Born a Cicada, Buried a Chrysalis!

Li Xiang paled in shock and instinctively tried to close his mouth.

The thing was slick beyond belief. With a fierce burrowing force, it pried his teeth apart in an instant and shot straight down his throat.

A cold, slippery sensation swept down his esophagus. Then a burning heat exploded in his stomach.

"Urgh!"

Li Xiang sprang from his chair, bent over, and desperately stuck his fingers down his throat. The irritation brought tears to his eyes.

He had dug that thing out of a female corpse's throat. Who knew whether it carried Corpse Poison or a curse?

But no matter how hard he retched, he brought up nothing but two mouthfuls of sour fluid. The Golden Cicada had vanished like a hidden dragon slipping into the sea, never to return.

Just as Li Xiang's heart hammered and he feared the thing would tear its way out through his belly, the burning in his stomach vanished. In its place came a warm, mellow current.

It spread swiftly through his meridians to every limb and bone, then settled in his abdomen and made itself at home.

"Grrr..." His stomach growled at the worst possible moment.

Li Xiang paused, then rubbed his belly with a wry smile.

The Golden Cicada had entered his stomach. Not only had it spared his life, it had left him feeling a hunger unlike anything he had ever known.

Had I been infected by a parasite?

The Golden Cicada had not truly fused with him. It remained a foreign thing inside his body.

"Great. I've got a freeloader living in my gut."

Li Xiang took a deep breath. Since it was here, he would deal with it. As long as he was alive, there was a way.

He turned and went into the back kitchen.

"At this point, I might as well eat first."

A few fresh scallions and a small piece of pork leaf fat remained on the cutting board. He had meant to eat them the next morning.

Li Xiang picked up the kitchen knife.

"Tok, tok, tok, tok..."

The rhythmic sound of chopping scallions rang through the quiet shop.

The knife flashed, leaving the scallions evenly chopped, their green and white pieces distinct.

[Chopped an ingredient once. Cook experience +1]

He set a wok on the stove and lit the fire.

[Lit a cooking fire once. Cook experience +1]

He cut the leaf fat into small pieces and tossed them into the hot wok. With a sizzle, a rich, savory aroma filled the room.

[Chopped an ingredient once. Cook experience +1]

He rendered the lard, fried the scallions in it, and cooked the noodles.

The simplest bowl of noodles became a taste of heaven, thanks to his precise control of the heat.

Li Xiang picked up the steaming bowl and ate in great gulps.

Hot broth slid down his throat and filled the emptiness in his stomach. The solid feeling of being alive slowly eased his taut nerves.

[Completed one cooking session. Cook experience +1]

[Cook level increased to Lv5]

[Unlocking Profession Ability...]

[Profession Ability acquired: Hundred-Flavor Tongue]

[Hundred-Flavor Tongue: Your tongue has become more sensitive. You can accurately identify ingredients, judge heat control, and assess the freshness of food.]

The prompts flashed through his mind. As Li Xiang slurped his noodles, his tongue grew more discerning. He could taste that the flour was old and that a little membrane still clung to the pork fat.

Full and content, Li Xiang licked his lips and turned his mind once more to the Book of a Hundred Trades.

The information under [Embalmer] had refreshed.

[Profession: Embalmer]

[Level: Lv10 (13/100)]

[Rank: Rank 0]

[Profession Trait: Corpse Sense (Beginner)]

[Profession Abilities: Rest in Peace; Soul-Summoning Hand]

[Notice: Embalmer has reached Lv10. Profession routes unlocked.]

The words on the page twisted and rearranged themselves, finally becoming five distinct branches, like five roads leading to different fates.

[Route One: Gravekeeper]

Prerequisite Professions: Embalmer Lv10; Night Watchman Lv10

Unlocking Ritual: Find a mass grave where more than a hundred people have been buried.

On a moonless night, enter alone with a lantern and an iron shovel. From sunset to sunrise, ensure that no corpse rises and leaves the graveyard. You must also prevent any living creature from entering and disturbing the dead.

During the vigil, neither foot may step outside the graveyard, and you may not speak a single word.

Description: Inherits the Embalmer's power to soothe ghosts and the Night Watchman's keen awareness in the dark.

A Gravekeeper is no longer limited to tending individual corpses, but claims an entire area as their domain.

Within your graveyard, you are the sole king.

Any corpse that stands without permission will be smacked back into the earth by the shovel in your hands.

Any living person who dares trespass will lose their way in the mist of the Ghost Wall and eventually become fertilizer for the graveyard.

Assessment: Spend too long as a Gravekeeper, and you will grow ever more withdrawn. You will stop wanting to speak to the living and may even come to believe the dead are the only honest friends.

[Route Two: Paper Effigy Maker]

Prerequisite Professions: Embalmer Lv10; Painter Lv10

Unlocking Ritual: On a Yin Year, Yin Month, Yin Day, use paper made from human skin to fashion a life-size effigy. At the Third Quarter of the Zi Hour, take up a Cinnabar Brush and paint in its eyes.

