Horse Butcher

A rotten face without a single inch of intact skin came into Qin He's view.

If not for his build and clothes, Qin He would not have dared recognize him.

All the skin on his face was gone, replaced by black bumps the size of soybeans.

At first glance, it looked like the skin of a toad—horrifying to behold.

That morning, Xu Changshou had carried over a bucket of ashes and said they were what remained after Horse Butcher had been cremated.

In other words, Horse Butcher had not been killed by the corpse pouncing on him.

The cause of death was a mystery.

By the rules, Horse Butcher's body should have been handed over to the Flying Fish Guard. That had been where the corpse cart was headed that morning.

For some reason, it had turned around and come back.

The problem was obvious, and just as obviously, there would be no answer for the time being.

Qin He had always been the sort to think through what he could and set aside what he could not.

With two hundred Corpse Suppressing Nails in hand and his Shadowless Hand well-practiced, he would block soldiers with generals and dam water with earth.

Whatever it was, he would just fight it.

Dressed in mourning hemp and wearing a mourning cap, he first cleaned up Horse Butcher's corpse.

There was not much to clean up, really. The entire face had rotted away, so he could only make do by brushing it with lime to restore something resembling a normal "skin color," lest the underworld messengers fail to recognize the man when they came to claim his soul.

Once he had tidied it up, he carried the body to the furnace and recited a string of corpse words, whether useful or not: "Master, go on your road without worry; Rebirth in Paradise brings riches and honor. Do not blame the three fires for cleansing your body, lest the worms do you harm. This little craftsman dons hemp and cloth to change your clothes for the road. Lie well upon the Three Purities Platform, and do not let the hour pass beyond dawn."

He lit the fire, fed it coal, and pumped the bellows to burn the corpse.

"Ho, ho~~"

The moment the furnace fire rose, Horse Butcher suddenly opened his mouth, and a piercing shriek burst from his throat.

His eyes rolled back, revealing a pair of crimson blood-red pupils. Fangs split his mouth, and he sprang up to pounce.

Slap!

What greeted it was a lightning-fast slap.

Horse Butcher crashed heavily back down.

A Corpse Suppressing Nail pierced his brow.

Empowered by fifteen years of inner strength and ten years of Dao Xing, the inscriptions on the nail glowed red as it sank in, making black qi hiss from Horse Butcher's body.

Qin He's eyelids twitched wildly. Good heavens, this corpse was no ordinary fiend.

Fangs grew from its mouth, blades from its fingers.

The Corpse Suppressing Nail embedded in its brow was melting away and thinning at a rapid pace.

Without another word, the Shadowless Hand sprang into action. With a series of slap slap slap slap, he drove fifty Corpse Suppressing Nails into the fiend corpse before stopping.

During the wretched growth phase, caution came first.

One Corpse Suppressing Nail had been enough to restrain the fiend corpse. With fifty driven in, the body was completely unable to move.

The scarlet in its eyes slowly faded. Its sharp fanged mouth opened, releasing a puff of green Calamity Qi that drifted upward. The heat wave from the furnace fire struck it, and it dispersed into the air.

Calamity Qi was the final breath exhaled by a person before death. If grass or trees touched it, they would surely wither; if humans or livestock touched it, they would fall seriously ill at best and die at worst.

Once the Calamity Qi was expelled, it meant the person was truly dead.

Horse Butcher's corpse had undergone a fiendish transformation because this breath of Calamity Qi had remained lodged in his throat and caused trouble.

As for why, he could only wait for the Shadow Play Performance.

Everything proceeded step by step.

Two hours later, the fiend corpse had completely turned to charcoal.

A gray-white curtain descended. A wooden rod moved the shadow figures, performing Horse Butcher's life.

Horse Butcher was named Ma Wu. One could tell from the name alone that he had been born poor; he had not even been given a proper name.

His parents had been tenant farmers for a landlord. They had borne seven children in all: five sons and two daughters.

With so many mouths to feed, even in years of favorable wind and rain, they could barely raise them all—much less in Yu Region, where great floods and severe droughts had taken turns ravaging the land for nearly twenty years.

His two elder sisters had been sold off as servant girls, and two of his four elder brothers had starved to death.

All things considered, Horse Butcher had been slightly more fortunate. At a young age, he had been adopted by a childless relative to carry on that branch's incense.

That relative was a butcher, so Horse Butcher naturally became one as well.

He traveled from village to village, running east and west, barely managing to fill his belly. When he met more generous households, he could occasionally eat some offal. Life was much better than it had been with his original family.

