The clamor swelled. Monks, ordinary travelers lodging in the temple quarters, worshippers who had arrived early for the Ullambana Assembly... more and more people gathered, surrounding the scene in tightly packed rings.
Seeing the onlookers gather, the people from the Wu Family Sugar Shop raised their voices even louder. Wu Guier's father, Wu Arong, pointed at a monk's face and cursed:
"When Wu Guancheng asked for her hand, he agreed to marry into our household, yet he never did a single day's work! All day long, he wandered around the Mass Burial Mound like a man possessed, fiddling with corpses. We're in the food business-how could we dare let him help? If he wouldn't work for his wife's family, he shouldn't have lured our daughter away!"
For merchants running a small business, every pair of hands in the household mattered. They had agreed to marry their daughter to a parentless orphan only because he had no dependents and could move into their home. Who could have expected Wu Guancheng to refuse to put down his brush even after the wedding, spending all day studying painting techniques?
Had he been able to earn a living as a painter, that would have been one thing. But to paint more lifelike monsters, Wu Guancheng studied corpses and sketched them; everything he did shocked and scandalized people. The Wu family had suffered relentless criticism from their neighbors as a result. Wu Arong and his wife urged their daughter to agree to a divorce, but Wu Guier was a strong-willed woman. When they pressed her too hard, she simply left home.
Now that all pretense had been torn away, the Wu family had deliberately chosen the Ullambana Festival to bring their relatives to the temple and demand her return, exposing all these sordid affairs in