Chapter 317: Why Provoke Anyone Else, When You Could Provoke Those Four Fierce Gods?

Tang An and her three disciples heard the commotion outside, but not a single one of them came out.

Listening to them howling like ghosts and wolves, she didn't find it noisy at all; instead, she felt quite delighted.

It wasn't until they had all screamed until their throats were raw, with some even fainting from fright, that Tang An and the others finally opened the door.

"Hehehe~" Sun Wukong hopped out to watch the fun. "Master, they've scared themselves silly; they've wet their pants."

Tang An looked down, and indeed, the lower garments of most of them were stained wet.

"You were shouting quite happily during the day; I thought you were all bold fellows. I didn't expect you to be such cowards who wet their pants."

As soon as Bai Wuchang saw Tang An and the others, they immediately spoke up, ordering the many ghosts to float together, line up neatly in two rows, and bow to pay their respects to the four of them.

"The little ones pay respects to the Destined One, the Great Sage, True Lord Erlang, and the Third Prince."

Just kidding—those monks dared to be disrespectful only because they were ignorant of life and death.

But as for Bai Wuchang, how could they ever dare to provoke these few great deities?

Tang An glanced at Yang Jian, and Yang Jian cast a spell, drawing water from the pond to splash the monks awake.

She then glanced at Wukong, and Wukong went to the front courtyard to drag the Abbot and that one-armed monk over.

As for the Golden-Nosed White-Haired Mouse, she had been competing for favor with Jiuyue all day.

One wanted to take care of her idol, the other wanted to take care of her sister; neither of them cared in the slightest about the life or death of the monks in the temple.

Once the group of monks had been brought over, Tang An let Bai Wuchang bring up the four ghosts.

Upon seeing Tang An and her three disciples, the four ghosts kowtowed without a care for anything else, begging Tang An and the others to save them, saying that saving a life is more meritorious than building a seven-story pagoda.

Why did they beg Tang An and the others? Naturally, because they had already heard the identities of these few from Bai Wuchang along the way.

It was no exaggeration at all; their perfectly fine souls had nearly been scared out of their wits.

After all, they had committed a violation of the vow of celibacy almost right in front of those three heavenly deities, and then died of poisoning.

The female demon they had set their sights on was, fortunately, not the Destined One that Bai Wuchang spoke of. If they had dared to harbor designs on that Destined One, they truly dared not imagine what the consequences would have been.

"Saving a life is more meritorious than building a seven-story pagoda?"

"But saving the life of a beast brings no Merit."

Tang An had the four of them explain the whole story in front of all the monks in the temple.

If they didn't speak, or if they concealed, covered up, or lied, then Bai Wuchang would take them away to be cast into Wujian Diyu, never to be reincarnated for all eternity.

The monks finally understood what kind of masters they had offended. They didn't even dare to take a deep breath, kneeling on the ground and trying their best to be invisible.

Especially those who had previously clashed with Tang An and her disciples in speech and cursed them as demons—at this moment, they regretted it so deeply it felt as if their very guts and organs had turned green.

They kowtowed and begged for mercy incessantly, whether it was the four ghosts or the courtyard full of monks. They were all afraid of being caught in the crossfire of the great deities' anger, losing their lives, and ending up in Wujian Diyu, never to be reincarnated.

"What? When you thought we were demons, you said demons were born to be evil. But when you were told they were evil, you were not only unafraid, but dared to meet them with malice, evil words, and evil deeds."

"You weren't afraid that a Princess of Great Tang would destroy the temple; because the Emperor is far away, you harbored wishful thinking, and thus dared to repeatedly contradict me."

"Now that you know our identities, you finally know fear. But what you fear is not us; you fear the pressure of true power and Divine Power."

"Because you know perfectly well in your hearts that even if we do nothing, a single word from us could plunge you into a state of eternal damnation."

"In short, so-called monks are nothing more than petty people who bully the weak."