And so Horse Butcher followed his adoptive father—that relative—in slaughtering pigs, and did so for more than ten years.

His adoptive father treated him fairly well too. Over those ten-odd years, he had pinched and saved money from between his teeth, built a tile-roofed house, and even found him a wife.

But like so many innocents in chaotic times, when the monstrous flood of turmoil swept across the earth, an individual's fate was like duckweed in a violent storm, overturned and destroyed in an instant.

Horse Butcher would never forget the night the rebel army passed through. A vast sea of torches dyed the sky crimson. They swarmed like locusts, and the people were like evil ghosts.

After one night, everything edible had been swept clean, and everything burnable had turned to ash.

The village was utterly destroyed. Like most others, Horse Butcher could only bring his adoptive father and wife along with the rebel army, swept aimlessly toward another land.

The journey was hard, hunger and cold pressing in from all sides. His adoptive father died of illness, and his wife was lost as well.

Horse Butcher even encountered his birth parents' family on the road, but like wisps of smoke over the wilderness, they were separated in the chaos of war in the blink of an eye.

In the end, the only thing left at Horse Butcher's side was the pig-slaughtering knife passed down through his adoptive father's family.

Before long, the rebel army was crushed in defeat by the Imperial Army, corpses strewn across the fields. Horse Butcher narrowly escaped with his life and followed some experienced refugees who had survived famine north along the Grand Canal, arriving at Tongzhou Wharf, the Capital City's grain depot.

After starving for several days in the Refugee Camp, Horse Butcher, like most Corpse Burners, had his bones examined by an official runner and came to this Corpse Burning Facility.

With a body full of Sha Qi and a pig-slaughtering knife that had killed countless beasts, Horse Butcher's days burning corpses went as smoothly as a fair wind. Even corpses that had clearly mutated could be subdued until they behaved obediently.

The half year at the Corpse Burning Facility had been, for Horse Butcher, like living the life only a landlord master could enjoy: a place to live, food to eat, and ample leisure time.

Yet the living earned by burning corpses ultimately had to be repaid with one's life. There had never been an exception.

The Shadow Play Performance reached last night. Horse Butcher had smoothly finished burning a corpse when he suddenly felt a chill down his back. Instinctively, he turned his head to look behind him.

He saw a handkerchief printed with a red Fanged Ghost Head.

The handkerchief abruptly covered his face. Countless rays of red light burst forth, a reeking stench filled the air, and after a wave of agonizing pain, the performance came to an abrupt end.

The Soul-Snatching Shadow Lamp captured the soul, Judgment Weighing weighed it. The Black Robed Man Zhang Jin Kou said: "Busy and bustling, gathering and parting, sorrow and joy—how many human tragedies and delights turn empty in the blink of an eye."

The ripples faded, and a skill book appeared in Qin He's mind: Flying Needle Technique.

Annotation: Flying needles pierce willows; every shot finds its mark.

As the skill was learned, his bones and muscles crackled. His mind filled with a vast amount of Flying Needle Technique training and combat experience. With a casual flick of his hand, ten iron nails struck the roof beam in a neat straight line with a string of pa pa pa pa, sinking in completely and shaking half a room's worth of dust loose.

Qin He was secretly delighted. This skill, paired with his gold needle crafting technique and Shadowless Hand, was simply a perfect match.

With a casual flick, it was more than flying needles—it was a rainstorm of pear-blossom needles.

From now on, he would not need to use his hands to slap Corpse Suppressing Nails onto corpses. If a corpse carried poison, it would be all too easy to capsize in a gutter.

His style had risen by a great deal. He could nail corpses—and people.

After trying it a few more times, Qin He calmed down.

Horse Butcher had taken a death meant for him.

The handkerchief that had killed Horse Butcher was the very one the female corpse had held yesterday. Its cold, ambushing chill had been exactly the same.

The difference was that last night, Qin He had refused to turn around no matter what, while Horse Butcher had turned.

Two choices, two outcomes.

If he had turned around, then perhaps the corpse Horse Butcher burned tonight would have been his own.

As for the cause of death, the bloody ghost head would have skinned his face alive and drained away all his Yang Energy.

The dense black bumps on Horse Butcher's face had formed when blood seeped from his vessels after his skin vanished, combined with his swift death.

Qin He had no idea what that handkerchief was, why it had appeared in the female corpse's hand, or, most importantly, why it had not appeared at all in the female corpse's Shadow Play Performance.

No matter how he thought it over, he could not understand it. He did not know whether the Shadow Play Performance had left something out or whether it had nothing to do with the female corpse at all.

It was far too bizarre.