The Treasure Seeker of An Mountain

Night. The Corpse-Stitching Shop.

Lin Shou looked at the corpse on the cold table. He had already cut it open, and its chest cavity was empty of organs, flesh, and bones.

After seeing off the old woman, who had wept until the sky and earth seemed to darken, Lin Shou carefully examined the corpse again.

Inside the skin, he found a dense pattern of tooth marks. It really did look as though an animal had gnawed away the internal organs and flesh, leaving not even a scrap of bone.

Monsters are running amok on An Mountain...

The man's death really was bizarre. Lin Shou tapped the cold table with his fingers, wondering how much of that claim he could believe. After thinking it over, he picked up paper and brush and sketched the tooth marks.

After the first three incense sticks had burned down, Lin Shou began stitching the corpse.

This was no small undertaking. The internal organs and bones were all gone, so Lin Shou had to make him a whole new set. It didn't need to be detailed; it only had to look the part.

After much threading and stitching, the corpse was repaired.

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

Lin Shou saw the dead man's life story.

The dead man had been a Mountain Traveler. As the name suggested, he made his living off the mountains. In some places, they were also called Treasure Seekers. Around the Capital City, Miyun Township and Pinggu Township had many mountains, and those mountains held treasures: ginseng, cloud fungus, bezoar stones, donkey gallstones, all kinds of medicinal herbs, rare birds and animals, mineral veins, and timber. Mountain Travelers searched for these things and sold them to make a living.

There was a folk tale that the Empress Dowager of the previous dynasty had once fallen ill and needed mountain ginseng as medicine to save her life. After searching the imperial treasury and finding none old enough, they summoned a Mountain Traveler to go into the mountains. He returned three days later with ginseng of the right age and was rewarded with more money than he could spend in a lifetime.

Of course, "find a great mountain treasure and never worry about food or drink for the rest of your life" was like telling someone, "You can get rich buying lottery tickets." It was a carrot dangled in front of a donkey: worth listening to, but not taking seriously.

Most so-called Mountain Travelers didn't have that kind of skill. They were just woodcutters, herb gatherers, and snake catchers. The corpse Lin Shou was stitching had belonged to one such man. In life, he had probably only dug up mushrooms and caught rabbits to sell. He had recently heard that the Imperial Medical Academy was buying snake gallbladders, and went to try catching snakes for the money.

They said true Mountain Travelers knew how to read mountains and had special methods of training. They were thrown into a cellar as soon as they were born and had a secret medicinal salve applied to them every day, to cultivate eyes capable of spotting treasures. They had a lineage of their own, and were nothing like the fakes.

An Mountain now produced White Wax Wood and Coal. The great coal mine run by the Yuzhitang Trading Firm supplied the entire Capital City. It was said that a Mountain Traveler had discovered the coal vein twenty years ago and sold it to the firm, earning a fortune. He was the real deal.

But according to the Lantern of Life, this fake Mountain Traveler had gone up An Mountain to catch snakes.

The professional snake catchers who did it all the time knew how to read snake trails and find their dens. But this country bumpkin had heard people could make money catching snakes and decided to try it himself. What did he know? All he could do was wander blindly through the mountains and hope for luck.

He didn't even take the proper mountain paths. Think about it: how many people traveled those well-trodden routes every day? Real or fake, any Mountain Traveler knew there couldn't be treasures on a main road crowded with people. If there were, someone else would have picked them up already. So they all headed for the deepest woods, the places no one went.

This fake Mountain Traveler wandered through An Mountain's woods all day without seeing a single snake. His only catch was two bird eggs he'd found in a nest.

With no other choice, and night already drawing near, he thought, I'd better go back. I can make egg soup with one, and steamed egg custard with the other. That'll do for dinner.

He started back as darkness fell, and that was when things went wrong.

He had come during the day, ducking into every patch of woods he saw without giving it much thought. But once night fell, he was in trouble: he didn't know the way.

He began guessing and fumbling around for a path. In the second half of the night, he finally emerged from the woods into an open space, only to find... a graveyard!

