Volume 1 Chapter 001 The Female Corpse Enters the Door
Our family's business is rather weird. We make money from dead people.
In ancient times, the punishment was very harsh, such as burning with fire, beheading, quartering, and being torn apart by five horses. Needless to say, the corpses left behind were horrible. And those of us who work in this field inevitably have to deal with such corpses.
For example, if someone was burned to death, they would first clean the body with clean water, then apply animal fat mixed with rouge on the body, and then draw the facial features. Beheading was more difficult, because sometimes the person could still struggle for a moment after being cut by the knife, and this moment was enough to mess up the body's internal organs. When cleaning up, the body had to be hollowed out, then filled with cotton or something like that, and then sewed up with shark thread.
Fortunately, by my generation, these kinds of tortures have long disappeared, otherwise it would be really annoying.
My name is Lu Jing. I grew up in a small mountain village. My family only has my uncle and I. My uncle's surname is Feng, and his name is Feng San. But everyone in the village calls him Feng Lao Gou. I don't know why. My uncle is not my biological uncle. I was given to him by someone else. As for my biological parents, he refused to tell me, and I didn't want to ask.
The business our family is engaged in is now called the funeral industry, but in the past, it did not have such a fancy name. It was called the business of taking on the dead, and the main business was to make up the corpses, perform rituals, and also check the feng shui.
The traditional Chinese idea is that the dead are the most important, and no matter how rich or poor one is, people are always willing to spend money on funeral affairs, so our family's income is generally acceptable. But people who work in this industry are always tabooed.
When I was a kid, the children in the village were warned by their parents not to get close to me. If they saw me, they should run away. It was really hard at that time. Every time I saw them playing marbles and skipping rubber ropes, I could only watch from afar. Later, when I went to school, no one wanted to sit with me.
Because of this, Uncle San once thought about changing his career, such as opening a small shop in the village, but due to various reasons, it was ultimately not realized.
After I was eight years old, I started helping my uncle, so the most common corpses I saw were all kinds of corpses. Some were strangled to death, some drowned in water, some were run over in car accidents, some were poisoned by drinking pesticides, some choked to death while eating, and some died of impotence during sex...
The most tragic case I have seen was a person who was run over by a train. His entire head was crushed off, and when he was buried, my uncle sewed a fake head out of cloth to replace it.
I heard that this was a bit evil. The person who died was a man named Wang Daming from our village. He was a smart guy and one of the first people from our village to go out and make a living. At that time, there was a train station near where he was doing business. There was often an old man with gray hair there who used a bird to tell fortunes.
That evening, Wang Daming was bored and went to join in the fun, but he drew a bad fortune, saying that he would have a bloody disaster within three days. Wang Daming was also a domineering person, so he flew into a rage on the spot, not only smashing the old man's stall, but also throwing the bird holding the fortune stick to the ground and stepping on it to death.
The old man refused to comply and went up to him to ask for compensation. Wang Daming pushed him away and ran away, but somehow he slipped and fell off the platform. At this moment, a train whizzed by.
In addition to this, I have also seen a one-year-old child being bitten to death by a wolf dog raised at home, a person being frightened to death while walking at night, and a person cutting his own neck with scissors...
With more exposure, many things become commonplace.
A few years later, I was twelve years old. One evening, I came back from school alone and found a truck from the village parked in front of my house. Many children were pointing and talking around, but when they saw me coming, they all dispersed.
I went back to the house and saw a few people walking out. The leader was a young man with a yellow face, frowning and depressed. He was handsome, but looked very bad. Behind him followed a few tall and strong men. They went back to the truck and lingered for a while, then lifted a coffin and put it in the main room of my house.
Although I was young, I could see something was amiss. In the past, when I went to funerals with my uncle, the bodies would stay at the funeral home for a few days at most before being cremated. But these people didn't stay at home to keep vigil, but instead sent the bodies to my house. There must be something wrong.
"I'll leave it to you." The sickly-looking young man bowed to my uncle, got into the car with the others, and left in a hurry.
After they left, I asked Uncle San if there was anything special about the corpse this time. Just like the last time when Wang Daming's body was brought back, it was sent directly to my house for us to sew a cloth head.
