(A quick note here! What follows will be told in the form of a story. Those fated to read this, do not become trapped by the story's outward form. Instead, use the story's sides to awaken to your own Dao. Good, good.)
Some time ago, a buddy I hadn't been in touch with for ages called me and asked what I'd been busy with, whether I wanted to make money.
I asked where he was and what he was doing.
He said he'd been abroad for three years. At first, he'd spent a year and a half working in Singapore without making much money, but now he was in Cambodia.
Before he left, he owed more than a million outside. Now he'd paid it all back.
He also said he mainly did online marketing over there and had already climbed to the supervisor level.
It was aimed at other countries, not the domestic market. He'd already pulled more than ten people around him over there. It was extremely profitable, and he asked if I wanted to go.
As you all know, I was a pure Cultivating Buddhism and understanding the Dao kind of guy, neither greedy for fame nor chasing profit.
Whenever someone talked to me, the first thing I did was look at what I was thinking inside. The second was to look at what the other person was thinking.
Money and beautiful women held no temptation for me at all. So I began to speculate about his purpose in telling me all this.
Based on my understanding of human nature, if someone was making a lot of money, they would definitely keep their head down and rake it in, rather than tell others about it.
So if they did tell someone, there were only two reasons: either they wanted to use you to make money, or they saw you as money.
So I refused him outright.
Sure enough, he then told me they were recruiting over there. If I had any friends around me who wanted to make money, they could contact him.
For every person he normally brought over, they would give him thirty thousand. If I introduced someone to him, he wouldn't take a single cent and would give all thirty thousand to me.
Now here was the question: if it was a normal marketing job, how could introducing one person pay that much?
Although I didn't know whether money was easy to make in Cambodia, in my heart, this was no different from selling pigs.
So I casually chatted with him for a few more sentences and hung up.
After hanging up, I thought it over. If it really was that profitable, he would definitely contact the friends he was closest with.
Although he and I were pretty close too, no matter how you ranked things, it shouldn't have come to my head.
Thinking of this, I called another buddy who was closer to him than I was. That buddy told me he hadn't mentioned this matter to him.
That made me doubt the truth of the matter even more. I wondered if he'd been detained by someone.
Maybe I was overthinking it, but what if I was thinking too little and this buddy couldn't come back?
If I analyzed it according to the usual plots in film, television, and novels, then this buddy's current state was like a turtle locked in a birdcage—he probably couldn't get out.
Besides, in my eyes, his so-called online marketing job was just like a pyramid scheme. The money came from recruiting people, then squeezing profit from those brought over. Maybe in the end, they would even be sold off.
The internet was always reporting news like this.
As the saying went, one must not harbor the heart to harm others, but one must guard against the hearts of others. I had no choice but to think that way.
What I was mainly afraid of was that this person really might not be able to return.
Although I suspected he was deceiving me, that did not conflict with my worry for him.
I contacted this buddy's wife again and asked whether she knew what he was doing. She said she was driving, so I told her to get on with what she was doing first.
After turning it over and over in my mind, I still cast a Lesser Six Rens divination. The signs showed Great Peace, Swift Joy, and Void Death.
Lesser Six Rens had six hexagrams in total, three auspicious and three inauspicious.
They were Great Peace, Lingering, Swift Joy, Red Mouth, Minor Auspiciousness, and Void Death.
They represented great auspiciousness, moderate misfortune, moderate auspiciousness, minor misfortune, minor auspiciousness, and great misfortune.
Judging from this divination, he was doing quite well over there right now and getting by fine, but there would not be a good outcome in the end.
In other words, I didn't need to worry about this buddy of mine for now, but in the end, it would most likely be time for Little Sunflower Mom's Classroom: the kid had been pumping iron but never coughing up rust, so he was probably finished.
Sigh, such was the heavenly sign. This humble monk had no way around it.
Since we were on the subject, let me give everyone a little knowledge about Lesser Six Rens.
Lesser Six Rens was also known as Horse-front divination. It was simplified by Zhuge Liang during the Three Kingdoms period based on Qi Men Dun Jia. Because its predictive method resembled Six Rens, it was called Lesser Six Rens.
When this humble monk first began cultivating, I wanted to learn a method of divination. I looked at many of them—Plum Blossom Numerology, Six Rens, Purple Star Astrology, and so on—but Lesser Six Rens alone was the most convenient and simple. Among the people, it was also called counting on one's fingers, so I learned it, mainly so I could show off after achieving success in cultivation.
Later, things really did unfold as the divination signs had shown. This buddy told me his family knew about it and said I didn't need to worry too much.
As for how things would end, we could only wait and see. If I was still writing this book by then, I would write it down. If I was no longer writing this book, I would reveal the answer to everyone in another book.
Only a few days after this matter passed, another brother from Yangcheng, Gouzi, called me. He said there was a man surnamed Wu in his area who had once been a teacher. He seemed to be possessed by an evil spirit, or perhaps had encountered a ghost. He was like a mental patient, muttering all day long and apologizing to the air, constantly saying things like:
"Teacher was wrong, Teacher was truly wrong! I'll never dare again! Please, let me go!"
As he spoke, he also kept smashing his head against the air, leaving his skull covered in huge bumps.
Sometimes, he even ran out of his House in the middle of the night and went to someone else's pigsty to play poker with a sow.
Just a few days ago, when no one was watching him, Teacher Wu actually sent the old sow Auntie Wang's Household had raised for more than ten years flying sideways.
Hearing this, I couldn't help feeling a little doubtful.
Normally speaking, that shouldn't be possible, right?
Friends who had studied biology all knew that reproductive isolation existed between humans and other species. That meant it was impossible for a human to play poker with a sow.
But what Gouzi said didn't sound like a joke, so I was extremely curious about the matter.
Also, this incident had disturbed the common folk so badly that they couldn't live in peace. The village chief was thinking of spending some money to find some capable stranger to handle it. Gouzi figured I'd been cultivating for a year and a half now, and he was always hearing me talk about how awesome cultivation had made me, so he wanted to see whether I had any solution. Then the two of us could earn this money, splitting it seventy-thirty—three for him and seven for me.
I also asked Gouzi why they hadn't called the police or simply sent Teacher Wu to a psychiatric hospital.
Gouzi said neither the police nor psychiatric hospitals could handle this. He had looked it up. Our country had a law called the Mental Health Law. Article 28 stated that where a person was suspected of having a mental disorder, or posed a risk of harming themselves or endangering others, their close relatives, workplace, or local public security authorities should take measures to stop them and send them to a medical institution for mental disorder diagnosis. Diagnosis—but diagnosis did not mean they could be hospitalized.
Article 30 of the Mental Health Law also stipulated the voluntary principle for hospitalization of mental disorder patients. Even for a seriously mentally disordered patient, hospitalization treatment could only be carried out with the consent of their guardian.
Article 31 of the law clearly stipulated that if the guardian did not agree, medical institutions could not carry out hospitalization treatment on the patient.
Therefore, the law did not grant any other person or organization besides the guardian the right to decide that a mentally disordered patient should receive hospitalization treatment.
Besides, Teacher Wu was all alone, with no close relatives around him, and he hadn't harmed anyone. The only ones he harmed were old sows. Fuck! No one had any solution to that.
After hanging up, I immediately booked a plane ticket to Yangcheng.