The Heavenly Punishment Corpse

An Yunli froze on the spot, too afraid to run.

She'd seen Lin Shou easily climb over the wall into the teahouse's back courtyard. She knew he really could come looking for her in the middle of the night.

This man was terrifying...

"Turn around. Face me."

An Yunli shifted her feet in tiny steps, then turned around reluctantly.

She wanted to find someone to help her, but there was no one she could turn to.

Shopkeeper Xia wasn't here today. He'd gone to the apothecary to pick up medicine, leaving only the old bookkeeper to watch the shop. He was elderly, with dim eyes and poor hearing, and was dozing off right then.

"Come here."

Lin Shou's tone was imperious. When he saw An Yunli inching toward him, he clicked his tongue impatiently and barked:

"Move it!"

"Don't be mean to me... Please don't be mean to me..."

Like a startled rabbit, An Yunli repeated the words in a small voice as she hurried over in quick, mincing steps.

Lin Shou grabbed An Yunli by the wrist and felt for her pulse.

No use. He still couldn't feel a pulse.

With a turn of his hand, Lin Shou took an instrument from the Three Immortals Return to the Cave. It looked like three tubes joined together. He put two ends in his ears and handed the other to An Yunli.

"Put this inside your clothes, over the left side of your chest."

"W-what is this?"

"A stethoscope."

"A... stethoscope?"

"For examining patients."

"Oh..."

An Yunli obediently placed the stethoscope over the left side of her chest.

Lin Shou had made the stethoscope especially for An Yunli. Since he couldn't feel a pulse at her wrist, he could only listen to her heartbeat.

He couldn't keep leaning in to listen the way he had last time. That was too intrusive, so he'd made a stethoscope.

Listening to An Yunli's heartbeat, Lin Shou could tell it was much stronger than before. Last time, it had been so weak she'd sounded like she was on the verge of death. After taking the medicine, she was doing much better.

"The new medicine... did you prescribe it for me?"

An Yunli suddenly asked in a timid voice.

Hm? Lin Shou wondered. Can this little fool tell that her medicine's changed? Did Xia Ruzhen tell her?

"How do you know?"

"The medicine... is really bitter."

"..."

At a loss for words, Lin Shou took out a small paper packet.

"I made sugar cubes in here. Keep one in your mouth whenever you take your medicine, and it won't taste so bitter."

Lin Shou had made these sugar cubes while experimenting with spices from the Compendium of Materia Medica. Since An Yunli said her medicine was bitter, he'd make some more later.

He'd checked her pulse and given her candy, so at last Lin Shou nodded and let An Yunli go. She looked as though a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders and hurried back to her room.

The great demon king was terrifying, and the medicine he gave her was so bitter...

But back in her room, An Yunli hid under her blanket and opened Lin Shou's packet. The sugar cubes were snowy white and delicate. She'd never seen anything like them, but they looked lovely. Unable to resist, she popped one into her mouth. It was sweet and delicious.

After giving An Yunli the sugar cubes, Lin Shou returned to the Corpse-Stitching Shop.

The sun sank in the west, and crows called in the evening.

A corpse was brought in.

Lin Shou opened the straw mat and took one look before furrowing his brow.

He backed away several steps, picked up the Disinfectant Alcohol Spray nearby, and began spraying. The whole room filled with the smell of alcohol. Then he took out the Medical Arm. The three incense sticks hadn't even burned down yet, but Lin Shou was already keeping a safe distance from the corpse.

The Medical Arm opened the straw mat, revealing the horrifying corpse inside.

One eye was missing. Flesh had sprouted across its face, its chin was covered in sores and deformed, and almost half of its right hand was gone. The fingers and toes on its other limbs were misshapen and mutilated to varying degrees...

It barely looked human anymore. It was more like a zombie from a horror movie, terrifying and grotesque.

Lin Shou had taken only one look before cautiously backing away—not out of fear, but because he recognized the condition.

Common folk called this "Heavenly Punishment." In Lin Shou's previous life, it had another widely known scientific name.

And it was contagious. Though he had built up strong resistance to poison, he still needed to take precautions and maintain a safe distance, eliminating even the slightest chance of infection.

Lin Shou stared at the Heavenly Punishment corpse, his brows knitted tightly.

