Record of Selling Corpses

Lin Shou opened his eyes, three sticks of incense held in his hands.

Outside, rain pattered through the night. Inside, the room was damp and cold, the candlelight dim. A headless corpse lay across the icy bed.

Where was this...

A jumble of memories flooded his mind, and Lin Shou quickly realized that he had transmigrated.

It was now the Great Jing Dynasty, the fifty-ninth year of Ganhuang's reign.

The court was corrupt. Famine and plague raged, disasters struck, and the people had no way to live. Stepping outside, one saw nothing but bones covering the plains.

This place was nothing like the peaceful Earth where he had once lived.

Chaos and upheaval. The dead walked and ghosts lived; demons and monsters ran rampant.

He was now in a Corpse-Stitching Shop on the street beside the execution grounds at Caishikou in the Capital City, working as a corpse stitcher who prepared the dead for burial.

What was a corpse stitcher?

The old saying went that when people died, they returned to their roots and rested in the earth. They had to be buried with their bodies whole. Bury someone missing an arm or a leg, and it was a grave taboo that invited ill fortune and disaster.

To lay the souls of the dead to rest, the trade of corpse stitching had come into being. Depending on the region, its practitioners were also called burial men, ghost stitchers, or Skin Stitchers.

Like executioners, paper effigy makers, coroners, and the Pallbearer Guild, corpse stitching was a trade that dealt with the yin.

Few dared to work with the dead day in and day out, and fewer still could.

The best people for the trade were those born with some defect, or at least widowers, widows, or orphans who had lost several relatives. One had to bear some of the Five Drawbacks and Three Deficiencies; without enough baleful fate, working with the yin could easily bring trouble.

Lin Shou had grown up among refugees. As a child, he had nearly been thrown into a pot by starving people desperate for a meal. He had no idea who his parents were, and later became intellectually disabled. His own fate was steeped in baleful intent, which was why he could do this work.

In such turbulent times, this trade was barely a way to make a living, but it was still better than starving to death.

"This world is a mess."

After sorting through his memories, Lin Shou felt deeply unsettled. The gulf between the peaceful, prosperous era of his previous life and this precarious world was too vast.

And this world was not merely chaotic. It seemed to be plagued by all manner of uncanny spirits and demons, and all kinds of supernatural calamities...

Of the twenty-four Corpse-Stitching Shops near Caishikou in the Capital City, familiar faces vanished every year, replaced by strangers.

So far, Lin Shou had yet to meet a corpse stitcher who had retired in peace. They disappeared, died suddenly, fell ill, met with misfortune, or went mad. Every ending was grim.

Just as he was mulling this over, a bird's beak began pecking at the door in the night outside. A mournful proclamation rang out through the drizzle:

"Corpse stitcher vacancy at No. 20 Corpse-Stitching Shop! Corpse stitcher vacancy at No. 20 Corpse-Stitching Shop!..."

Lin Shou's heart gave a thud. Another one was gone.

If he had the choice, he would have liked to change professions. He wasn't the same intellectually disabled Lin Shou he had been before. What kind of business couldn't he run in a shop in the bustling city? He could even sell flatbreads. Anything was better than risking his life in a trade that dealt with the yin.

But the twenty-four Corpse-Stitching Shops at Caishikou in the Capital City weren't owned by the corpse stitchers themselves. How could a bunch of disabled people burdened by the Five Drawbacks and Three Deficiencies afford to open shops in a bustling part of town?

These twenty-four Corpse-Stitching Shops were a corpse-disposal department established specifically by the Ministry of Rites and the Imperial Medical Academy.

The corpse stitchers were nothing more than hired hands, provided with food and lodging.

If Lin Shou quit today, tomorrow he would be sleeping on the streets, using the sky as his blanket and the ground as his mat. Without a travel permit, he couldn't even stay in the Capital City; he would be thrown into a refugee camp outside the city.

So until he found another way to make a living, he had to keep working as a corpse stitcher.

Lin Shou glanced at the three sticks of incense he had just offered. They had burned down steadily, so he lowered his head to examine the corpse.

It was an adult male, decapitated, with a clean, neat cut across his neck as wide as a bowl.

That morning, the execution grounds at Caishikou had been busy with beheadings. One batch of condemned prisoners after another had been executed after autumn, like chives being cut.

Once the heads were chopped off, the prisoners' relatives came to claim the bodies through their tears, then brought them to the Corpse-Stitching Shops around Caishikou.

Lin Shou's job was to stitch this one back together.

He threaded his needle, sewed the skin together, dusted the seam with powder, combed the hair and brows, and dressed the body in burial clothes.

After a night of stitching and preparing the corpse for burial, the body that had been cut in two by the executioner was restored as if it had never been harmed, lying on the icy bed.

Lin Shou set down his needle and thread and let out a long breath. He thought the job had gone smoothly, without a single hitch.

Then, suddenly, his mind reeled.

Mist slowly spread before his eyes. Through it, burial mounds and tombs rose and fell in layer upon layer; mausoleums and stone steles stretched away like mountain ranges, while grave goods and paper offerings flowed ceaselessly like nine rivers.

Yin Mountain Underworld River enshrined a mottled scroll of stone inscriptions. Three strange characters were carved into its cover:

Record of Selling Corpses.