Nine Corpse Suppressing Artifacts

The furnace burned for roughly half a shichen before the corpse was charred.

Passed safely.

The gray-white curtain slowly fell. The Shadow Play unfolded, and Qin He saw the dead man's life.

The dead man was named Zhao Si, a native of Laicheng, Lu Land. Though he had loafed about in his youth, he was not truly a bad person. His family owned a steamed-bun shop, which barely supported their lazy son.

But good times did not last. Zhao Si's shop caught the eye of local thugs and scoundrels. One day, someone splashed shit and piss over freshly steamed buns; the next, someone staged an accident and claimed Zhao Si's buns were poisonous; the day after that, the flour room caught fire.

Before long, Zhao Si's shop had been thoroughly ruined. He was left deeply in debt, and reporting it to the authorities did no good. His parents were angered to death.

Unable to swallow his hatred, Zhao Si took up a sharp knife, stabbed the thugs straight through the heart, and fled to the Capital City.

Though he had once been harmed by villains, Zhao Si ultimately became the very sort of person he hated most.

After arriving in the Capital City, he quickly spent his meager travel money and ended up on the streets.

At the time, the Three Rivers Cao Gang was recruiting boatmen, so Zhao Si joined. Since he had already taken a life, he was fiercer than most. Before long, he began to stand out in the Three Rivers Cao Gang, rising from boatman to enforcer. Later, he copied the same trick, using identical methods to seize several profitable shops for the Grain Transport Gang. He won the favor of a gang foreman and became a minor leader among the enforcers.

After gaining some status, Zhao Si bought a refugee woman and a tiled-roof house, making a home for himself.

But how could a fugitive criminal ever settle down and enjoy a peaceful life?

Before long, enemies he had made over the years came knocking. While he was drunk, they stabbed him straight through the heart—exactly the same way he had once killed his own enemy.

The Soul-Snatching Shadow Lamp captured his soul, Judgment Weighing weighed his sins, and the Black Robed Man pronounced: "What we hate is not injustice, but why we are the ones forced to bear it."

As the ripples faded, a book appeared in Qin He's mind: "Shadowless Hand." Annotation: When you concentrate wholeheartedly, your hand speed will become unbelievably fast.

Qin He raised a brow. It looked like a skill book?

Whatever. He would learn it first and worry about the rest later.

With a thought, a flood of inexplicable knowledge appeared in his mind. He understood every acupoint in both hands and grasped certain special techniques for exerting force. Even the bones in his hands crackled as they reformed.

A few minutes later, the skill had finished learning.

He found something to test it on: a bamboo tube on the ground.

Gripping the bamboo tube, he activated the skill. His hand instantly turned into an Illusory Shadow and rapidly rubbed up and down the tube.

In less than half a minute, smoke rose from the friction against the bamboo tube. It looked ready to catch fire.

Qin He found it quite novel. Even drilling wood to make fire was not as fast as this.

"Poof!"

The bamboo tube actually caught fire.

Qin He hurriedly stopped, only to discover that his hands were neither sore nor hot. It was simply incredible.

But after calming down, he could not help but feel conflicted. What use was this skill?

Could it really be used to drill wood for fire?

Shaking his head, Qin He put the skill aside.

Over the next four days, Qin He safely burned another four corpses.

In total, he received an Abyssal Fruit, a Golden Wound Pill, a copy of Nine Corpse Suppressing Artifacts, and a copy of Yogurt Making Technique.

How should he put it? Useful and useless things came together.

The Abyssal Fruit increased Qin He's strength by quite a bit again, though not as much as the first time—roughly twenty percent.

The Golden Wound Pill was medicine for treating injuries. Its exact effects were not explained, but it was decent enough.

As for Yogurt Making Technique, Qin He did not even know how to complain about it. He was not opening a yogurt shop, so what use was it?

Still, with the thought that one could never have too many skills, Qin He learned it anyway. It did not cost him anything.

The most useful one was undoubtedly Nine Corpse Suppressing Artifacts.

It recorded the methods for making nine artifacts specifically used to suppress corpses. The information did not say how useful they were, but anything the cheat gave him had to be useful.

That was enough. What Corpse Burners feared most was a Corpse Mutation.