Heavenly Punishment was most common in the Min Region and rarely seen in the north. Plenty of people had never even heard of it.

How had something like this appeared in the Capital City?

Night deepened. Lamps were lit and candles kindled.

Though the Heavenly Punishment corpse was dangerous, Lin Shou knew he had to stitch it up. It wasn't just a requirement of the Bureau of Corpse Management; he needed to see its Lantern of Life and learn where this case of Heavenly Punishment had come from.

The three incense sticks burned out.

The Medical Arm threaded the needle and stitched the corpse. Since it had suffered so many deformities, Lin Shou made several small prosthetics out of modeling clay and sewed them onto the body. At last, the stitching was complete.

The Record of Selling Corpses appeared, and the Lantern of Life began.

Lin Shou carefully examined the man's life.

His family was a small but wealthy cloth merchant's household in the Capital City. His father had money, and he was a rich second-generation heir who spent his days walking birds in their cages, eating, drinking, and making merry. He didn't know how to do anything useful. The only useful thing he knew how to do was spend money.

His family had money, so he could do whatever he pleased.

A spoiled young master, a pampered playboy.

Every day, he went wherever he pleased with a crowd of ne'er-do-well friends. His favorite place in the Capital City was the Eight Great Alleys.

What kind of place were the Eight Great Alleys?

Simply put, they were the Capital City's pleasure district, lined with brothels and houses of entertainment.

To put it more crudely, they were where people went to hire prostitutes.

But unlike the brothels and pleasure houses people usually imagined, the Eight Great Alleys offered not just women, but male entertainers too.

For a time, these male entertainers had even been the main attraction.

In the early years of Ganhuang's reign, a ban on prostitution had been issued, forbidding brothels in the inner city. The brothels of the Capital City had all been pushed outside the walls. The largest pleasure district left in the inner city was around the opera troupes lodging near the Eight Great Alleys, where there were plenty of handsome young male performers...

Since the previous dynasty, officials and nobles had had a taste for male entertainers, often keeping their own troupes and maintaining actors as lovers.

Though the Capital City's opera scene had famous stars nowadays, the troupes in the Eight Great Alleys had once been poor at singing and more focused on looks than skill. For a time, they'd served as a grand matchmaking ground for high-ranking men looking for male lovers.

After performing onstage, the young actors would change out of their costumes and go enjoy themselves with their older lovers.

Though prostitution had since been legalized and male courtesans had fallen out of favor, there were always some who liked that sort of thing. The man in this corpse, for example, kept a male lover in the Eight Great Alleys.

Hss... Lin Shou stared at the corpse beside him, stunned. There's a gay man right next to me?

Lin Shou had no comment on the man's private tastes. What he wanted to find out was where the Heavenly Punishment had come from.

That male lover might be the key.

The playboy had once been very close to him, and they'd often been intimate. Then, for some reason, the man suddenly stopped seeing him. The playboy flew into a rage and cursed him as an ungrateful bastard who'd only been after his money.

Not long after the playboy returned home, his hair and eyebrows began to fall out, and bumps kept appearing on his skin. He felt he'd caught some strange illness. He consulted a number of doctors, but none could figure it out. They all said his body was probably depleted and his yin and yang out of balance, then prescribed some medicine.

He took it for a year, but it didn't help. His illness only got worse. His hand kept losing its grip, until one morning he woke up and found a finger had fallen off.

After that, his body began to deform.

His family was terrified. The doctors couldn't help, so they invited a practitioner who dealt with spiritual matters, commonly known as a Great Immortal. The man said the playboy had been stricken by Heavenly Punishment and had to be driven from the home at once, or the whole family would suffer!

The old man said he couldn't do that. He couldn't bear it—this was his son, his own flesh and blood. Even if you cut the flesh from the bone, the sinews still connected them.

In the end, the old man found his son a house elsewhere. He lived there on his own, with enough money sent each month to get by. If the old man missed him too much, he'd go visit from a distance.

The father was miserable, and so was the son. Day after day, his hair fell out and his fingers dropped off. He was no longer a man, not quite a ghost. He could scare people half to death if he went out after dark. Even his parents were afraid of him.

The more he dwelled on it, the more depressed he became. Seeing his own body so crippled made him miserable. Finally, one day, he went out, found a well, and jumped in.

With a thud, he was dead.