A Date with a Zombie

Qin Zhong wiped the sweat from his forehead and chuckled under his breath. "That gentleman was in a good mood today. On top of the five silver dollars we agreed on, he tipped me another one."

"Since you're here to share the luck, dinner's on me tomorrow. I'll treat you to a feast."

As he spoke, he parked the Rickshaw, grabbed the white towel around his neck, and gave the sweaty grime there a rough wipe.

Li Xiang said nothing. He just watched him quietly.

As Qin Zhong drew closer, a scent drifted into Li Xiang's nose on the night breeze—a peculiarly distinctive scent.

It was a jumble of smells.

There was the strong reek of sweat on Qin Zhong, the dampness of late-night dew, and the machine oil from the Rickshaw's bearings.

But beneath them all lurked a faint yet piercing odor.

It was... the smell of earth.

Not the dust found on any roadside, nor the fresh fragrance of soil after rain.

He had smelled it on Shopkeeper Sun of Ink Fragrance Studio in the antiques street. The scent on Shopkeeper Sun had been faint, and he had used agarwood to cover it.

On Qin Zhong, it was fresh, as though he had only just picked it up at the source.

It was the smell of a Fresh Burial Pit.

"Senior Brother Qin."

Li Xiang spoke suddenly, stopping Qin Zhong just as he was about to fetch water to wash his feet.

"Hm? What is it?" Qin Zhong stopped, looking puzzled.

Li Xiang walked slowly up to him. His gaze fell on the yellow mud coating Qin Zhong's thick-soled cloth boots, then on the splatters across his trouser legs.

"That job of yours didn't take you into town, did it?"

Li Xiang's voice was calm, yet it made Qin Zhong's heart flutter for no apparent reason.

"Ah, don't get me started."

Qin Zhong grumbled, "I don't know what got into that gentleman tonight. He insisted on circling around the mass grave west of town, said he had a friend to pick up there."

"You have no idea how rotten the roads are out west. Potholes everywhere. And the fog was thick tonight—all red fog. I nearly ran my lungs to pieces."

"West of town?" Li Xiang's gaze sharpened. "The mass grave?"

"Somewhere around there." Qin Zhong patted his chest. "That place gives me the creeps."

Li Xiang reached out and lightly patted Qin Zhong's shoulder, then pinched a little dark-red powder from his collar.

He brought it to his nose and sniffed.

Cinnabar.

Specially prepared cinnabar mixed with rooster blood, black dog blood, and powder from lightning-struck wood, used to seal coffins and suppress Baleful Intent.

"That friend you picked up tonight didn't say anything, did he?" Li Xiang asked.

"Huh? That's uncanny!"

Qin Zhong's eyes widened. "How did you know? The gentleman's friend was a strange one. Wrapped head to toe in a black cloak, didn't make a sound the whole time. Cold as ice, too, and dead heavy—heavier than a two-hundred-pound fat man!"

"I was going to ask if he was sick, but the gentleman told me to keep my mouth shut and just pull the rickshaw."

Qin Zhong shuddered at the memory as he spoke. "With that fellow sitting in the rickshaw, it felt like I was hauling a block of ice. Chills kept running down my back."

Li Xiang looked at Qin Zhong's guileless face, so utterly unaware, and sighed inwardly.

Qin Zhong was lucky his fate was tough enough to withstand it.

An ordinary rickshaw puller would have come down with a serious illness after hauling a load like that. He might even have lost half his life.

"Senior Brother Qin, take off your shoes." Li Xiang pointed at Qin Zhong's feet.

"Huh? I only bought these shoes recently..."

"You can't keep them." Li Xiang cut him off. "And those clothes—you'd best take them off right now and burn them in the stove."

"Why?" Qin Zhong protested. "What a waste!"

Li Xiang did not explain. He crouched and ran two fingers through a smear of blue-gray muck stuck to the sole of Qin Zhong's boot.

