Wu Gou looked down at his hands.
They were a pair of rough hands, covered in calluses and cracks, with dirt packed under the fingernails.
He wore tattered hemp clothes and straw sandals on his feet, his toes poking through the worn-out weave.
This was Taotie’s body when he was still alive.
Wu Gou accepted this identity with equanimity.
“Daniu! Daniu!”
A woman’s shout came from the distance, her voice hoarse and laced with a sob.
Wu Gou turned his head and saw a woman, so thin she was barely recognizable, running toward him.
Her eyes were sunken, her cheekbones jutted out sharply, and her lips were cracked and bleeding. She clutched a child in her arms, one who was equally gaunt.
“Daniu, Mother isn’t going to make it. Hurry back and see her!”
Wu Gou’s feet moved of their own accord, following the woman toward a low, cramped shack.
Inside the shack, an old woman lay on the ground, covered by a tattered cotton quilt.
Her face was so emaciated it was just a layer of skin stretched over bone. Her eyes were half-closed, and her breathing was so faint it was nearly silent.
“Mother, Mother, wake up! Daniu is back!” the woman cried, kneeling beside the old woman.
The old woman’s eyelids fluttered, and she managed to open a thin slit, looking toward Wu Gou.
“Daniu...”
Her voice was as faint as a mosquito’s buzz.
Wu Gou crouched down and took the old woman’s hand.
It was ice-cold and felt like a handful of withered twigs.
“Mother,” Wu Gou heard himself speak. The voice was Taotie’s—deep, raspy, and trembling with a sob.
“Daniu, I’m at my end... You... you must take care of Xiao Hua and your wife...”
After saying this, the old woman’s eyes closed.
Her hand slipped from Wu Gou’s palm and fell limp to the ground.
“Mother—!”
The woman’s wailing was heart-wrenching.
Wu Gou knelt on the ground, staring at the old woman’s distorted, skeletal face. A sense of profound sorrow that was difficult to put into words surged within his heart.
He knew this was only Taotie’s memory, but the feelings were real.
The hunger, the despair, the agony of watching a loved one die while being utterly powerless to help.
Then came the daughter.
A three-year-old girl, thin as a kitten, lay in the woman’s arms. She didn’t even have the strength to cry out loud anymore.
She simply stared with her large eyes at Wu Gou, her lips moving slightly as she whispered, “Daddy.”
And then, there was no more sound.
Clutching her daughter’s corpse, the woman wept until she lost consciousness.
And then, it was the woman’s turn.
She died on the third morning.
When she passed, she was still clutching half a piece of tree bark in her hand—perhaps something she had saved, wanting to leave it for Wu Gou.
Wu Gou knelt before the three bodies, his tears already run dry.
He didn’t know how he had survived those days. He only knew that when that group of people pinned him to the ground, he didn’t resist.
The moment the stone knife sliced his throat, he even felt a sense of relief.
He finally didn't have to suffer anymore.
His soul drifted up from his corpse, floating in mid-air. He looked down as his body was shared and eaten by his former neighbors, then watched as his wife and daughter were dug up from their graves. Then, his soul began to change.
He became a man-eating evil ghost.
Every image before him carried a suffocating emotion: despair, rage, resentment, and a hunger that reached deep into his marrow.
Those emotions surged like a tide, threatening to drown him.
Wu Gou realized that the evil spirit Taotie seemed to be trying to use these memories to infect him with malice, to assimilate him into a man-eating evil ghost as well.
Taotie’s malicious voice echoed in his mind.
“Do you feel it?”
“This is my pain.”
“I experience this every day and every night, over and over again. it never stops.”
“Can you feel it?”
“Can you understand?”
“If you could understand, you would know that it is only natural for me to eat people.”
“The world ate me, so I eat the world.”
“It is only fair.”
Wu Gou smiled slightly but did not answer. He simply stood quietly in that darkness, letting those emotions wash over his soul.
Anger, despair, hunger—as the various emotions surged, he remained motionless like a reef, letting the waves crash against him.
His name was Wu Gou, meaning ‘without stain.’ He was originally the purest wisp of a split soul peeled away from Ksitigarbha of Great Vows. He was untainted, unclouded, and flawless. With a Linglong Buddhist heart that was exquisite and translucent, how could he be stained by the myriad greeds, angers, and attachments of the secular world?
Bodhi is not a tree, nor is the bright mirror a stand. Originally, not a single thing exists; where can dust alight?
However, letting his soul be continuously washed by malicious emotions was not a long-term solution. Wu Gou acted decisively, shedding his human-skin cassock in a “Golden Cicada Shedding its Shell” maneuver, breaking free from Taotie’s grasp.
A thin layer of human skin remained where he had been. Wu Gou, now drenched in blood and raw flesh, watched as the scene before him shattered.
Suddenly, a colossal figure stood before Wu Gou.
It was a twisted, hideous mass of a monster cobbled together from countless human faces.
Every face was contorting, screaming, and weeping.
They were the villagers he had swallowed, the innocents he had killed during the famine.
Their resentment had not dissipated; instead, it had fused with his own, transforming into this monster.
At the very center of the monster was Taotie’s own face. It was covered in tear tracks, but his eyes were red as blood, and his mouth hung wide open, revealing two rows of razor-sharp teeth.
Taotie’s malice roared and screamed.
“Why aren’t you moving?”
“Why do you have no reaction?”
“Can you not feel it?”
“Are you faking it?”
“How did you break free? How can you remain indifferent! You have already been eaten! How can you not hate!”
Wu Gou bared his bright white teeth. On a face now devoid of skin, the smile looked exceptionally gruesome.
“I am not faking. This monk felt it.”
“Then why—!”
“Because this monk knows that is not you.”
Wu Gou’s voice was very calm, as steady as a pool of still water.
“That is your pain, not your essence.”
“You were once a kind soul, a poor man who would rather starve to death than steal or rob. Before you were eaten, you were even thinking that you finally didn't have to suffer anymore.”
“You are not an evil ghost.”
Taotie’s malice laughed in fury, his laughter even more crazed and hysterical than before.
“Hahahaha!”
“You think you understand me?”
“You think a few words can deliver me?”
“What do you think you are?!”
Wu Gou sighed.
“This monk is nothing special.”
“This monk is just someone like you—someone who has been eaten.”
The malicious Taotie’s laughter came to an abrupt halt.
“What did you say?”
Wu Gou closed his eyes and began to chant a scripture. The sound of the mantra echoed in the darkness, each word radiating a golden light.
The light grew brighter and more intense, like a sun rising in the dark.
The malicious Taotie felt an unprecedented fear.
“You... what are you doing?!”
“Stop!”
“I told you to stop!”
Wu Gou opened his eyes. He raised his right hand, fingers spread wide.
Golden light erupted from his palm, transforming into a pillar of light that shot toward the heavens.
Taotie’s malicious body began to tremble, cracking from the inside. Golden light spilled from the fissures like an egg about to hatch.
“No—!”
With a wretched scream, the malicious Taotie’s body violently exploded.
Wu Gou stepped out from the fragments, his entire body enveloped in golden Buddhist light.
Beneath his feet was a lotus platform composed of hundreds and thousands of human hands. Some hands were thick, some were slender, and some were mangled and incomplete.
Wu Gou sat down cross-legged upon that lotus platform.
The lotus platform of human hands carried him as it slowly rose.
On his back, his flesh naturally split open like a blooming lotus flower.
From within the petals, an umbilical-cord-like muscle tissue extended outward.
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