After painting the eyes, sit facing the effigy all night. No matter what sounds you hear or how the effigy moves, you must not speak, move, or extinguish the lamp.

When dawn comes and the lamp goes out, the effigy will turn to ash, and the Profession will be yours.

Description: Yin and yang flow together; the false becomes indistinguishable from the true. A paper horse can run. A paper knife can kill. A paper person... can sometimes seem more human than a living one.

Assessment: Never forget: paint eyes on a paper effigy, but not a mouth. Give it a mouth and it will eat people. Draw its bones, but not its heart. Give it a heart and it will turn into a ghost. Do not grow too attached to your creations. When your house is filled with paper people, can you be sure... that you are still alive?

[Route Three: Underworld Matchmaker]

Prerequisite Professions: Embalmer Lv10; Matchmaker Lv10

Unlocking Ritual: Find the bodies of an unmarried man and woman who both died violent deaths. At midnight, prepare a wedding hall, dress the two corpses in bridal finery, and officiate their ghost marriage as witness. Continue until the rooster crows at dawn and the pact is sealed.

Description: By forging ghost-marriage pacts, you can force vicious ghosts that once had no reason to fight for you.

The red thread in your hand ties a living person at one end and a malicious ghost at the other.

You also wield tremendous authority over enemies of the spirit kind. Your words can soothe raging ghosts or drive them into a frenzy in an instant.

Assessment: A melon forced from the vine won't be sweet, but a ghost forced into marriage... will be fierce indeed.

[Route Four: Corpse Poisoner]

Prerequisite Professions: Embalmer Lv10; Gardener Lv10

Unlocking Ritual: Collect nine kinds of highly poisonous seeds and plant them in the belly of a plague victim who has only recently died. Keep watch beside the corpse day and night, watering it with your own blood until it rots away completely and a bewitching corpse flower blooms in its place.

Description: You excel at growing strange magical plants on corpses. You can instantly catalyze bodies on the battlefield, making them burst into clouds of poisonous spores or sprout thorny vines that entangle enemies.

A hundred poisons flow through your blood, and your breath carries a sweet, hallucinogenic scent.

To you, death is not the end. It is the beginning of fertilizer.

Assessment: The most beautiful flowers often bloom from the filthiest rotting flesh.

[Feng Shui Master]

Prerequisite Professions: Embalmer Lv10; Fortune Teller Lv10

Unlocking Ritual: Find a Corpse-Nurturing Ground or Extinction Point where yin and yang converge, yet great misfortune gathers. Dressed in burial clothes and gripping the Altar-Sealing Wood, seal yourself in a coffin and bury it seven feet underground. Spend the first seven days after your burial shut away without daylight, food, or water.

Description: Qi scatters when it rides the wind and stops when it meets water. The ancients gathered it so it would not scatter and guided it so it would come to rest. Thus they called it Feng Shui.

In this Age of Chaos, where the rules have crumbled, Feng Shui Masters do far more than inspect homes and survey land.

They listen to the earth's pulse and command their surroundings.

They can see the blood of the earth's veins flowing through mountains and rivers, and glimpse the rotten foundations hidden beneath a thriving city.

Assessment: There were no roads in this world to begin with. Once enough people walked them, they threw the Feng Shui into disarray.

"Sure enough, every Embalmer route tied to ghosts and gods is a little absurd."

Li Xiang's gaze swept back and forth across the five routes.

A Gravekeeper could claim a graveyard as his kingdom and steal the power its occupants had possessed in life. The stronger they had been, the stronger the power he could use. Unfortunately, it was too restrictive. He could only wield its full strength within the graveyard.

A Paper Effigy Maker could craft paper people to fight. The ritual required a Yin Year, Yin Month, Yin Day. This year happened to be a Yin Year, and in another month it would be a Yin Month and Yin Day. He could meet the requirement.

An Underworld Matchmaker officiated ghost marriages and linked yin and yang. That was a vicious one, but its unlocking ritual was far too dangerous.

A Corpse Poisoner had a hundred poisons flowing through his blood. He would turn himself into a poisonous man.

A Feng Shui Master had to spend seven days in a Corpse-Nurturing Ground or Extinction Point where yin and yang converged amid great misfortune.

The first four routes were either too restrictive, too extreme, or too conspicuous. Only the fifth Profession, [Feng Shui Master], seemed suited to an ordinary person. It offered both offense and defense, and compared with simply dealing with corpses, a Feng Shui Master would plainly be more sought after by the powerful.

"A Fortune Teller, huh..."

Li Xiang rubbed his chin.

The barrier to that Profession was low. He could set up a street stall and earn experience.

"That settles it. I'll try this route first."

"If it doesn't work out, I can always switch Professions."

"With the Book of a Hundred Trades, I have an advantage over ordinary people when it comes to unlocking new Professions."

"To be safe, I'll unlock Painter too. More skills never hurt. Even if I don't need Paper Effigy Maker, Painter might serve as a prerequisite for another Profession later."

With that thought, Li Xiang, exhausted from the long day, fell into a deep sleep. His breathing grew slow and even. He had no idea that something was changing inside him.