Then he held his fingers up to Qin Zhong.

"Smell."

Qin Zhong leaned in for a sniff. His brow knotted at once, and he clapped a hand over his nose.

"Ugh... What is that stink? It smells like... like a dead rat rotting in a drain! Sour and foul!"

"That isn't ordinary mud."

Li Xiang stood and took a handkerchief from inside his clothes to wipe his fingers.

"It's Green Paste Mud, also called Preservative Soil."

"You only find this stuff beneath the sealing earth of deep tombs where people have been buried for hundreds of years at least—in what we commonly call ancient tombs."

Li Xiang's voice rang unusually clear in the still night.

"This mud has soaked in corpse fluids and preservative mercury for years. Its yin energy is heavy. Once it gets on you, it clings like a maggot to the bone. It'll bring you bad luck and slowly eat away at your yang energy."

Qin Zhong went pale. He instinctively took a step back and nearly fell onto his backside.

"An... ancient tomb?" His voice trembled. "You're saying... that old friend I hauled tonight was... dug out of a grave?"

"I don't know whether he crawled out himself, but that soil definitely came from down there."

Li Xiang looked at Qin Zhong and spoke the underworld term that made people's blood run cold.

"Senior Brother Qin, you certainly earned a lot of silver dollars tonight."

"Because you weren't hauling a living person, or an ordinary dead one."

"On that trip, you helped those tomb robbers transport a load from a Fresh Burial Pit."

"The corpse aura mixed into that earthy smell is called Earth Infusion in the trade."

"You didn't just haul tomb robbers. You hauled a big rice dumpling, too."

Qin Zhong was stunned.

He was not in the trade, but living in such troubled times, he knew a thing or two.

He knew exactly what "big rice dumpling" meant.

A zombie!

A corpse risen from the dead!

"What did I do to deserve this?"

Qin Zhong looked ready to cry. He fumbled frantically at his shoes and clothes. "Burn them. I have to burn them."

"And one more thing..." Li Xiang looked at the Rickshaw parked in the courtyard. "You'll have to replace the seat cushion too. More of that stuff got on it than on you."

Qin Zhong nodded over and over, like a pestle pounding garlic.

Li Xiang watched Qin Zhong scramble about, but his thoughts had turned elsewhere.

The mass grave west of town. Green Paste Mud. A big rice dumpling.

And that mysterious employer.

It seemed there was even more going on beneath Linjiang County than above it.

But why choose Crimson Night?

Tomb robbers transporting goods usually feared a corpse rising. Zombies were at their most vicious on Crimson Night, yet these people had done the opposite of what anyone would expect. Far from fearing it, they had deliberately chosen that time.

"The fifteenth of every month..."

A passage about secrets of the former dynasty surfaced in Li Xiang's mind, from his grandfather's Hall of Peace Notes.

Zombies had not existed before the Demon Dynasty.

They were abominations created by the Demon Dynasty's emperor, who had gathered strange talents from across the land in his pursuit of eternal life and an undying body.

Take the Gold-Thread Jade Suit mentioned earlier. It was a burial shroud reserved for emperors and feudal kings of the Divine Dynasty. Jade was believed to seal in breath, while gold was believed to endure forever, expressing their longing for eternal life.

The emperors and nobles of the Demon Dynasty had gone a step further. After death, most had themselves made into zombies and buried in places of extreme yin, where they absorbed the earth's energy and the moon's radiance as they awaited rebirth.

Were they... refining a corpse?

A terrifying thought surfaced in Li Xiang's mind.

Had those people chosen this time to transport their cargo so they could refine the corpse with moonlight?

But when he thought of the newspaper report about the captain of the Blackwater and considered what he had just seen, another possibility seemed more likely.

Could this be tied to some mysterious Profession's advancement ritual again?

In this world, whenever strange behavior was mysterious and impossible to explain, nine times out of ten it could be traced back to a Profession's advancement ritual.