Without question, this was the most practical reward among the six corpses Qin He had burned.

Qin He discovered that during the Soul-Snatching Shadow Lamp's Judgment Weighing, the more extraordinary the dead person's past and the more unusual their experiences, the heavier the weighing—and the better the reward.

The most obvious comparison was between the corpses that had yielded Nine Corpse Suppressing Artifacts and Yogurt Making Technique.

One had been a traveling merchant who had roamed north and south for half his life; the other had been a congenitally disabled child, bedridden and paralyzed.

The difference in their Shadow Plays was striking. The traveling merchant's life had been full of danger and excitement, while the disabled child had known nothing beyond the roof over his head.

As for the Nine Corpse Suppressing Artifacts, they were: glutinous rice, talismans, Ink Line, metal needles, Black Donkey Hoof, Horse Bell, Soul-Capturing Lamp, Corpse Suppressing Pill, and Rebirth Seal.

Of these nine items, each was more powerful than the last. Especially the final four—they were family heirlooms, the tools their descendants relied on to make a living, treasures never casually shown to outsiders.

Even the first four were far from simple.

Take the simplest, glutinous rice. Not just any glutinous rice would work. It had to be rice that sprouted in early spring, having absorbed the Yang Energy of heaven and earth. Then secret methods had to be used to keep its sprouts from rotting before it was planted again at Awakening of Insects.

A single plant might yield only a dozen or so grains. When suppressing a corpse, one handful thrown out was gone.

Then there were the talismans. Cinnabar had to be bought with silver; copper coins could not buy it. One stroke of the brush could cost half a month's food money. The paper used to draw talismans was even more expensive, requiring gold and silver foil stamping. They could not be used lightly—they were life-saving items.

The East City Corpse Burning Facility had four talismans. Every constable on duty carried one on his person, and after his shift, he had to return it.

The Ink Line was the same. The thread could not be just any random thread; it had to be made from fire silkworm silk. Then a carpenter had to use it for half his life, pulling it horizontally, vertically, and straight, gathering righteous and upright energy into it before it could be used.

When it came down to it, among materials for suppressing corpses, the fourth-ranked metal needles were actually the most convenient.

So-called metal needles were not needles made of gold. Gold was too soft to make needle tools. It referred to metal.

Any needle made of metal would do.

That made people wonder: if that was the case, why did metal needles rank fourth?

For Corpse-Suppressing Metal Needles, the difficult part was not the materials, but the craftsmanship required to make them.

Put simply, one had to engrave a corpse-suppressing text called "Auspicious Talismans," containing three hundred and eighty talismans, onto a single nail. Every talisman's strokes were roughly the size of written characters, and not a single stroke could be wrong. Even the slightest error meant starting over.

As for the size of the nail, one could make it as large as a hoe handle, so long as it could be driven into the corpse when suppressing it.

But there was one issue: the skin of a corpse that had undergone Corpse Mutation was tough. Even the weakest was as hard as wood.

Now he understood.

The materials were cheap, but the problem was finding someone capable of making such a thing.

But for Qin He, that was no problem at all.

The moment Qin He learned the skill, he instinctively understood how to make the complete set of Nine Corpse Suppressing Artifacts without a teacher.

It was a cheat. Who knew? Do not ask—ask, and the answer was magic.

Early the next morning, Qin He handed over the ashes, collected fifteen copper coins, and headed straight for the blacksmith's shop. He spent ten coins to buy two hundred iron nails.

After returning to the Corpse Burning Room, he shut the door, sharpened one iron nail, heated the rest over the fire, and began engraving.

Each stroke should have been arduous. Even if Qin He went without food, drink, or sleep, he would probably only have managed a few in a day.

But he had Shadowless Hand.

When you concentrate wholeheartedly, your hand speed will become unbelievably fast.

Swipe, swipe, swipe... Qin He was unbelievably fast.

He finished engraving one in half a minute. In one shichen, all two hundred were done.

Then he stitched together a needle pouch from scrap cloth and hung it at his waist.

Heh, it was as long as a belt of ammunition.

As the saying went, "When the time comes, heaven and earth lend their strength." Qin He had only just finished making the Corpse Suppressing Nails when the Corpse Burning Facility received a special corpse.