1. This Sacred Land

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“Look closely, this man’s name is Xiao Shuai!”

He was tying a rope tightly around a pure gold lotus lamp, swinging it overhead to aim carefully, then throwing it with all his might toward the circular hole above…

Ouyang Rong thought that if this was really someone playing a prank on him—using a hidden camera to film an ordinary person—then soon everyone’s first impression of him would probably come with this ridiculous introduction.

“I’m telling you, whether this is a tacky prank, sleep paralysis, or the real Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss… nobody’s stopping me from going back to study for my postgraduate exams!”

Squatting on the edge of a lotus-shaped stone pedestal, Ouyang Rong lowered his head, lips dry and murmuring as his eyes stared intently at the golden lotus lamp in his hands, meticulously tightening the knots.

He was in a sealed underground chamber. The walls bore faint traces of faded murals, and in the center of the floor stood a half-meter-high lotus base with a constricted waist, inverted like a lotus seat.

Other than that, the chamber was empty.

The only source of light was a round hole in the ceiling about ten meters above, roughly the size of a manhole cover.

This seemed to be the only exit. A beam of pale moonlight slanted down through it, landing squarely on the young man crouched on the lotus pedestal, disregarding his dignity.

“I’ve been preparing from dawn to dusk for a whole year. The battlefield awaits this weekend. Do you think falling into a well can trap me? Even if it’s Buddha’s well, no way! I’m telling you—it’s impossible!”

After checking the knots one last time and licking his chapped lips, he sprang up on the lotus pedestal with a bounce.

One hand gripped the rope tightly, the other held the heavy golden lotus lamp, and he looked up, eyes blazing with longing at the ‘well mouth’ he had been staring at endlessly.

There was no well he couldn’t climb out of; only postgraduate candidates willing to climb!

But after this surge of adrenaline, Ouyang Rong didn’t act immediately.

He suddenly turned back and called into the darkness behind him, “Hey, come help me! Once I get out, I’ll pull you up too.”

He wasn’t alone in this sealed chamber.

In the pitch black beyond the moonlight, three shadowy figures were faintly discernible:

One was a tall, emaciated monk sitting cross-legged like a small mountain. His gray robe was tattered, his face gaunt and ageless.

Another was an old Taoist leaning against the wall, sitting with legs splayed like an overturned basket. Wrapped tightly in a large black feathered crane cloak, arms crossed as if shivering from the cold. Only a pointed head with youthful features and white hair was visible, the Taoist’s head wrapped in a mixed-origin Taoist turban.

The third was a slender girl, knees hugged to her chest, face buried. Her delicate frame was accentuated by the ancient-style Hanfu she wore, making her appear even more fragile.

She was the quietest one in the chamber.

When Ouyang Rong first woke and tried to speak to her, she didn’t utter a word, only flashing a pair of clear, stream-like eyes through the gap between her knees and thin arms.

Now, as Ouyang Rong fidgeted under the moonlight, the slender girl’s eyes quietly watched him again from between her arms.

Ouyang Rong scanned these three oddly attired individuals. No matter how he looked at them, they didn’t seem like fellow postgraduate candidates. Still, he couldn’t help muttering, “You really don’t want to leave?”

In response, he received three looks as if he were a fool.

“We can’t leave!”

Hearing the word ‘leave,’ the gaunt monk trembled uncontrollably as if just pulled from the icy North Sea.

“Why not?” Ouyang Rong asked.

The gaunt monk pointed down and then up, “This place is the Lotus Pure Land; above is the endless hell!”

“If I don’t pass my exams, that would indeed be hell,” Ouyang Rong nodded and turned away.

The monk couldn’t help but chant a caution: “Namo Amitabha. Benefactor, if you go up, you will immediately be devoured by evil creatures.”

“Don’t be a damn fool and go looking for death,” the cloaked Taoist sneered. After a pause, he added, “If you want to die, don’t take us along.”

“…” Ouyang Rong.

Are you all some kind of fried dough sticks?

He swallowed his words, shook his head.

Indeed, in this day and age, believers tend to be a bit superstitious. Better to be among the Hanfu crowd girls.

Glancing again at the silent, slender girl, Ouyang Rong decisively turned to throw the golden lotus lamp upwards toward the round hole.

Earlier, he had tried shouting for help loudly but heard no response—whether because the chamber was too deep or it was late at night, no sound came from outside.

“I can’t delay any longer. I haven’t finished memorizing my vocabulary yet.”

