From what he had learned by asking around, Shi Jingang turned out to be an interesting man. He had never been a monk to begin with, and he didn't have a dime's worth of connection to Shaolin Temple.

He used to be an unsigned singer. He sang well, and he had been on several singing-competition shows.

He had a girlfriend. Not a doll — a real one.

She died in the apocalypse, and in his grief and fury Shi Jingang shaved his head, went to a stretch of ruined temple wall, and announced that he was taking vows. But he had already become an iron person by then, his carrier vehicle being the Audi he used to run as an unlicensed cab. An iron person is strong enough, after all, and little by little a good many survivors came and attached themselves to him.

Later the Provisional Government was founded, and its army, built around the Central Theater Command, ranged everywhere wiping out evolved beasts and rescuing survivors. The people under Shi Jingang's protection were found along with the rest, and monk or not, he was taken into the Provisional Government and made captain of a Patrol Brigade.

He lasted less than a month before he was relieved of the post. The reason was simple enough: the fellow took people off and built a temple, spent all day reciting from a copy of the Diamond Sutra he had scavenged from somewhere (TL Note: the Chinese title of this sutra is where his dharma name comes from), and grew a following out of it.

The world had ended and people were frightened. The Provisional Government knew better than to let a religion run loose.

So they banned it.

And since Shi Jingang was after all a powerful iron person, and a carrier vehicle had endless uses, the Provisional Government chose to make a big matter small and a small matter nothing, and let him off that once.

Unfortunately, Shi Jingang had tasted how sweet it was to gather believers. He went on gathering them in secret, and in order to bind…