"The followers of Rulai are truly just like him." Tang An had originally wanted to play with them a bit more, but at this moment, she felt disgusted and weary.

Seeing the faces of such people for too long is truly nauseating.

"Princess..." The Abbot wanted to speak, but was frightened into silence by the look Tang An gave him.

Tang An then looked at the four ghosts. "Speak."

The four ghosts were so scared that they immediately recounted the whole story from beginning to end.

It turned out that all these monks had taken a fancy to the peerless beauty of the Golden-Nosed White-Haired Mouse, exchanged glances, put their heads together, and came up with a plan.

First, one went to deliver tea that had been drugged.

The ones who went afterward, no matter what excuse they used, had the same self-evident goal.

But they didn't expect that the female Bodhisattva they thought they had found was actually a female demon.

Therefore, they suffered at the hands of the Golden-Nosed White-Haired Mouse and were thrown into the back courtyard.

It was the season for venomous snakes to emerge; they had fallen unconscious in the back courtyard, were bitten by venomous snakes, and subsequently died from the poison.

The only monk who luckily survived did so because he happened to be carrying snake-repellent medicine on him, which allowed him to escape the disaster.

After hearing the story, Tang An looked at the Abbot and the other monks.

"Now, do you understand?"

"We understand, we understand." The monks nodded in succession, not daring to look directly at Tang An again.

"Very well, since this matter has been clarified and Banjie Guanyin has not been harmed, it shall be considered settled for now."

The monks were all overjoyed; thank goodness, thank goodness they hadn't been implicated.

"However..."

Tang An's "however" made the atmosphere heavy once again, and everyone fell silent.

"You monks, how many young women have you harmed in total?" Tang An's face wore a smile, but her eyes were filled with coldness.

The crowd looked at each other; some were confused, others were terrified and uneasy.

"I do not believe that Banjie Guanyin was the first."

"And I firmly believe that if we let this matter go, she will not be the last."

"Like this." Tang An looked at Bai Wuchang. "You deal with minor ghosts all year round; you know how to make people feel fear."

"The two of you shall interrogate all the monks in the courtyard one by one. If anyone is stubborn and refuses to cooperate, regardless of whether they have committed crimes or not, you may directly hook their souls to the Underworld to suffer the torments of the Eighteen Levels of Hell."

Tang An said this to Bai Wuchang, but even more so to the monks.

"Yes!"

Bai Wuchang accepted the order and began to interrogate them one by one.

In about an hour and a half, the interrogation of all the monks was completed.

The individual testimonies were delivered before Tang An.

As Tang An looked at those testimonies, her blood pressure inevitably soared, and her chest heaved with anger.

"Bam!"

She slammed the table, and the few monks brought by Bai Wuchang were all so frightened that they knelt on the ground.

Yang Jian and Sun Wukong each took half of the testimonies to read, and their expressions were clearly very ugly as well.

"You keep saying that demonic nature is inherently evil, yet the things you have done are truly worse than those of beasts."

Yang Jian was the Judicial God, in charge of the order of the Heavenly Law. If these people were even immortals, he would have a hundred ways to punish them, making them unable to seek life or death.

Wukong hissed in anger, swinging the Golden Cudgel as he wanted to beat them to death.

"Wukong." Tang An spoke up to stop Sun Wukong; was it because her benevolence had flared up?

No, it was because Tang An felt that letting them die quickly would be letting them off too easily.

What exactly happened to make the master and his disciples so furious?

That would have to be the testimonies mentioning the women they had defiled in the name of worshipping Buddha.

No, it was not just women; there were even, even... seven or eight-year-old children!

After realizing they had lost their purity, some of the women hanged themselves, some jumped into rivers, and some were drowned in pig cages by their husbands' families.

Those girls were still so ignorant that they did not even know what they had experienced. Even those who did know were likely powerless to resist and afraid to tell the adults.

Tang An found it truly hard to imagine what kind of terrifying shadows those defiled girls and women had endured.

But Tang An knew that those violent monks all deserved to be tortured to death!