Chapter 13: The Freeloader

Spending silver, receiving an unclaimed corpse.

The corpse from the government office jail before him was only wrapped in a piece of tattered cloth. According to the runners, this person had died out of fear of punishment, committing suicide in the jail at night.

But when Xu Qing unfolded the tattered cloth, he found that the corpse inside was stark naked, without even a scrap of cloth to cover its navel.

Looking at the person's posture—hands hugging knees, curled into a ball—it was clearly death by freezing and starvation, not death out of fear of punishment!

Holding the idea of exploring the truth, Xu Qing reached out to touch the other person, attempting to awaken the Immortal Book of Salvation to read their life story.

But to Xu Qing's utter astonishment, the Scripture of Salvation in his mind had no reaction at all.

Where exactly had things gone wrong?

Could it be that this corpse was fake?

Xu Qing instantly ruled out this possibility. Even if one were to fake a human body, it could never be achieved for four taels of silver, let alone sold to him here!

Then it could only be that his method of transcendence was wrong.

Carefully recalling the process of transcending corpses in the past, Xu Qing suddenly had an epiphany.

When he transcended the corpse-workers at the Cui family mill, those corpse-workers were no different from ordinary corpses on the outside.

The only difference was that to refine a complete corpse-worker, one had to go through layers of procedures like the Soul-Returning Curse and the Corpse-Raising Curse, and finally, a special type of walking-corpse talisman had to be drawn on the body to give the corpse a programmed consciousness for working.

Ordinary corpses, without being processed, would have their souls leave the body and gradually dissipate after a short time.

Even when he transcended Liu Youdao, it was because the person was near death and the soul hadn't left the body yet, which was why he could transcend him.

As for the previous Master Liu, it was because Liu Youdao had already harbored the intention of digging up his grave and refining him into a corpse-worker for secondary profit before setting up the mourning hall.

By the time Xu Qing went to the Liu residence, Master Liu had already been cast with the Corpse-Driving Curse and was in a state of soul-returning sealing.

After reviewing his past transcendence experiences, Xu Qing seemed to have discovered the problem.

The corpse before him, dead from freezing and starvation, had clearly been dead for longer than the period during which the soul lingers.

In other words, he needed to summon the soul before he could transcend it.

With a solution, Xu Qing was inexplicably excited.

This might be his first time raising a corpse since becoming a corpse-driver!

Closing the shop door and lighting a stick of spiritual incense, after his mood calmed down, Xu Qing took the items needed for corpse-driving, put on fish-skin gloves for protection, and laid them out in a row on the edge of the wooden bed.

Soul-summoning bell, corpse-driving whip, ink-line, bagua mirror, and red brush, cinnabar, and purple smoke furnace.

Regardless of whether they were useful or not, just one glance at them would make both laymen and experts call it authentic!

Look at these tools; the treasures collected over a lifetime of corpse-driving were probably just this much, and he had brought them all out!

"Green protects the soul, white serves the spirit, red nourishes the qi, black connects the blood. Other souls stay away, dead souls do not leave. Listen quietly to my curse, residual spirits enter dreams, heaven's gate opens, earth's gate opens, golden sparrow becomes spirit, wandering soul returns to see the body, thousand-mile soul-binding syndrome, quickly enter the true nature!"

Taking out the soul-summoning bell and chanting the Soul-Returning Curse from the Thirty-Six Corpse-Driving Curses, when the bell and the curse reached a certain frequency, a gust of yin wind suddenly blew in through the windows and door cracks of the mortuary shop. The invisible and colorless wind swirled, found its direction, and finally landed on the unclaimed corpse.

The next moment, the curled-up, stiff corpse on the wooden bed suddenly trembled, emitting a crisp sound of bones stretching and shifting.

When the sound stopped and the limbs were completely flattened, the unclaimed corpse suddenly opened its gray-white eyes, and a hoarse, astringent sound like a turning windlass came from its mouth.

"Cold, so cold! Lend me your skin to wear."

The strange occurrence happened suddenly. Xu Qing, caught off guard, was so scared that his zombie hair almost stood on end. The Thirty-Six Corpse-Driving Curses didn't say that the corpse would talk after the ritual!

