The Nunnery of Rot

“Hah… hah…” Drenched in sweat, Li Huowang braced his hands on his knees, gasping for air.

He had been climbing for two whole hours now, and still hadn’t reached the top.

This nunnery was far higher than he had imagined.

He lifted his head with effort and saw that the winding dirt path seemed to stretch on forever, leading ever upward.

Gritting his teeth, Li Huowang grabbed hold of a vine by the roadside and continued his ascent.

By the time his legs ached so badly he could barely stand, he finally saw the mountain gate of Anci Nunnery.

He wiped the sweat off his chin with the back of his hand and instinctively looked up at the couplets flanking the gate.

But to his great surprise, he couldn’t understand them at all.

It wasn’t that Danyangzi had caused him to forget how the characters were read. The problem was that the characters themselves were bizarrely shaped.

Their forms were long and rhomboid, like stacked lozenge-shapes—slanting high on the right, low on the left. The script was elongated and oblique. At first glance, it resembled oracle bone script, yet many of the strokes felt strangely familiar.

“Is this… writing? Or something else?” Puzzled, Li Huowang walked over and touched the carvings.

After scrutinizing them for a long moment, he lifted his foot and stepped through the gate.

But once he was inside, the words he had prepared in his mind found no target.

The overgrown courtyard in front of him was utterly empty. Not a single person in sight. It was a stark contrast to the crowded, bustling scene at Zhengde Temple.

“Anybody here?” His voice echoed across the yard.

Still no one appeared.

Looking left and right, he headed for the main hall. No incense smoke rose inside it, yet it wasn’t dark—the roof was badly damaged, and slanted sunlight poured in through the gaps, illuminating everything.

The bodhisattva statue at the center of the hall was coated in dust and draped in cobwebs.

If it weren’t for the lotus pedestal beneath it, Li Huowang might not even have recognized it as a bodhisattva.

“Did I get the wrong place? This nunnery looks completely abandoned.”

Just as he was thinking this, a faint snoring sound caught his attention.

Following the noise, he gradually rounded the statue. Behind it, he saw a large, heaving ball of flesh.

Drawing closer, he realized it wasn’t a ball of flesh—it was the bare belly of a fat nun, exposed beneath her robes.

There she lay, flat on the cold ground, snoring with her mouth open. A sour, rancid stench assaulted his nose.

Black robes. Obese. Filthy. Every checkmark pointed to one conclusion: this was a nun of Anci Nunnery.

Frowning slightly, Li Huowang studied the woman Li Zhi had called a “good person.” Whether or not she was good wasn’t clear yet, but judging by her current state, even a bad person wouldn’t want to get too close.

“Reverend Sister. Xuanyang of Qingfeng Temple requests an audience on urgent business,” Li Huowang said, raising his voice and offering a Daoist salute to the mound of flesh.

The fat nun’s snoring showed no sign of stopping. She hadn’t woken up at all.

“Is she pretending?”

He stepped forward and raised his voice even higher. “Reverend Sister! Xuanyang of Qingfeng Temple requests an audience on urgent business!!”

Still no reaction.

He was about to lean in and shout directly into her ear when he was driven back by the overwhelming stench emanating from her body.

It was a putrid, fermented blend of dirty socks, durian, and stale sweat—so intense that even he couldn’t take it.

Before he could think of another approach, the fat nun shivered and sat up abruptly on her own.

Rubbing yellow crust from her eyes with thick, stubby fingers, she staggered toward a side door without even opening her eyes. “Ah, time to eat. Time to eat.”

“Reverend Sister. Xuanyang of Qingfeng Temple requests an audience on urgent business!”

This time, she finally noticed him. Startled, she jolted, causing her three layers of greasy chins to quiver.

“You scared me to death! What’s wrong with you, creeping around like that?”

Li Huowang stood still, his expression twisted. He had stopped worrying about whether these people might be plotting against him. Now he was starting to wonder if the nuns here could even deal with Danyangzi at all.

“Worship the Buddha and burn your own incense! Don’t bother me while I’m eating!” The fat nun’s voice was cold and dismissive. Then she turned and waddled further inside on legs like elephant trunks.

Li Huowang said nothing more. He simply followed her.

The nunnery was large, but it was also dilapidated. If the main hall’s bodhisattva was in bad shape, the statues in the side halls were even worse.

Some of the doorways still had writing on them, but the characters looked exactly like the ones on the gate.

“Reverend Sister, what kind of script is this?” Li Huowang asked.

“Nüshu. Of course you don’t understand it. It’s a script passed down to women only, not men.”

Though she answered the question, the nun was clearly impatient and pressed on without slowing down.

Watching the increasingly unfamiliar surroundings, Li Huowang followed without hesitation. Everything here felt real. There was none of that strange hospital-like feeling.

Maybe it was because he had eaten too much Black Tai Sui, or because he had been trapped in hallucinations for so long, but other false perceptions hardly affected him anymore. Even if they did, he could tell them apart easily.

After winding through the compound for a while, Li Huowang followed the fat nun to a mud-walled house with a chimney.

The sound of movement inside confirmed there were other people in there. The thick, cloying stench pouring out was enough to tell him they were all nuns.

Watching the fat nun charge in with gleaming eyes, Li Huowang frowned deeply, took a deep breath, pinched his nose shut, and pushed through the stinging odor to enter as well.

As soon as he stepped inside, the sounds of smacking, swallowing, and chewing assaulted his ears.

For a moment, Li Huowang thought he had walked into a pigpen.

A group of black-robed, fat nuns were crowded around a big iron pot, eating noisily with their hands. They didn’t even use chopsticks or bowls—just scooped it up with their fingers and shoved it into their mouths.

They ate with such relish that they didn’t even react to Li Huowang standing there.

As for what they were eating, Li Huowang could barely make out a kind of oily fried rice with vegetable leaves mixed in.

His face red from holding his breath, he opened his mouth to suck in air and felt the stench burn his throat.

That finally drew someone’s attention. A nun who had finished eating pulled her finger out of her mouth and gestured for Li Huowang to take her spot.

“Want some vegetarian food? Two hundred coppers a head.”

Hearing that she wanted money, instead of being annoyed, Li Huowang was secretly pleased. “No, thank you. But I do have a matter I’d like the reverend sister’s help with.” He tossed a gold bean over.

“Gold!” The fat nun eagerly stuffed the gold beans into her mouth, chewed them with her yellow teeth to confirm they were real, then mixed them with saliva and bits of vegetable leaves and spat them back into her palm.

“Are you here to buy pigs? How many? Speak up! Our nunnery raises the fattest pigs.”

As the nun leaned in, Li Huowang stepped back slightly.

“No. I’ve heard that the reverend sisters of Anci Nunnery are profoundly skilled. So I came here to seek your help in removing a malevolent spirit.”

“Hahaha!~ Aren’t you a Daoist priest yourself? You’re asking a nun to help you exorcise evil spirits? HAHAHAHA!~”

As if laughter were contagious, the other nuns in the room joined in. By the end, even Li Huowang couldn’t help himself.

“HAHAHAHA!~”