The Beast-Making Art

The Record of Selling Corpses recorded events in seal script, chronicling the life of each corpse.

When a person died, the lamp went out; once the coffin was sealed, the verdict was final.

Good and evil lay with me; praise and blame came from others.

Lin Shou's vision blurred. It seemed he could see the Lantern of Life of the male corpse he had stitched.

In life, the corpse had been a member of the Gao family of Changchun Township, a wealthy master who delighted in doing good. He often gave out porridge at the Public Mortuary to help the poor, and enjoyed an excellent reputation. Everyone in the surrounding villages praised him as a great benefactor.

Once, a refugee fleeing famine had collapsed unconscious at the wealthy master's gate. In these chaotic times, human lives were cheap, and the man wasn't even an acquaintance.

An ordinary person would have turned a blind eye, but Wealthy Master Gao had paid a physician to treat the refugee. In the end, the man recovered, and Gao had even given him a fair sum of silver. This showed just how many good deeds Wealthy Master Gao had done.

But even such a great benefactor had one matter he could not reveal to outsiders.

Wealthy Master Gao had a daughter, hidden away deep in the women's quarters and seldom seen by outsiders. It wasn't that an unmarried girl couldn't leave the house; the Great Jing Dynasty had open-minded customs, and women could go out in the streets too. The reason Gao's daughter never left home was that she had been born with an intellectual disability.

She was a grown woman of twenty-six or twenty-seven, yet her mind was like that of a three-year-old child. Her speech was slurred, her arithmetic went no further than counting on her fingers, and she would sometimes drool or lose control of her bowels.

This daughter's condition was a great affliction to Wealthy Master Gao. When she was little, he could care for her as a child. But after more than a decade, she had grown up and still couldn't be married off. She had become a burden at home.

Until one night, Wealthy Master Gao called his daughter into the courtyard, looped a hemp rope around her neck, and pulled it tight.

The girl was intellectually disabled, with the mind of a three-year-old. How could she understand what she had done wrong? She only knew to cry,

"Father, I'll change. Father, I'll change..."

The moon was bright that night, and the Zhao family's dog was barking.

The girl's voice grew fainter and fainter, then fell silent. Tear tracks streaked her ashen face. Her own father had strangled her to death.

No son could remain filial before a sickbed for long.

If you came across a beggar on the road, giving him some money and doing a good deed was easy. But if your own elderly mother lay gravely ill at home, and you had to care for her for ten years, who could say what thoughts might arise in your heart?

Wealthy Master Gao was recognized throughout the surrounding villages as a great benefactor. In the end, though, he had strangled his own intellectually disabled daughter to death.

He had strangled her in the dead of night and thrown her into a well. It should have gone entirely unnoticed. The next day, he could have said she'd accidentally fallen in while getting up at night; everyone would have wept, held a funeral, and that would have been the end of it.

But alas, Heaven had eyes, and fate had other plans.

That night, Wealthy Master Gao's cook had gotten up to relieve himself. He had witnessed every moment of his master strangling his daughter in secret, and was so frightened that he reported it to the authorities the very next day.

The constables came and shackled him. In the yamen, the upright magistrate questioned him, and Wealthy Master Gao confessed to killing his daughter, every last detail.

A life for a life. He signed his confession and was imprisoned, to be executed after the autumn harvest.

And so, yesterday, his head had been chopped off at the execution ground in Caishikou, and his body had been sent to Lin Shou's Corpse-Stitching Shop.

The Lantern of Life had run its course. The life of the corpse Lin Shou had stitched was recorded in full in the Record of Selling Corpses.

The Yin-Yang Abacus clacked; Heaven, Earth, Dark, and Yellow fetched good prices.

The Record of Selling Corpses assigned the corpse a price: Yellow-Grade, Fifth Rank.

The Record of Selling Corpses rated corpses across four grades, from highest to lowest: Heaven, Earth, Dark, and Yellow. Each grade was divided into nine ranks.

Yellow-Grade, Fifth Rank didn't seem particularly high among these ratings.

Lin Shou came back to himself. The Yin Mountain Underworld River was gone from before his eyes, and the Record of Selling Corpses had vanished too. But in his hand, he now held a reward he had received for "selling a corpse."

