Carefree, peaceful days passed, and I knew nothing of sorrow.
In the blink of an eye, Lin Shou had been in this world for over half a month.
The Great Jing Dynasty was peaceful and prosperous. One could often see the glorious sights of crooked-neck trees hung full and opium addicts sleeping soundly in the middle of the street.
Lin Shou lived a quiet little life at the Corpse-Stitching Shop.
Each night, he stitched up a corpse, squeezed a few rewards out of the Record of Selling Corpses, and cultivated his mind and body. Life was easy.
But unexpectedly, that evening—
Lin Shou had just finished eating a bowl of sweet tofu after Ning Luowei pestered him relentlessly. He sent her on her way.
Then an official from the Bureau of Corpse Management delivered a corpse to the Corpse-Stitching Shop. Lin Shou was a little surprised when he saw it.
"Isn't this the corpse-stitcher from Shop No. 20?"
Lin Shou looked at the corpse in confusion and asked the official from the Bureau of Corpse Management who had brought it.
This corpse-stitcher from Shop No. 20 was the one whose number the Obituary Bird had called out that night on the rainy evening Lin Shou had arrived in this world.
Lin Shou still remembered going to take a look the next morning. The official had said the man got into trouble while stitching up a Tomb Raider's corpse.
Half a month had already passed since then. How was it that the corpse was only just about to be buried?
"The Bureau of Corpse Management was gathering evidence and investigating him. The investigation is finished now. Stitch up his corpse."
Following procedure, the official from the Bureau of Corpse Management handed the corpse over to Lin Shou, then left.
Lin Shou looked at the corpse, its body covered in bloody scratches from fingernails. He thought the man was unlucky. Here was another corpse that had died in a strange way.
Still, the corpse had been preserved absurdly well.
It had been dead for half a month, yet it hadn't dried out or begun leaking yellow fluid, and there was no bloating at all. It looked as though it had only been dead for a day or two.
He truly had no idea what methods the Bureau of Corpse Management used to preserve corpses.
Deep in the night, he lit incense and got to work.
Lin Shou watched the incense burn down steadily, then prepared to stitch the corpse.
The corpse's face and body were covered in scratches. Lin Shou examined its fingernails and found bits of flesh beneath them. The man must have scratched himself.
Could he have caught some kind of contagious disease?
Lin Shou put on a mask and gloves made from sausage casing. He wrapped himself in clothes, making sure not a patch of skin was exposed, then fetched the alcohol disinfectant spray he had made a couple of days earlier.
Fully protected from head to toe, he began stitching.
The needle darted up and down. This time, his work was much rougher than when he had stitched Ning Luowei.
After all, stitching up a living person was different from stitching up the dead. Once a body was buried, they would never meet again in this lifetime. There was no need to be as meticulous as he had been with a living person.
Lin Shou knew when to stop, and he had already held back quite a bit. But skill like his was hard to rein in. Even a casual stitch was still far better than the "work" of other corpse-stitchers.
Lin Shou felt that ever since stitching Ning Luowei with twenty-three thousand nine hundred stitches that night, his technique had improved again.
It seemed the skills rewarded by the Record of Selling Corpses might have their mastery raised straight to the pinnacle, but that didn't mean there was no room for further improvement. It was still possible to break through the limits.
Now, whenever Lin Shou immersed himself in stitching a corpse, he even felt as if he could hear a sage preaching. After finishing, his mind brimmed with reflections on life and the truths of the world, as though his soul had been cleansed.
Could this be what they meant by a craft so masterful it entered the Dao? Entering the Dao through skill?
Tsk. Lin Shou felt that, in this fired-up state, he could step up to a podium and deliver a rousing speech full of inspirational wisdom.
The stitches fell into place. He snipped the thread.
The corpse of the corpse-stitcher from Shop No. 20 was finished.
Everything went smoothly, and nothing strange happened.
Underworld money and paper offerings, the River of the Netherworld, the Record of Selling Corpses appeared.