Some graves had headstones, while others had neither stones nor names. Several rows of mounds stretched before him. The fake Mountain Traveler broke out in a cold sweat. Where had a graveyard come from in the middle of this desolate wilderness?

In the dead of night, just as he was growing afraid, a shout suddenly rang out from a nearby grave! The fake Mountain Traveler turned his head and saw only a gust of cold wind sweep past. Then everything went black.

The pair of eyes in his sockets were gone.

The fake Mountain Traveler writhed on the ground in pain. Then he felt something plug his mouth, and something else crawl inside through it, beginning to eat his internal organs. Before long, he was dead.

The Lantern of Life ended there.

Lin Shou stared in astonishment. What had come out of the grave just before the man died? Had a ghost risen from the dead?

The fake Mountain Traveler had gone blind too quickly for Lin Shou to get any more useful information from the Lantern of Life.

The Yin-Yang Abacus clattered: heaven, earth, mystery, yellow—good prices all around.

Corpse valuation: Yellow-Grade, Ninth Rank.

The Record of Selling Corpses rewarded him with a mushroom said to strengthen a man's virility. Supposedly, after eating it, he could stay hard for three days. Lin Shou didn't need it, but it was neither here nor there.

More than the reward, he was curious about what he had seen in the Lantern of Life. Were there really monsters on An Mountain?

The next day, the old woman collected her son's corpse and took it home for burial. Lin Shou had spent the whole night puzzling over it without finding an answer, so he stopped fretting. An Mountain probably had nothing to do with him anyway.

He stepped outside in the morning and breathed out a puff of cold air. The weather in the Capital City had been turning colder lately; winter had arrived, and people on the street were wearing much thicker clothes. A couple of days ago, Ning Luowei had caught a cold when the weather changed.

Lin Shou also went to the Cloth Market and picked up a few thick cotton-padded coats. Winters in the north were cold, and in those days there was no air conditioning or underfloor heating. People got through winter with padded clothes, stoves, and heated brick beds.

In the dead of winter, you heated some water, curled up at the head of the bed, wrapped yourself in a quilt, and basked in the warmth rising from the fire underneath. Pure comfort.

Heating in the Capital City was done with coal. Lin Shou checked how much was left in the shop. When the weather grew colder, he would have to buy a batch at the market—enough to last through the whole winter.

Without coal, the northern winter could freeze a person to death.

When changing the water in his fish tank today, Lin Shou noticed that several of his koi had died. Could even cold-water fish not withstand this weather? Would a deeper tank be better in cold weather?

With fewer fish, the tank looked dull and lifeless, and even the feng shui of the Azure Dragon Position had weakened a little. His cultivation of the Classic of Burial had slowed down too.

Lin Shou just couldn't feel right about it. Fine, he'd go to the Bird Market today and buy a few more fish.

The Capital City's Bird Market was also a place where the hobbyists went to show off their prized toys.

Although it was called the Bird Market, it didn't only sell birds. Flowers, birds, fish, and insects were all there; "Bird Market" was just a catchall name. These days, people kept cats and dogs as pets, but in the past, that wasn't a thing. When people talked about keeping pets back then, they mostly meant keeping birds.

In ancient times, there was even a saying for the daily life of a spoiled young dandy: "Carry a cage and stroll with your bird." That showed how much they loved keeping birds.

Hunters who caught fine birds or small animals would bring them to the Bird Market and set up a stall. Wealthy young masters would see a bird they liked—a thrush with a curved jade-colored stripe, or a waxbill with a bright yellow crest—and gladly pay for it. If they came across someone willing to spend freely, they could make a fortune. There were even people whose trade was traveling from place to place, catching rare birds and animals.

It was a pastime for the wealthy, who were happy to spend money on rare and precious breeds. They loved competing with each other: today, I see your little bird is fine; tomorrow, I'll buy one even finer.

As long as people kept competing, bird catchers would always have business.

Put simply, it was a way to show off wealth—but it was much more satisfying than flaunting watches and cars these days. No matter how fine your watch or car was, it was an industrial product: if they could make one, they could make another. But a rare, precious little creature might be the only one of its kind under heaven.

You had one, and no one else did. Every time you showed it off, you could really gloat.