The Golden Cicada dormant in his abdomen entered a state of activity in time with his breathing.

"Bzz—"

An exceedingly faint cicada cry vibrated within him. It never escaped his body, but his flesh and blood resonated with it.

The pores across Li Xiang's body slowly opened. Countless golden filaments, hundreds or thousands of times finer than a strand of hair, seeped out from beneath his skin.

These Golden Threads were no lifeless objects. They swam and intertwined in the air, shedding a soft, mysterious glow.

The Golden Threads flew like shuttles, weaving silently around Li Xiang's body.

They began at his fingers, moved over his limbs, and finally spread across his torso and head.

Any expert in tomb raiding who saw him would have fallen to their knees and kowtowed in terror.

This was no ordinary sleeping man. It was the highest standard of imperial burial attire: a Gold-Thread Jade Suit.

According to ancient legend, jade could seal in the breath, while gold could preserve the body forever.

Ancient emperors were obsessed with eternal life. They firmly believed that if gold thread joined pieces of jade around their bodies after death, it would trap their last trace of vital essence and keep their flesh from decaying for a thousand years.

They waited in their dark, cold tombs for that elusive moment of "shedding their mortal shells and ascending to immortality," as though surviving death's long night would let them become undying gods and rise into the nine heavens.

But those emperors had rotted inside their jade suits all the same, leaving only heaps of dry bones.

Li Xiang was different. He was alive.

As the Golden Threads wound around him, his skin took on a translucent quality in their shimmering light, like creamy white jade. It truly seemed as clear and lustrous as the jade pieces themselves.

The Golden Threads wound closer and closer together until they had completely wrapped Li Xiang in a human chrysalis glowing faintly gold.

Born a cicada, buried a chrysalis, rising from the earth to emerge with wings...

The next morning, the rain had passed and the sky was clear.

Li Xiang felt refreshed from head to toe, without the slightest discomfort.

He had barely opened the Shroud Shop when a handcart stopped at the door.

Two people had come, one old and one young.

The older man's face was lined with wrinkles. He was a porter helping pull the cart.

The younger one was about seventeen or eighteen. He wore a student uniform faded pale from repeated washing and round-framed glasses. He was thin, and a stubborn grief burned in his eyes.

He was the son of the beheaded man whose body Li Xiang had stitched up yesterday. His name was Shao Shan.

"Boss Li, I've come to take my father home."

Shao Shan's voice was hoarse and his eyes red. He had clearly cried all night.

Li Xiang nodded without saying much and led him into the room where the body lay.

When Shao Shan saw his father's body, neatly stitched together with scarcely a mark visible on the neck, his rigid frame shuddered. Tears broke free at once. He dropped to his knees with a thud and knocked his forehead hard against the floor three times.

"Dad, I've failed you..."

His anguished sobs echoed through the alley in the morning light.

Li Xiang stood to one side, quietly watching as he rolled two iron walnuts used for strengthening his fingers in his hand.

When Shao Shan had cried his fill and risen, he took a crumpled cloth bundle from inside his coat. It held a large handful of copper coins.

"Boss Li, here's the rest of the money. Please count it."

"No need." One glance told Li Xiang there was probably more than enough. He took only half the agreed amount and pushed the rest back.

"Your father was a brave man. Keep the rest to buy him some paper money for his journey."

Shao Shan paused, then bowed deeply.

"Thank you, Boss Li."

Together, they carried the body onto the handcart.

Before they left, the old porter who had stayed beside Shao Shan sighed and urged him, "Shan, listen to your uncle. Bury your father and live a peaceful life back home.

"Your father lost his life over that... that revolution business. Why put yourself through the same thing?"

Shao Shan's hands stopped tying the rope. He looked up sharply, his still-youthful face set with resolve.

"Peaceful? Where can anyone live in peace these days?"

He pointed north and said through gritted teeth, "The Warlords are fighting one another, the remnants of the old dynasty are making monsters of themselves even in death, and foreign powers treat us like pigs and dogs. My father died trying to awaken the people.

"I'll finish what he couldn't!

"I'll do what he never got to do!"

"I'm heading south to help build the Great Xin Dynasty's rise!"

"Oh, my little ancestor!" The old porter was so frightened he reached to cover Shao Shan's mouth. "You're marching straight to your death! There's a war in the South. If anything happens to you, your family line will end with you."

Shao Shan shoved the old porter's hand away and glanced back at his father's corpse on the handcart, his eyes blazing.

"Death? I'm not afraid to die!"

The boy straightened his back.

"My teacher said a true man can be buried anywhere. If my death can bring clarity to this troubled world, then for every Shao Shan who falls, thousands upon thousands more will rise!"

With that, he took up the handcart and walked into the morning mist without looking back.

Li Xiang stood in the doorway, watching the boy's figure vanish at the end of the alley as he gently turned the iron-gall walnuts in his hand.

"A true man can be buried anywhere... Tsk. Young people burn so hot."

He shook his head. His tone was teasing, but there was no mockery in it.

In this world, some sought eternal life, while others went willingly to their deaths.

Who was nobler than whom?