He recalled a wilderness survival video he’d seen while eating, where someone who fell into a deep pit tied a heavy object to one end of a long rope and threw it out to catch on a tree, enabling rescue.

“I remember there were two incense burners for coin offerings before I fell,” the postgraduate candidate analyzed calmly.

The lotus lamp he held, found here, might be real gold or just gold-painted, but it felt valuable.

But… whatever. Even if it’s a cultural relic, it’s useless if people’s lives and exam prep are on the line. The ‘people’ have requisitioned it!

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The first throw missed and clattered to the ground.

The second throw hit the mark and went outside!

But when he pulled, it slipped back inside the hole.

Third throw, changed direction, missed again…

At that moment, the gaunt monk clasped his hands and showed a look of sorrow:

“Benefactor, why persist stubbornly? You’ve just ascended to this Pure Land; don’t fall again into that Avici Hell below.”

“Above are all kinds of evil creatures, full of wicked karma. There are torrents without drowning in the mountains and fields, fierce fires throughout the ten directions, poisonous gases filling heaven and earth, and evil winds destroying all things…”

“Cut the crap,” the cloaked Taoist changed position, sitting cross-legged and shifting away from Ouyang Rong slightly, impatiently saying: “Good advice can’t save the damned; great mercy doesn’t save those who cut themselves off.”

Just as the candidate prepared to throw again, his body suddenly stiffened. He lowered his gaze silently at the unfamiliar Confucian robe he was wearing—a robe he hadn’t been wearing before he fell.

Boom—

Outside the chamber, faint thunder rumbled, and before he could react, night rain began to fall.

Ouyang Rong looked up, raindrops striking his pale eyelids.

The circular hole above truly resembled a manhole cover—that very well mouth where he had slipped and fallen.

The story was a bit convoluted.

Ouyang Rong was a postgraduate candidate retaking the exams. Near the exam period, while lurking in a small online study group called “Gentleman’s Postgraduate Exam Group (No Girls Allowed),” he heard from group members about an Eastern Forest Temple on the outskirts, reputedly skilled in helping people pass exams and pray for love, attracting many from all over the country each year.

He then learned the temple housed a century-old Wishing Tower with a Blessing Bell. By accumulating enough merit, one could ring the bell and receive blessings, making wishes come true.

Ouyang Rong was skeptical, a materialist at heart, but perhaps the anxiety of today’s youth was so great that even Buddha knew about it and took on this business…

And he really needed both exam success and relationship luck—it struck a nerve.

So, taking faith as sincerity, he set out early one morning with a critical eye and took a taxi to Eastern Forest Temple. Upon arrival, he was stunned to find a long queue stretching down to the mountain foot, filled with peers like him, heads down and scrolling phones in the cold wind.

Getting up early marked the veterans; even lining up, they were reviewing test papers.

Ouyang Rong was about to pull out his phone when a little monk held a QR code between two fingers and poked it in front of his nose, urging him to scan it.

He discovered it was for an app called “Merit Tower.”

The temple was quite thoughtful, allowing busy worshippers to ring the bell online without waiting in line—a nationwide pioneer in worshipper care.

Without hesitation, Ouyang Rong downloaded the app and turned to leave immediately. Postgraduate candidates had precious time.

On the way back, he studied the app and quickly understood its functions.

Inside the Merit Tower app, there was mainly an electronic wooden fish and a Blessing Bell.

The wooden fish could be tapped manually, each tap adding one merit point, with a friendly counter above.

The crucial Blessing Bell required accumulating 10,000 merit points before it could be rung once.

The devilish part was the app’s built-in background music of the Great Compassion Mantra, which couldn’t be turned off…

“Tap the electronic wooden fish, accumulate cyber merit, gain mechanical blessings, ascend to the Pure Land, and see the Mecha Buddha, right? This I know well,” Ouyang Rong said confidently.

The app also had a “Limited-Time Donation for Merit” option in the lower right, which Ouyang Rong ignored, thinking maybe next time… or maybe never.

Without spending money, the devotee had to grind hard. Though his vocabulary memorization stalled at the word ‘abandon,’ his hands-on tinkering skills had been top-notch since childhood.

As a kid, if given a straight stick, he’d clear all waist-high plants within ten miles; passing dogs would get whacked twice; with a string, no tadpoles could survive in the pond.

That night, Ouyang Rong crafted a physical auto-clicker from a motor, gears, chopsticks, and rubber bands, placed it and his phone on the bedside table to grind merit points, while he relaxed and listened to the Great Compassion Mantra as he slept.