Lin Shou watched as the Lantern of Life began to turn.
The life of the corpse-stitcher from Shop No. 20 had been utterly ordinary.
All in all, it wasn't much different from No. 6's.
He had struggled through the first half of his life, nearly starving to death.
Then he saw that the Bureau of Corpse Management was hiring, but they only wanted people with disabilities. So he steeled himself, broke his own leg, and got his chance.
Then, before he had even worked for two months, something happened, and he died.
Lin Shou didn't care about any of that.
He had stitched up so many corpses and seen so many lives. A lifetime of petty striving, lasting less than a hundred years, would all vanish like smoke sooner or later.
What he cared about more was what had happened on the night the corpse-stitcher from Shop No. 20 died so mysteriously.
The Lantern of Life reached that night.
After the autumn executions, the corpses of those beheaded at the execution ground were sent to the Corpse-Stitching Shops. The corpse sent to Shop No. 20 belonged to that Tomb Raider.
The corpse-stitcher from Shop No. 20 bustled around the shop, his face flushed and his spirits listless. He had been drinking during the day.
He lit three sticks of incense.
The corpse-stitcher sat waiting for a while. Feeling tired, he wanted to finish stitching the corpse as quickly as possible so he could go to sleep.
He glanced at the three sticks of incense. They had burned down halfway.
All three were the same length and burning steadily.
The corpse-stitcher figured everything was fine. Rather than wait for the incense to burn all the way down, he simply started stitching the corpse.
He threaded the needle between the neck and the head. At first, nothing went wrong. But by the time he had stitched more than halfway—
There were just five stitches left before he could finish.
Suddenly, a fierce wind howled outside!
Crash! The Corpse-Stitching Shop's front door blew open! The light drizzle outside drifted in, and the candlelight flickered in the darkness, nearly going out.
The drunken corpse-stitcher frowned. He was sure he had latched the door. How strong could the wind possibly be to blow it open?
But when he turned his head, he saw the three sticks of incense in front of the corpse's head.
According to the rules of corpse-stitching, you had to watch the incense burn steadily all the way down before you could be sure nothing was wrong and start stitching the corpse.
But this corpse-stitcher had been drunk and tired today, eager to finish up and go to bed. So he hadn't waited for the incense to burn out.
As the old saying went, chance could bring good fortune, or it could cost a life.
The world was full of coincidences.
Someone who had never bought a lottery ticket might buy one today because the shopkeeper couldn't make change for a pack of cigarettes and offered a ticket instead. Then every number would come up right, and tens of millions would fall into his lap. That was the kind of chance that brought good fortune.
A train might run for decades without an accident. Then, today, you happened to be standing beside the tracks, five hundred meters away. The train derailed, and though several thousand people nearby were unharmed, bam—it hit only you and killed you. That was the kind of chance that cost a life.
That was exactly what happened to the corpse-stitcher from Shop No. 20 tonight.
He had happened to drink. He had happened not to wait for the incense to burn down. He had happened upon the corpse of a Tomb Raider.
The corpse's head was attached to its neck, and it was only five stitches from being finished.
The wind blew the door open. The corpse-stitcher turned and saw the three sticks of incense in front of the corpse, still burning: two short, one long.
Two short, one long!
The corpse-stitcher's drunkenness vanished in an instant.
Oh no! The incense!
The corpse-stitcher slapped his thigh and gritted his back teeth, realizing that something was terribly wrong. A great calamity was probably about to befall him.
In a panic, he looked wildly from side to side. Then he saw the door the wind had blown open and thought, I... should run!
All corpse-stitchers were crippled or maimed. This old cripple with one bad leg was so frightened that he didn't even need his crutch. He heaved himself up and tried to bolt for his life.
But he felt a force tug at his wrist. It was as if someone had grabbed hold of him. He couldn't get away.
The old cripple turned his head and took a sharp breath.
The corpse's hand was gripping his wrist.
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