A fresh Yin Immortal Fruit. It smelled sweet and enticing, and looked plump and juicy. Its flesh had a kindly human face, while its pit resembled the heart of a tiger, leopard, or wolf.

The Human-Faced Beast-Heart Fruit.

With a single thought, one could become a Buddha; with another, a demon. Jiangbei had its sorcery: by using the five viscera of hundreds of exceptionally good or evil people as seed, one could cultivate a Human-Faced Beast-Heart Fruit in ten years. Eating it allowed one to grasp the transformation between humans and beasts and comprehend the secret of the Beast-Making Art.

"The Record of Selling Corpses, corpse-stitching, rewards..."

Lin Shou was delighted. He actually had a cheat ability.

Though crossing into this strange, chaotic world had left him worrying about his uncertain future, the appearance of the Record of Selling Corpses had shown him a way to protect himself and make a place for himself.

Lin Shou looked at the ghastly-looking Human-Faced Beast-Heart Fruit in his hand, shut his eyes, and took a bite.

Though the Yin Fruit looked a little frightening, it tasted quite good—juicy, sweet, and crisp, making his mouth water.

The more Lin Shou chewed, the more alert he became. His mind suddenly felt as if it had been struck by an enlightening draught, and a vast amount of bizarre knowledge poured in.

The nerves and meridians of the human body, the five viscera and six bowels, the structure of livestock bodies, bones and spines, the method of turning people into beasts, the way to turn beasts into people...

An hour later.

Lin Shou had fully absorbed and understood the bizarre knowledge that had poured into his mind, and mastered the "Beast-Making Art."

The Beast-Making Art, also called the Nightmare Bewitchment Art, came from the unorthodox paths of Jiangbei. It was an extraordinarily sinister sorcery.

In years past, heretics had used the Beast-Making Art to turn children into monkeys and dogs, then take them into the streets to perform for money. Others transformed people into cattle, sheep, and other livestock, then sold them as meat or beasts of burden.

In this era, human lives were cheaper than cattle and sheep.

An unwitting buyer might take one home. Once the sheep went into the pot, the bones and flesh that floated to the surface would be human. How could that not be horrifying?

Because the Beast-Making Art was so vicious and vile, and those Jiangbei heretics had acted far too brazenly, the authorities had taken notice and launched a campaign of extermination. Any heretic who knew the Beast-Making Art was executed on the spot upon capture.

For a time, the martial world was gripped by fear. The Six Fan School joined forces with the righteous sects to launch a massive purge of heretics, wiping out many of their lineages.

After that, the Beast-Making Art vanished from the martial world.

Once in a while, rumors of it surfaced, but only in the Western Regions beyond the frontier.

Who would have thought that Lin Shou would accidentally learn this long-lost heretical art today?

"This Beast-Making Art is a bit too wicked..."

Although Lin Shou had learned a new craft, it seemed awfully dangerous. The sorcery was vicious enough to damage his karmic merit, and if he was exposed, he might draw the authorities' wrath and get himself killed.

Forget it. He'd shove it in a box and let it gather dust.

Lin Shou felt that he was a perfectly decent corpse stitcher who kept his head down, never fought anyone, and never made enemies. He shouldn't have any use for the Beast-Making Art.

What he cared about more was the Record of Selling Corpses.

Stitching corpses earned him rewards.

A condemned prisoner beheaded at the execution ground had received a rating of only Yellow-Grade, Fifth Rank, yet it had rewarded him with a lost martial art.

He could hardly wait to stitch a few more corpses.

But he couldn't, because dawn had broken.

A rooster crowed in the courtyard outside. The sky brightened with the pale glow of dawn. Night had ended, day had come, and the righteous energy of the world descended.

According to the rules, he couldn't stitch corpses at this hour.

Corpse-stitching wasn't just about sewing flesh back together. Some said it also meant stitching together the scattered three souls and seven spirits of the dead.

The day belonged to yang, and the night to yin. Only at night, when yin energy was present, could one find the three souls and seven spirits. That was why corpse stitchers could only stitch corpses at night.

Lin Shou didn't know whether this was true. He was only a novice corpse stitcher who had been in the trade for half a month, and he followed the rules he'd been taught during his Ministry of Rites selection and training.

In the trade of yin, following the rules didn't necessarily keep you alive. But breaking them often meant certain death.

After all, the rules of this shadowy trade had been piled up from human lives.