The next day, he got banned.

“…” Couldn’t handle it?

Ouyang Rong never expected this little outsourced app to have anti-cheating measures.

The next morning, indignant, he went back to Eastern Forest Temple to argue—well, actually to feign innocence and see if he could get unbanned.

At the temple, the long line was as usual, so he bypassed it and climbed the mountain, hoping to find another way in.

Halfway up, a group member from the righteous study group posted a picture of Hao Ran’s upright spirit.

Posting it broad daylight? Ouyang Rong double-tapped to zoom, and in that moment of distraction, he missed a step, slipped, and blacked out…

…

Ouyang Rong, now standing on the lotus pedestal, wiped rainwater from his face.

Judging by his last memories, he must have slipped into an uncovered well in the temple.

Strangely, when he regained consciousness, he was lying back on the cold, hard lotus pedestal.

His phone and down jacket were gone, nowhere to be found in the chamber. Instead, he wore an unfamiliar white robe.

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A white bandage wrapped around his forehead like a headband, covering a sizable bruise that still throbbed.

Fortunately, only his forehead was injured, not his face.

Though the chamber was pitch black with no mirror, he roughly touched his face and was confident it was still his own—unless he had been reborn as Hu Ge or Edison Chen.

Without this solid evidence, he might have almost believed the monk’s and Taoist’s nonsense.

Not dwelling on the strange clothes, he hesitated briefly in the rain, then resumed throwing.

He changed direction twice mid-throw.

Finally!

On the tenth throw, the golden lotus lamp thrown into the hole did not slide back. A steady resistance climbed up the rope, rubbing his raw hand.

His face brightened. He wiped his face hard, spat out some muddy water, and began climbing the rope with no regard to dignity.

Behind him, the gaunt monk, the cloaked Taoist, and the slender girl watched him intently.

About ten meters high, he crawled like a little worm scaling a wall, jerking upward.

His posture was somewhat ungainly, and with all eyes upon him, he felt a flush of embarrassment—especially in front of the Hanfu girl.

But life was more important than looks. He could worry about that once he was on solid ground.

Soon, Ouyang Rong had climbed more than halfway. He could almost reach the rocks around the well opening, and suddenly smelled familiar sandalwood incense.

He was indeed still in the temple! He breathed a sigh of relief.

At that moment, he noticed the half-hidden moon above trembling.

The moon shivering? That was his first thought in those initial seconds.

But soon he realized it wasn’t the moon.

It was the entire underground chamber—and himself—trembling.

Startled, Ouyang Rong clutched the rope tightly.

The rain’s sound above him suddenly intensified, the wind grew fiercer, and the rain changed from falling vertically to slanting sideways.

Then came the sound of water outside—not the rhythmic rise and fall of ocean waves, but like a roaring train approaching from afar.

It seemed to come from the horizon, sweeping away everything—birds, beasts, mountains, forests—in its path, shaking the entire world.

Ouyang Rong finally understood the true meaning of “earthquakes and shaking mountains” and “the sky’s color changing.”

Unfortunately, it came at the cost of a hard fall.

The golden lotus lamp he had thrown slipped loose and fell back down, dragging the momentarily deafened Ouyang Rong back to reality…

How long passed, he didn’t know. The sudden chaos settled once more.

The sideways rain returned to falling straight down.

Ouyang Rong sat on the cold stone floor, soaked.

Beside him lay a broken half of the lotus lamp; the other half had flown to a corner, spilling colorful beads across the ground.

His upper body still clutched the rope tightly, eyes dazedly fixed on the round hole resembling a manhole cover.

Near the opening, he had heard not only roaring floods and howling winds but faint wails of many people.

Outside was a great flood, at least a raging mountain torrent hundreds of miles wide—possibly even a flood like the biblical deluge of Jehovah.

Weak individuals were nothing before such power… postgraduate exams didn’t matter either.

After a long silence,

“Hey, what did you just say?”

Ouyang Rong suddenly spoke without turning around.

Not far behind him, the gaunt monk, face still calm, again raised a hand pointing to the ground and the other to the sky.

“Benefactor, this place is the Lotus Pure Land; above is the endless hell!”

Ouyang Rong hesitated.

Actually, he wanted to ask about the phrase “torrents without drowning in the mountains and fields… evil winds destroying all things,” but… never mind.

The materialist postgraduate candidate turned with a serious expression and sincerely asked, “May I ask your name, venerable monk?”

“…”

The gaunt monk.

“…”

The cloaked Taoist.

“…”

The slender girl.