When she saw that the little Buddha statue had somehow run off, and the information provided by the "attendant monk" had been extremely limited, Annie had no choice but to hold back her anger for the time being. Then she and Tibbers continued along the stone path lined with the Twenty-Eight Mansions, heading farther up the snowy mountain.
Before long!
When she and her "monkey" Tibbers reached the top of a flight of steps marked by a stone stele reading "Frost-Covered Path," they found a spacious area filled with a huge crowd of monk statues in all sorts of poses, dressed in thin robes. From a distance, they looked just like a whole gathering of Arhats.
But as they drew closer, they were surprised to discover that those lifelike statues didn't seem to be statues of Arhats at all. They looked like actual monks, frozen stiff.
That's right—a whole crowd of monks who had frozen to death!
On the wide, flat ground, a great many bald "statues" stood motionless in all kinds of poses, just like a group of Arhats someone had deliberately placed there. Their figures appeared and disappeared in the wind and snow, their bodies utterly still. Their thin robes remained frozen in the instant they had been caught fluttering in the wind, as though they were conveying some wordless Zen lesson.
But the "statues" weren't carved from stone or wood. They were real people—or at least, they had been once?
Up close, it was easy to see that their bodies were already covered in frost. Their skin was as pale as paper, their eyes vacant and clouded white, their mouths slightly open, as if they had still been chanting sutras or trying to say something in their final moments.
Annie also noticed their various poses: some sat