Chapter 5

Lin Shou looked at the silver scattered across the floor and thought, Good heavens, I've become a money-printing machine, scattering coins everywhere.

This Paper-to-Silver Art was genuinely interesting.

The money it produced seemed to be real gold and silver, indistinguishable from official silver. Even the Silver Casting Workshop couldn't tell the difference.

But if that were all there was to it, Lin Shou would have achieved financial freedom with a single art. How could there be such a good thing falling from the sky?

He snapped his fingers. Sparks suddenly sprang up from the silver ingots strewn across the floor, and in an instant, they burned into wisps of green smoke, leaving not even a speck of ash.

Lin Shou immediately felt his heart grow light, his mind clear of desire, wanting nothing at all. The greed in his heart had been burned away completely.

This Paper-to-Silver Art produced Greed-Abstinence Silver.

It turned the greed in people's hearts into silver, then burned it all away. In truth, it was a method of cultivating one's character and nurturing one's nature.

What would happen if someone didn't burn this Greed-Abstinence Silver, but used it instead?

Greed for silver brought calamity. Great misfortune was sure to follow.

The sky was just beginning to lighten, and the watchman beat the drum for the fifth watch.

The breakfast stalls at Caishikou had set up along the street. Lin Shou also left the Corpse-Stitching Shop and went for a morning run around the execution grounds. Regular exercise was good for one's health.

Whenever the neighbors saw him, they retreated in fear, keeping a wide berth. They wondered what sort of fit the little fool from the Corpse-Stitching Shop had taken this time.

After his run, he found a breakfast stall, bought soy milk and a fried dough cake, and sat down to eat. By chance, he glanced at the stall owner and thought the man looked familiar.

Tsk, he remembered now.

Wasn't this the cook from Wealthy Master Gao's household?

The corpse Lin Shou had stitched up the night before last belonged to Wealthy Master Gao of Changchun Township, who had murdered his daughter in the middle of the night. The family cook had witnessed the crime, reported it to the authorities, and had Gao arrested. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

After Wealthy Master Gao died, his family fell into decline and dismissed all their servants and cooks. The cook lost his job, then set up a breakfast stall at Caishikou to sell fried dough cakes. That was how Lin Shou happened to run into him.

The events in the Lantern of Life weren't stories. They were major and minor events happening every day throughout the Capital City, the everyday lives of ordinary people.

This chance encounter made Lin Shou realize that though the Capital City was vast, the world was still made up of people. He wasn't completely disconnected from the people he'd seen in the Lantern of Life.

After finishing the crisp, fragrant fried dough cake and downing a steaming bowl of soy milk, Lin Shou's belly was full.

He wiped his mouth and slapped down three copper coins. They were the meal allowance the Bureau of Corpse Management gave its corpse stitchers. It was a little tight each month, but enough to get by.

Judging by the time, someone should soon come to claim the corpse in the Corpse-Stitching Shop. Just as Lin Shou was about to get up and head back,

a man stumbled out of the alley beside him, his steps unsteady. He walked right into the middle of Caishikou Street.

He lay down on the ground and died.

In the capital of the Great Jing Dynasty, in broad daylight, someone had suddenly dropped dead in the street, his body exposed in the busy market. Yet the surrounding townsfolk were unmoved, as if they'd grown numb to the sight.

Lin Shou took a look. The dead man's face was sallow, his body withered like a living corpse. He'd already been hollowed out. Lin Shou understood: the man had smoked himself to death.

In these turbulent times, human life was cheap. People dying was nothing unusual in and around the Capital City. Some smoked themselves to death; others, too poor to afford food, found a rope and hanged themselves. Such things happened all the time. People had grown used to them.

Look, there was even an old cripple with a cane, rummaging through the corpse's belongings for its felt hat. Autumn had passed, and winter was coming. A warm hat like that would come in handy.

Wait, that cripple looked familiar too. Wasn't he the corpse stitcher from Shop No. 6?

Lin Shou had seen him a few times. As far as he remembered, the old man with the bad leg had been a corpse stitcher for nearly a year. He'd been tough as nails and hadn't run into any trouble.

