Corpse Retriever

The woman slowly straightened up, lifting Zhao Hequan by the neck as if he weighed nothing.

She brought her face closer, as though scrutinizing him.

Gradually, black spots began to bloom on Zhao Hequan’s neck—exactly where her hand gripped him—and quickly spread over his entire body.

These spots began to swell and merge, forming clusters of black pustules. Each cluster bulged at the center, leaking pus that trickled down his body, collecting around his dangling feet before dripping onto the ground.

Yet Zhao Hequan didn’t cry out or struggle. It was as if he was still sound asleep.

It was Li Zhuiyuan who suddenly felt a foreboding chill twist through his chest. If touching this woman meant being infected and rotted alive, then what about the two scraps of her flesh that had fallen on his face earlier?

His face had begun to itch.

He concentrated—yes, it was real itching, not just nerves.

But no matter how unbearable it got, Li Zhuiyuan didn’t dare lift a hand to scratch.

Then, using only her left hand, the woman hoisted Zhao Hequan sideways beside her. The contrast was stark—her physique was absurdly tall and strong.Earlier, Li Zhuiyuan had been too stunned by her sudden appearance and their eye contact to register it, but now he saw it clearly: the woman’s build was more statue than human, like one of those temple effigies.

She must have found the one she was looking for, because she began walking toward the base of the embankment, carrying Zhao Hequan like a sack.

Her stride was steady, eyes fixed ahead.

Halfway down, though, her body kept moving forward—but her head snapped sideways at a ninety-degree angle and looked straight at him.

A jolt shot through Li Zhuiyuan.

She was still watching him!

The woman kept her eyes locked on him as she moved, only vanishing from sight when she descended the embankment.

The itching on his face persisted.

Li Zhuiyuan remained still, eyelids slightly cracked open.

Time lost its meaning—he had no idea how long he’d been lying there. He just kept holding his pose, refusing to move.

Suddenly—

In the lower-left edge of his field of vision, that gore-slathered face lunged into view.

Like someone who’d walked out the door and remembered something, her body remained outside while her neck craned back, peeking in.

Those two rows of white teeth were the only clear feature of her face.

The teeth were slightly parted—if he mentally filled in the missing flesh, the expression would be a smile.

As if to say:

Heh—

Just checking if you’re really asleep.

This time, though, Li Zhuiyuan wasn’t frightened. He’d seen it coming.

The lingering cold around him hadn’t lifted. That meant she hadn’t gone far. She was still nearby.

He could picture her clearly—just standing there at the foot of the embankment.

Liu Jinxia had warned him: things like this, the unclean things, grew deeply interested in those who could see them. That’s why even if you did see them, you had to pretend you hadn’t.

Finally, the oppressive aura lifted. The cold receded. The summer night’s heat returned, and the evening breeze brought fresh air again.

It felt like walking out of a freezer—both his body and spirit began to thaw.

Which made his face itch even worse.

At that moment, just being able to scratch it would have been the most satisfying thing in the world.

Still, Li Zhuiyuan didn’t move.

His willpower had been stretched thin. His self-control was hanging by a thread. But somehow, he clung to inertia, keeping his previous posture and half-lidded eyes intact.

Then, out of nowhere, the cold returned—fast, fierce, and suffocating.

It wasn’t like being dragged back into the freezer.

It was as if the freezer had grown legs, opened its door, and swallowed him whole.

He heard two thuds behind him—footsteps—and the clear clink of iron chains.

In his peripheral vision, he saw a pair of feet appear directly in front of him, just past his line of sight. The feet were dripping pus.

Zhao Hequan’s feet.

He was still being held aloft by the woman.

Which meant she was right behind him now, terrifyingly close.

Still watching him.

At that moment, Li Zhuiyuan couldn’t understand her persistence.

Why, if she was so bent on testing him again and again, didn’t she just treat him like Zhao Hequan and haul him off too?

She had a free hand, didn’t she?

Then a thought struck him—something he’d overheard earlier that day. Two Haihe University students had smashed the chains on the Bodhisattva statue with a hammer.

That would have been Xue Liangliang and Zhao Hequan.

But the woman had only taken Zhao Hequan. Not Xue Liangliang.

Which meant she could only take one person this time?

Suddenly, everything clicked.

This was reverse competition.

The two contenders were him and Zhao Hequan. If he made a single misstep, the woman might drop Zhao Hequan and take him instead.

All her testing—those moments of uncanny staring—had been part of her calculation.

There was no way Li Zhuiyuan would sacrifice himself to save Zhao Hequan. If one of them had to go, he’d gladly nominate Zhao Hequan to go down with her.

After all, Zhao Hequan’s dreamland was America. Tough visa process, vast ocean—you could argue reincarnating straight there was a shortcut.

Toughing it out wasn’t pleasant. But reframed as a competition, this whole nightmare became a contest—and contests were Li Zhuiyuan’s home turf.

The cold came and went once more. The woman must’ve left again.

But Li Zhuiyuan remained exactly as he was.

He no longer cared whether the dream had ended or whether the woman would return. He simply held the pose, his eyes at the same half-lidded angle.

His face still itched. So he searched for another way to distract himself.

He began thinking about the calculations in Volume Eight of the Comprehensive Treatise on Yin-Yang Physiognomy. With nothing else to do—and too scared to try doing anything else—he figured he might as well keep studying.

Faces floated through his mind in rows, then began to blend.

Now, when a face appeared in his mind’s eye, it could be male or female, young or old.

On closer inspection, the eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, and ears all kept changing.

There was this game popular among girls in the capital these days—a sticker-doll game. You’d get a paper model of a person and a sheet of adhesive clothing, hairstyles, accessories. You could peel and stick to dress them up however you liked—a simple kind of paper doll.

Li Zhuiyuan felt like he was playing the same game now—but his face library was far more expansive than a mere sticker set.

As he kept playing, a thought crept into his mind:

Could he make one of those faces move?

Make it talk?

Volumes One through Seven of the Treatise were all rote memorization and calculations. Only by Volume Eight did it shift—from science into mysticism. And in that transition, the “mysticism” marked a threshold.

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