The pot of rice soup made from rice, coconut, and bitter herbs was completely devoured by the people who rushed over upon hearing the news. Some said that after drinking it, they felt refreshed and all their ailments disappeared. Others thought the rice soup tasted like honey, while still others found it bitter and hard to swallow.
The three Ding brothers were greedy and drank a lot of the rice soup with bitter grass juice added. After returning home, they couldn't eat anything for days on end. Meat tasted bitter, bread tasted bitter, and even drinking a sip of well water made them vomit bile.
The three brothers sought help from gods and Buddhas everywhere, but to no avail.
It is said that "having connections in the imperial court makes things easier." The two little demons, Zhaolang and Nongchao, contacted the City God and the Earth God of Qiantang and explained the situation. After that, no one paid any more attention to this trivial matter.
Xu Milu only gave them a minor punishment as a warning and did not interfere too much with the order of the mortal world.
The three brothers suffered greatly, and by the end of May, they had lost a lot of weight. They went to their mother's house to beg for forgiveness, but Granny Wang avoided them and kept quiet, using the braised large intestine recipe she had learned from Xu Milu to start a small business at the dock.
Qiantang was already a bustling city with countless fleets of boats coming and going. The braised large intestines that the mother and daughter sold at the dock tasted good and were cheap. Many men who did hard labor were willing to spend a penny to buy half a piece to take home and taste the meat. As a result, their small business gradually became popular.
The mother and daughter were deeply grateful and held the "Lady Xu" from Chang'an in even higher esteem upon returning home. The "glass cup" that Ding Si Niang mistakenly thought she had obtained in a dream was also enshrined in their home.
Granny Wang would often offer a stick of incense, and gradually, "Madam Xu" gained some fame in the Dingjia Village area.
It was only because Granny Wang became famous for selling braised pig intestines that people began to whisper among themselves that Granny Wang had encountered a fairy that day. She had met a little fairy who raised pigs for the Jade Emperor in heaven, otherwise how could she have the method to turn that smelly pig offal into fragrant meat?
—But that's all in the future. Everyone has their own destiny, so I won't go into details here.
Xu Milu's guess was correct. The small stone statue in the deep mountains was erected by Zhu, the wife of the yamen runner she had helped. After the small temple was built, she worshipped there a few times, but later even Zhu herself forgot that there was such a stone temple.
The stone temple stood deep in the mountains, making it easy for wandering ghosts and spirits to mistake it for a place of evil worship. So Xu Milu simply entered Zhu's dream and told her to find an excuse to demolish the temple.
It's not wrong for other cultivators to build temples, but for her, an "unregistered person" not on the Book of Life and Death in the underworld, building a temple is a bit too much.
If she attracts the attention of some powerful being, she might get into trouble—in modern terms, it would be like an alien illegally occupying a civil servant position on Earth.
Who would be willing to do that?
...
...
"Hahahahahahahaha..."
The altar-cleansing messenger, dressed in a monk's robe, was laughing heartily, his dark, muscular face beaming with undisguised joy.
"Before your master caused trouble in the Heavenly Palace, the Jade Emperor misjudged people and appointed him as a horse-herding boy. When I was traveling west with him, we quarreled and started calling him '弼马温' (Bima Wen, a lowly official in charge of horses). He always threw tantrums and annoyed me. Now it's said that you are a little immortal who raises pigs in the Heavenly Court—hahahaha, what a great Sage Equal to Heaven! What a little phoenix!—oh dear, oh dear..."
At least her master bestowed upon her the title of "Great Sage Equal to Heaven," so how did it become a pig farm for her?
Xu Milu gritted her teeth, but she couldn't explain to the people anymore, otherwise she would really be known as a "pig farmer".
Who knew that Pigsy would laugh so hard he almost fell over upon hearing this, jokingly saying that this was the fate between master and disciple.
He laughed for a while, then, catching his breath while cradling his large belly, he weakly wiped away the tears welling in his eyes and said:
"I dare not let your master, that monkey, know about this, otherwise he will definitely cause a scene. Although that monkey entered the Buddhist order with me and has been cultivating his mind and nature for the past two years, and his monkey temper has been somewhat restrained, if he finds out that I mentioned this to you, I'm afraid he will hit me with that golden cudgel!"
As soon as he finished speaking, three light "bang bang bang" sounds came from the air, as if someone had tapped him on the back of the head from a distance.
"Oh no, I forgot you still have that monkey's life-saving hair on you, and I also recited his name, so what I just said must have been heard by that monkey!"
"Can Master hear me and my uncle talking through this hair?"
Xu Milu touched the steel-hard hair on her wrist, unaware of what supernatural power Sun Wukong, thousands of miles away, had used to knock on the Clean Altar Messenger.
—But this ability to communicate remotely is probably far beyond her imagination.
"Hey! Heaven and earth are filled with gods and Buddhas. Anyone who has cultivated to a certain level can feel something when someone calls out the name of a god. You are wearing that monkey hair. I just recited 'Great Sage Equal to Heaven' several times. Even if the monkey doesn't know what I said, he can guess that I was talking about him!"
The Cleansing Altar Messenger shook his head, put down the seventeenth vegetarian cake in his hand, patted his belly contentedly, and then took out a completely black tree branch from his sleeve:
“I went to the Western Sea a few days ago and remembered that you were just learning how to ride the clouds. So I broke off a piece of the Migu Tree. Wearing the Migu Tree will prevent you from getting lost. In the future, you can just wear this branch on your body when you go out. Even if you go to the far north, you can find it.”
"The labyrinth tree?"
Xu Milu picked up the branch with some curiosity and examined it. The branch was completely black, even the core was the color of ink, and it looked just like a charred fire stick. But what was amazing was that there were two palm-sized tender green leaves growing at the branch's fork.
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