Lin Shou looked at the corpse in the street and the man picking over it, and sighed over the Great Jing Dynasty's reign of peace and prosperity and its simple, honest folk.

Then he went back to his Corpse-Stitching Shop.

The authorities took Rogue Wang's corpse away and buried it in a mass grave. This shameless rogue obviously hadn't been well liked; no one had come to arrange his funeral.

Even so, the authorities handled the entire process, from stitching up and dressing the corpse to burying it.

Lin Shou had always found this strange. People here attached excessive importance to funerals. Even corpses with no relatives to care for them were sent by the authorities to be stitched, placed in coffins, and buried.

It was all done as simply as possible, with rotten wooden coffins and burial in a mass grave, but the funeral rites were still complete. It was as if something terrible would happen if the whole burial process wasn't carried out.

The Imperial Medical Academy explained that it was to prevent corpse plagues. That was clearly a story to fool the common folk.

Lin Shou didn't believe stitching an arm or leg back onto a corpse and applying funeral makeup counted as disease prevention. If they really wanted to prevent an epidemic, they should burn the body.

Lin Shou shook his head. He knew too little for now, so he'd better keep his head down in the Corpse-Stitching Shop and slowly uncover the secrets of this world.

No corpse was brought in that night.

Other corpse stitchers would have been glad. Stitching corpses was risky, so a peaceful night earned them an extra day of life. It was a good thing.

But for Lin Shou, it wasn't.

He was hoping for a corpse to add to the Record of Selling Corpses. No corpse meant no earnings. The Bureau of Corpse Management was failing at its job.

In the middle of the night, Lin Shou lay on the cold platform where the corpses were kept, feeling cheated no matter how he looked at it.

Just as he was thinking this, he suddenly heard a bird's beak tapping at the door. A mournful announcement echoed through the night in the Capital City:

"Vacancy for a corpse stitcher at Shop No. 6! Vacancy for a corpse stitcher at Shop No. 6!..."

Someone had died at a Corpse-Stitching Shop again.

Hearing the Obituary Bird outside, Lin Shou jolted and sat up on the cold platform.

It wasn't that another corpse stitcher had died. People dying in the shops was the norm; he was used to it.

The problem was that it was Shop No. 6. He'd seen the man that very morning—the old cripple who'd taken the dead man's felt hat. Was it a coincidence?

The next day, just as dawn was breaking and the ghosts were baring their teeth,

Lin Shou got up early from the cold platform, put up the door panels, and left the Corpse-Stitching Shop. He followed the street from Caishikou to Shop No. 6.

Two clerks from the Bureau of Corpse Management were already there. They were the same two men who'd handled Shop No. 20 last time.

The two men remembered Lin Shou too; they'd only seen him the day before yesterday. They spotted him from a distance and called him over to help.

They went through the familiar routine. A basin of scalding dog's blood was thrown into the Corpse-Stitching Shop. Lin Shou poked his head in and took a look.

The old cripple's corpse lay across the shop, its skull missing.

There was only one corpse, and the cold platform was empty.

"Shop No. 6 wasn't assigned a corpse last night," the two clerks said from outside.

The man hadn't met with disaster because of his work stitching corpses.

Hearing this, Lin Shou fell into thought. He looked at the bloodied head, then searched the Corpse-Stitching Shop carefully. Sure enough, he couldn't find the felt hat the old cripple had taken the day before.

"Sir, I saw something yesterday. I don't know if it has anything to do with this..."

"Go ahead."

Lin Shou told them how he'd seen the old cripple taking a dead man's felt hat at the breakfast stall the day before.

The two clerks seemed to understand immediately when they heard about it. They had Lin Shou lead them to the dead man's home.

When Lin Shou brought the two clerks to the alley, that family was holding a funeral beneath a mourning tent. The corpse lay in its coffin.

Lin Shou peered in. The felt hat the old cripple should have taken was sitting neatly on the corpse's head.

One of the Bureau of Corpse Management clerks said, "Pardon me." He straightened his official robes as if his rank could ward off evil spirits, then reached out with his other hand to lift the corpse's felt hat.

Beneath the felt hat lay the cripple's stolen skull.