Uncle San went to close the door and said with a frown, "Damn it, these people demanded a burial!"
"Burial?" I was a little surprised. In recent years, cremation has also been promoted in rural areas, and most people choose to go to funeral homes. However, our area is a remote rural area after all, and the management is not too strict. From time to time, some people still secretly bury their dead.
This request is not excessive and is quite normal.
"Normal, what the hell!" Uncle San said with a dark face, "The coffining, the rituals and the burial are all left to us. They don't participate at all!"
I just can't understand this. Coffining, feng shui, and rituals are our responsibilities, but when it comes to burial, no matter what, the family of the deceased is the main character.
I went to see the coffin, and it was quite grand. The coffin was very thick, and judging by the grain, it was probably made of teak, so it must have cost a lot. The coffin lid was covered with yellow silk, densely written with prayers for the afterlife and some words of persuading people to abandon evil and do good. The ink line pressed down on the silk, and tied the coffin vertically.
"Damn, this is a coffin!" I noticed that the size of this coffin is more than one circle larger than the ordinary one. Except for those in the industry, most people can't tell the difference between coffin and outer coffin, and call them both coffins. In fact, the coffin is for the dead, and the outer coffin is put outside the coffin, usually used to hold burial objects.
I touched it with my hand and immediately pulled it back. The coffin was icy cold, and it seemed that there was something like ice in it.
"Look at this." Uncle San pointed at the ink line that tied the coffin. I didn't see anything special about it, but I thought the knot seemed to be quite special.
"Is your head filled with thoughts only about the girls in your class? This is called the Seven-Star Spin Buckle. Didn't I tell you?" Uncle San scolded.
"You've said so many things. If I remember them all, wouldn't that mean I'd go to heaven?"
When he said that, I remembered it. This is a knotting method for ink line, and only people in our industry know it. I was a little confused, because it means that our colleagues have already done it, so why did they come to us?
My third uncle asked me to step aside, and he pulled out a thread from somewhere, and in a few seconds he untied the ink line. He then worked with me to push the coffin lid open a little.
The coffin was tall and big, so I moved a chair over and curiously looked inside. It was freezing cold inside, no wonder there was a coffin, it turned out that the interlayer was used to store ice, which had melted a lot by now, leaving only some floating ice.
In the coffin lay the body of a little girl, who looked about my age. Because of the ice, the body looked like a living person. There were no black spots or rancidity, but instead there was a faint rotten fragrance. The little girl was wearing a bright red skirt, the fabric was very smooth, and looked like satin.
He was pretty, but his face was pale and his lips were black, but that was the way a dead person should look, nothing special about it.
I didn't see anything wrong.
Uncle San was sharp-eyed. He pointed at the neck of the corpse and asked, "What is that?"
I took a look and saw that the girl had long black hair, which was divided into two strands and combed neatly to cover her chest, just covering her neck. There was nothing wrong with this, as several girls in our class took care of their hair in this way.
My third uncle asked me to go in and check it out.
I didn't say anything, I put on a pair of gloves and swiftly climbed up the wall of the coffin to get in. I used to make up corpses and I've seen a lot of corpses. Besides, this coffin didn't have that unpleasant stench of decay, but instead had a nice fragrance, but it was a little cold, and it was chilly inside.
My third uncle asked me to part the hair of the corpse and take a look.
I did as I was told. I took a quick look and gasped. There was a circle of purple-red marks on the girl's snow-white neck, which was blocked by her hair. These were not marks left by something, but a circle of fine stitches.
This little girl's head is actually sewn on!
In the past, when there was still beheading, the heads of executed prisoners would be sewn back to their necks with needle and thread before being buried. After the Republic of China switched to execution by shooting, this kind of thing was rarely seen. But it cannot be said that it was completely unheard of. Two years ago, we took over a business. The victim died in a car accident, and the man's head was sewn back by Uncle San stitch by stitch.
But the skin of this body was intact all over, so it was impossible that he had been in a car accident.
Uncle San asked me to take off the clothes on the body. I looked at him awkwardly. This behavior was considered as indecent assault on the body, which was absolutely not allowed in our industry.
