Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Lu Lingzhu hurriedly apologized. “Sorry about that. She just has no manners. I’ll teach her better. Qiao Moyu, what is wrong with you? Master brought us here to broaden our horizons, so don’t embarrass him!”

As she spoke, she dragged me backward and lowered her voice in a creepy whisper. “Wait, that’s not right. This corpse doesn’t have much baleful energy.”

Song Feifei looked just as confused.

“Why does Granny Liu look like that? Is she a mermaid?”

Liu Nengshan was furious.

“What mermaid? If you want to watch cartoons, go back to your city and watch them. This is not a place for you to play around!

“Master Jiang, what kind of people did you bring with you?”

I quickly apologized too. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Her brain doesn’t work too well. She was struck by lightning once.”

Song Feifei protested, “Wasn’t Lingzhu the one who got struck? You’re slandering me!”

“All of you, shut up!”

Lu Lingzhu dragged the two of us more than ten meters away. Then the three of us crouched beneath a bamboo tree and whispered among ourselves. “I feel like the corpse the Liu family is seeing and the corpse we’re seeing are not the same thing.”

Only then did it click for me.

“Oh, right. We all have yin-yang eyes. Jiang Haoyan, that bastard, said they were opening the coffin today, so this morning he mooched half a cup of my Yin-Yang Water. He can see spirits too.”

“Then that’s even stranger. Look at that corpse. It doesn’t have much baleful energy, and it doesn’t seem like a ghost is covering their eyes either. So why are they seeing something completely different from us?”

Lu Lingzhu rubbed her chin in thought.

“Could that friend of yours with the surname Chen have been detained by the villagers because he also ran his mouth and said the corpse looked like a fish?”

I shook my head.

“Probably not. The villagers can’t be that unreasonable.

“Let’s keep watching.”

Under normal circumstances, when bone collection turned up a Yinshen, the ways to deal with it were generally “carving,” “burning,” or “dissolving.”

“Carving” referred to the flesh-carving method. After everyone worked together to lift the remains out, the bone collector would use a knife to cut open the deceased’s clothes and then start scraping off the flesh. Once all the flesh had been scraped from the corpse, the bones would be washed with rice wine or tea water and placed into an urn.

“Burning” meant cremation. Since skin, muscle, and bone all had different melting points, the body would be burned until all the rotten flesh melted away and only the bones remained. Then the bones could be collected.

There was also the flesh-dissolving method, which used chemicals to rapidly dissolve the flesh.

The bone collector would first pour a disinfectant called compound coal tar alcohol solution into the coffin. Then clean water would be added in proportion to dilute it, until the liquid covered the entire corpse.

Next, any other miscellaneous objects in the coffin would be hooked out, leaving only the corpse behind. Finally, fifty kilograms of lime would be poured in. Once that was done, the coffin would be filled with water and the lid immediately sealed tight.

When limestone met water, it produced intense heat and thick smoke, then slowly cooled and solidified. That was the process of dissolving flesh.

After about twenty minutes, all the rotten flesh would dissolve, but the hair and clothing would remain unaffected.

Before we came yesterday, Old Zhou had repeatedly urged Jiang Haoyan to memorize all three methods. He’d even told us to bring lime, as if he’d known in advance that there would be a problem with the corpse.

“Jiang Haoyan is such a clean freak. There’s no way he’d pick the flesh off himself. Burning it is a pain too. We’d have to gather firewood forever. If you ask me, we should just use the chemicals and be done with it.”

Song Feifei rolled up her sleeves, looking eager to give it a try.

“I used to love doing chemistry experiments. Come on, let’s go help.”

With that, she stood and went over to pick up the bucket of disinfectant. Lu Lingzhu and I stayed crouched where we were.

“Jiang Haoyan, pour this in first-ah!”

The disinfectant in Song Feifei’s hands dropped to the ground, sending several withered yellow bamboo leaves flying nearby.

She stared at Jiang Haoyan with her mouth wide open and her eyes bulging, looking exactly like one of those cheap screaming rubber chickens.

Lu Lingzhu and I weren’t much better.

Lu Lingzhu’s eyes bulged like a toad’s. As for me, I remained as composed as if Mount Tai had collapsed before me, and only my violently trembling pupils revealed just how utterly shocked I was inside.

Jiang Haoyan was panting heavily, his face full of intoxicated bliss as he helped Liu Nengshan’s mother sit up in the coffin. Then he pinched her cheek with one hand-no, her fish gill.

“You’re so beautiful-”

Jiang Haoyan puckered his lips and lowered his head, kissing that wide, flat, rotting mouth.