In fact, according to William Smith himself, he just found a place to work at Huayan Temple. When he arrived, his master was already nearly ninety years old. Every day, his work consisted of carrying water, chopping firewood, washing clothes, and cooking. When he had free time, he would chant sutras and meditate, practice breathing exercises and martial arts. He didn’t learn much academically—just enough to recite the Diamond Sutra fluently. He only learned a few sets of martial arts, practicing the most basic Arhat Fist for ten years straight. Over those ten years, William Smith, who was once thought unlikely to survive, grew up strong and robust. He officially became a registered disciple of Master Kongxing, with the Dharma name Wuming. The trouble started precisely because he became a disciple. After Master Kongxing passed away at the age of 102, it was only from the words of those who came from all over to pay their respects that William Smith realized his master was actually a Shaolin-born Buddhist authority. As a registered disciple, his seniority was much higher than the other monks in the temple. Later, Huayan Temple was designated a national first-class cultural relic protection site. The once neglected temple, with its ancient lamps and Buddhas, became a lucrative place thanks to the booming tourism and incense offerings. The original monks each had their own roles, the abbot was appointed by the Buddhist Association, and as an undocumented outsider, William Smith couldn’t get his household registration sorted out. The old monk didn’t clarify his monk registration before dying either. After a fight with the new abbot, William Smith was finally driven out of the temple by the monks who had long been plotting against him.

Twelve years later, after returning to secular life, William Smith came home wearing straw sandals and a kasaya, only to find that everything had changed. His father, who had herded sheep on the mountain all his life, had died there; his mother had remarried and run off with a carpenter somewhere. His two older sisters had long since married and moved away, and the two old mud-brick rooms that were once their home had become the village cowshed. With nowhere to go, William Smith shamelessly stayed at the village chief’s house and refused to leave, forcing the chief to send him to the township as a militia member. Soon after, there was a military draft. That year, word was they were going to the northwest, but there were very few volunteers from the county. The village chief forged a household registration for William Smith and coaxed him into lying about his age to enlist, saying it was a way to get a secure job. So, less than three months after leaving the mountain, William Smith transformed from a young monk into a soldier of the People’s Liberation Army.

Once in the army, the advantages of William Smith's years as a monk gradually became apparent. When standing at attention, he was the only one who never collapsed during training. On his first five-kilometer armed cross-country run, he set a company record. Compared to ten years of chopping wood and carrying water in the mountains, five or ten kilograms of weight in a cross-country run was child’s play for him. In later hand-to-hand combat training, William Smith further discovered the profound depth of Buddhist martial arts. With just the simple Arhat Fist, he managed to beat the instructor, who had been a soldier for over a decade, without giving him a chance to fight back. Because of this, William Smith was selected for the newly formed special forces unit in the military region. Despite his young age, William Smith thrived in the army, even being wounded four times during missions and becoming a first-class hero in the Lanzhou Military Region. But, as the saying goes, joy begets sorrow. Restless by nature, William Smith's favorite pastime was driving the special forces’ off-road vehicle across the grasslands and hunting. After all, missions were rare, and most of the time was spent idle. One time, after drinking too much, William Smith took the car out on the grasslands again. Coincidentally, the army was conducting a simulated confrontation between two forces. Drunk and disoriented, William Smith crashed a Red Army communications command vehicle worth over a million yuan, flipping it over completely, and was caught red-handed by the military police. Still drunk, William Smith didn’t even recognize who the police were and ended up beating five or six of them to the ground. The incident went straight to military headquarters. Before he even sobered up, William Smith was thrown into a military prison in a closed van. The regiment tried to protect him but couldn’t. In prison, William Smith was expelled from the army and sentenced to two years for destroying public property. Later, William Smith learned that this was only because the regiment had intervened; with his crime and status, he was lucky not to be sent to a secret prison. A year later, due to meritorious behavior, William Smith was released early. At that time, William Smith really didn’t want to leave—the prison provided food and shelter, and the living conditions were actually quite good. He even had a bunch of “big brothers”—murderers, arsonists, thieves, drug dealers—telling him stories from all over the country, which was eye-opening for someone as inexperienced as William Smith. After his sentence ended, William Smith still lingered in the prison for over a month, refusing to leave. Eventually, the warden got fed up and said, “If you don’t leave, I’m going to start charging you for meals!” and forcibly kicked William Smith out, even getting extorted for two hundred yuan in travel expenses on the way out.

When William Smith returned to Yangjiawan again, he found that in just a few years, all the villagers had moved out of the mountains. The place had become a forest reserve. He had no home, no family, and even his dream of returning to herd sheep was shattered.

……

A little over a year ago, with nowhere else to go, William Smith came to Fengcheng. Here, he tried to find a job—or more precisely, a way to make a living. But as William Smith put it, in the city, there were more college graduates than prostitutes, and jobs were harder to find than virgins. Someone like William Smith, whose education and physical fitness were on par with a migrant worker, couldn’t even get his household registration sorted out, and in the end, even lost the qualifications to be a laborer.