would need to come up with $4 million and some crypto to even hear a snippet of the music.

But here we are.

In the latest plot twist in one of hip-hop’s wildest sagas, the U.S. government has finally confirmed what many suspected: the ultra-rare Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was sold for a whopping $2.23 million back in 2018 to a Hong Kong-based company called WTC Endeavours Limited, Billboard reports. Yes, that’s after they seized it from “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli—who originally bought the one-of-one project for $2 million in 2015, right before his world unraveled in a mess of fraud charges, memes, and righteous public outrage.

Just to catch you up: Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is a 31-track album recorded in secret by the Wu-Tang Clan as a protest against the devaluation of music in the streaming era. Only one copy exists. No streaming. No downloads. No Spotify surprise drops. Just one silver box and a contract that says it can’t be commercially released until the year 2103. (No, that’s not a typo. That’s 78 years from now. Start saving your coins.)

Enter PleasrDAO, a crypto collective that bought the album from an intermediary after the government’s 2018 sale. According to The New York Times, PleasrDAO paid the equivalent of $4 million in cryptocurrency. And in the most hip-hop-meets-tech move imaginable, they turned the album into an NFT.

Here’s where it gets interactive: You can donate $1 and unlock five minutes of listening time from Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Even better, every dollar donation shaves 88 seconds off the countdown to public release. We’re not saying we can move the date to 2093, but if Black Twitter, HBCUs, and every Wu-Tang fan under 50 comes together—we might just make history.

This whole thing is like a real-life hip-hop fable: an album so sacred it got caught up in a federal asset seizure, flipped for millions, and now exists in the blockchain ether where fans can slowly, literally, buy back time. Wu-Tang really said “art has value,” and proved it in court and in crypto.

If nothing else, this saga is your reminder that Black art is powerful, priceless, and sometimes… requires a seven-figure security clearance. As RZA once put it, “This album is a piece of contemporary art.” And now, thanks to Web3 and Wu-Tang, you can pay a dollar and experience five magical minutes of it.

Wu-Tang really is forever.

Cover photo: U.S. Government Confirms Details on the Wu-Tang Album That Sold for Millions—Twice/Photo credit: Jamis Johnson/The New York TImes