Qingshui Convent stood halfway up a mountain on the outskirts.
At first, it had been nothing more than an abandoned convent hidden among the trees. Later, the Cui family's Old Madam had bought and renovated it, using it as a place to practice Buddhism and take in homeless women and abandoned children. For a time, some petty villains had assumed Qingshui Convent was one of those places where people devoutly worshipped Buddha by day and talked of romance with visitors by night. They had mistaken the nuns for convent girls who sold their favors, and had actually gone up the mountain in the middle of the night to harass them.
To put his mother-in-law's mind at ease while she practiced Buddhism, Cui Zhi had sent people to guard the place.
But he soon realized that he had been worrying for nothing.
His mother-in-law, who ate vegetarian food and worshipped Buddha, had plenty of ruthless methods at her disposal.
When she caught petty villains trying to climb the wall and molest the nuns, she had them tortured until they were crippled, then tossed out of the convent. The marks that time had carved into her features had done nothing to make her look more kindhearted. She glanced sideways at the men on the ground as if they were nothing but heaps of breathing, rotten meat. "You should be grateful you ran into this humble nun as I am now. If you'd met me twenty years ago, I'd have had you torn apart by five horses and sliced into thirty-six thousand pieces!"
After a few such incidents, everyone in Tianqing Commandery knew that a convent guarded by a rakshasa stood there. Women from the surrounding area who had nowhere else to go came to seek refuge, and their husbands' families and birth