As soon as the old Abbot left, Cui Dongshan picked up a white jade scroll rod from the table, breathed on it, and carefully polished it with his snow-white sleeve. One of life's pleasures was a scare that came to nothing—especially when it brought an unexpected windfall.
No one should mistake the old Abbot's genial manner for an easygoing nature. He had honored Luopo Mountain with a visit, sat by the mountain gate drinking tea and cracking sunflower seeds, but that did not make him easy to deal with.
Across the worlds, there were a few Fourteen Realms cultivators whom nobody wished to provoke. Bai Ye, though, was a scholar, while the Old Blind Man had never cared much for affairs beyond his mountain. Curse him all you liked, so long as he did not hear it with his own ears.
And Shen Qing, the monk nicknamed Chicken Soup Monk, was, after all, a Buddhist master for whom "a compassionate heart is a Buddha's heart." Only that stinky Daoist from the East Sea Observation Daoist Temple acted in ways no one could fathom.
From beginning to end, the old Abbot did not say another word to Sui Youbian.
Sui Youbian had wanted to take the chance to ask more about her teacher. But when the moment came and the words reached her lips, she could not bring herself to speak.
Jiang Shangzhen had told her some of the inside story of the Cloud Cave Blessed Land, hiding nothing about Ni Yuanzan, the boatman with the pole: his mosquito-slaying in Jianghuai, why he had vanished back then, why the old Abbot had thrown him out of the Lotus Flower Blessed Land, the three-legged golden toad that had appeared on his shoulder during his long years as a guest in a foreign