The Art of Raising Beasts

The Record of Selling Corpses recorded in seal script the life stories of the corpses.

When a person dies, the lamp goes out; the coffin lid seals the final verdict.

Good and evil lie within me; praise and blame rest with others.

Lin Shou's vision blurred, as if he were watching the lantern show of the male corpse he had just stitched up.

In life, the corpse had been a squire of the Gao family in Changchun Township, charitable and kind, often giving out porridge at the charity shelter, earning a fine reputation as a great benefactor praised far and wide.

Once, a starving refugee fleeing famine collapsed unconscious at the squire's gate. In chaotic times, human life was as cheap as grass, let alone for a stranger.

An ordinary person would have minded their own business and looked the other way, but Squire Gao spent money to call a doctor to treat the refugee, saving his life and even giving him a good sum of silver. This shows the kind of good deeds Squire Gao did.

Yet for all his virtue, this great benefactor had one matter he could not share with outsiders.

Squire Gao had a daughter, kept deep in the inner chambers, rarely seen by others. It wasn't that an unmarried girl couldn't go out—the Great Jing Dynasty had open customs, and women could walk the streets. The reason this daughter never left home was that she was born with a dull-witted condition.

A 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 limited to counting on her fingers, and she often drooled and lost control of her bowels.

This dull-witted daughter was a great pain in Squire Gao's heart. As a child, she could be cared for like a baby, but after more than a decade, she had grown up, couldn't be married off, and had become a burden at home.

Until that night, Squire Gao called his daughter to the courtyard, looped a hemp rope around her neck, and pulled it tight.

The girl, with her three-year-old mind, had no idea what she had done wrong. She only cried out:

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

That night, the moonlight was fine, and the Zhao family's dog was barking.

The dull-witted daughter's voice grew faint, then fell silent. Her iron-blue face was streaked with tears, as she was strangled to death by her own father.

A long illness tries even the filial son.

It's easy to give a few coins to a beggar on the street, but if your own mother is bedridden with a serious illness and you have to care for her for ten years, who knows what thoughts might creep into your heart.

Squire Gao was the great benefactor recognized by all the villages around, yet in the end, he strangled his own dull-witted daughter with his own hands.

Late at night, he strangled her and threw her into the well, thinking no one would know. The next day, he would claim the child had fallen in while getting up at night, and after a round of weeping and a funeral, the matter would be settled.

But heaven has eyes, and coincidences happen.

That night, the Gao family cook got up and secretly witnessed the whole scene of the master strangling his daughter. Terrified, he went to the authorities the next day to report it.

The constables came and locked him up. At the yamen, the upright magistrate interrogated him, and Squire Gao confessed to killing his daughter in full detail.

Murder demands a life. He signed the confession, was thrown in prison, and was sentenced to be beheaded in the autumn.

And so it was that yesterday, at the execution ground in Caishikou, his head was chopped off, and his corpse was sent to Lin Shou's corpse-stitching shop.

The lantern show ended. The life story of the corpse Lin Shou had stitched was fully recorded in the Record of Selling Corpses.

The yin-yang abacus clinked and clanked, setting a price between heaven and earth, dark and yellow.

The Record of Selling Corpses set the price for the corpse: Yellow Grade, Fifth Rank.

The pricing levels on the Record of Selling Corpses, from high to low, were divided into Heaven, Earth, Dark, and Yellow grades, each with nine ranks.

Yellow Grade, Fifth Rank—it didn't seem high in this ranking.

Lin Shou snapped back to reality. The Yin Mountain Underworld River was gone, and the Record of Selling Corpses had vanished, but in his hand, he held a reward from "selling" the corpse.

A crisp Yin Immortal Fruit, fragrant and tempting to the nose, looking juicy and plump. The flesh was kind-faced like a human visage, while the core was fierce like a wolf or tiger.

A Human-Faced Beast-Heart Fruit.

One thought becomes a Buddha, one thought becomes a demon. In Jiangbei, there was a sorcery that used the internal organs of hundreds of great good and great evil people as a foundation. After ten years, it could cultivate a single Human-Faced Beast-Heart Fruit. Eating it allowed one to comprehend the transformation between human and beast, unlocking the secret of the Beast-Making Art.

"Record of Selling Corpses, stitching corpses, rewards..."

Lin Shou was overjoyed. He actually had a cheat.

Though transmigrating into this chaotic and eerie world had once made him worry about his uncertain future, the appearance of the Record of Selling Corpses gave him hope for self-preservation and a foothold.

Lin Shou looked at the creepy-looking Human-Faced Beast-Heart Fruit in his hand, closed his eyes, and bit into it.

Though the yin fruit looked a bit frightening, it tasted good—juicy, sweet, and crisp, making his mouth water.

The more Lin Shou chewed, the more energized he felt. His mind suddenly cleared as if struck by enlightenment, and a flood of bizarre knowledge poured in.

The neural pathways of the human body, the five viscera and six organs, the structure of livestock bodies, bones and spines, the method of turning humans into beasts, the way of turning beasts into humans...

An hour later.

Lin Shou had fully digested and understood the bizarre knowledge flooding his mind, mastering the "Beast-Making Art."

The so-called Beast-Making Art, also known as the Nightmare Bewitchment Art, came from the heretical paths of Jiangbei. It was an extremely sinister and venomous demonic technique.

In earlier years, evil cultivators used the Beast-Making Art to turn children into monkeys or dogs, taking them to the streets to perform for money, or turning people into cattle or sheep to sell as meat or labor.

In this era, human life was cheap, worth less than cattle or sheep.

If someone unknowingly bought such a sheep and put it in a pot, what floated up were human flesh and bones—how horrifying.

Because the Beast-Making Art was so vicious and the Jiangbei heretics acted too arrogantly, the government took notice and launched a crackdown. Anyone caught using the Beast-Making Art was executed on the spot.

The martial world was thrown into panic. The Six Fan School allied with righteous sects to carry out a great purge of heretics, wiping out many heretical traditions.

From that day on, the Beast-Making Art vanished from the martial world.

Occasional rumors of it surfaced only beyond the western frontier.

Never did Lin Shou expect that today, he would accidentally learn this long-lost heretical art.

"This Beast-Making Art is a bit lacking in virtue..."

Though Lin Shou had picked up the skill, thinking it over, it was also quite dangerous. The art itself was vicious and harmed one's karmic virtue, and if exposed, it would easily invite government suppression.

Forget it, he'd bury it at the bottom of his chest and let it gather dust.

Lin Shou felt that as a humble corpse stitcher who kept his head down, never fighting or making enemies, he should have no use for the Beast-Making Art.

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

By stitching corpses, he could earn rewards.

A single executed death-row prisoner's corpse, priced at just Yellow Grade Fifth Rank, had already rewarded him with a lost martial art.

He couldn't wait to stitch a few more now.

But he couldn't, because dawn had broken.

In the courtyard outside the door, a rooster crowed. The horizon blushed with the pale white of morning clouds. Night ended, day dawned, and the righteous qi of heaven descended.

According to the rules, he could no longer stitch corpses at this time.

Stitching corpses wasn't just about mending flesh; there was also a saying about stitching together the scattered three souls and seven spirits.

The sun governs yang, the night governs yin. Only at night, when yin qi was present, could one find the three souls and seven spirits. Thus, corpse stitchers could only work at night.

Lin Shou didn't know if this saying was true or false. He was merely a new corpse stitcher who had entered the trade half a month ago, and he did everything according to the rules taught during the Ministry of Rites' selection and training.

In the yin gate profession, following the rules might not guarantee survival, but breaking them often meant certain death.

After all, the rules of the yin path were built on piles of human lives.