Seeing the corpse on the bed suddenly pop up its arms and reach out to claw his skin, Xu Qing almost instinctively threw a punch!

Followed by a second punch, a third punch, a rain of punches!

Only after shaking the bed and beating the 'pretending to be a ghost' corpse until it twitched did Xu Qing stop.

"That's it?"

Reaching out to pin the twitching frozen corpse under him, the Scripture of Salvation in Xu Qing's mind began to turn pages.

The corpse's name was Qu Zhicai, originally a romantic guest who was proficient in eating, drinking, whoring, and gambling. All day long, he was either on the way to a gambling den or galloping on the unknown roads to brothels.

At the age of twenty, just after reaching adulthood, Qu Zhicai set a great ambition: he would travel to all the gambling dens and brothels in the Great Yong Dynasty, then write a book and become a founding master-like figure.

To put it bluntly, he was just a scumbag who wanted to gamble and whore and had no desire to improve!

After setting his ambition, Qu Zhicai borrowed money from relatives and friends under the guise of going to the prefectural city to study hard and earn a title, and from then on, there was no news of him.

Did he really go to the prefectural city to study?

You wouldn't believe it, he really did go to study!

But after arriving at the prefectural city, he didn't study poetry and classics, but how to roll dice and how to visit brothels!

When he ran out of money and got bored in the prefectural city, Qu Zhicai would borrow a sum of money from his drinking buddies, saying he would pay it back in a few days.

But when the agreed repayment date arrived, the creditors would ask around—

Good heavens! Where could you find even half a hair of Qu Zhicai in the entire prefectural city!

At this time, Qu Zhicai had already rolled up the money and run to another city to enjoy himself!

In the following half year, he repeated this method and actually had a momentum of achieving his ambition!

This day, Qu Zhicai, walking lightly as if he were about to become an immortal, arrived in the Jinmen area. Once in Jinmen, if you didn't go to the famous Linhe pleasure boat, that was definitely not okay!

There was no curfew in Linhe Ward, and even in the middle of the night, various idlers walked between gambling dens and brothels.

Qu Zhicai was among them.

For example, if he had bad luck at the gambling den one day, he would go to the flower house across the street to find a girl to "lubricate" his luck. Once he felt the luck return, he would go back.

This matter was no big deal for a romantic wanderer, but Qu Zhicai was possessed by a ghost and did something stupid that he absolutely shouldn't have done!

This day, his luck was bad, and he went to the Cuiyun Building to lubricate his hand. As a result, when he finished, he accidentally saw the girl's jewelry box!

Inside were not only gold and silver hairpins but also various pearls, jade, and gold and silver fragments.

Qu Zhicai asked the girl: "Why are you saving so much money?"

The girl said: "Today is the last business I'll take. After this, I'll take the money I've saved over the years and find my godmother to redeem myself."

The girl also said: "Young master is the last noble person I've met on my road to redemption. I will definitely serve you well."

In the girl's eyes, Qu Zhicai was the last romantic traveler she met on her road in the world of mortals, so she used all the knowledge she had learned over the years, serving him so well!

After Qu Zhicai left, the girl took the jewelry box and found her godmother. Just as she was about to redeem herself and get back her contract, she suddenly discovered that the money in the jewelry box had disappeared!

This was her life for the second half of her life!

The girl almost couldn't catch her breath. Fortunately, the madam in the Cuiyun Building had a bottom line. After asking the reason, without her saying much, friends from all over the streets who had received her "flesh charity" in their youth all came!

Old, young, those on crutches, those carried on stretchers—everyone who could breathe came!

Although a bit exaggerated, this really highlighted the connections of the "female bodhisattva"!

The crowd was filled with righteous indignation, cursing and swearing that they would turn Linhe Ward upside down.

With such a big commotion, it didn't take long to alarm the patrol government office and the garrison soldiers.

The officials were originally angry, thinking about what these gamblers and prostitutes were making a fuss about in the middle of the night.

When they arrived at the scene and heard the reason, the anger in the officials' hearts rose even higher!

But this time, the rising anger was directed at that freeloader!

As the old saying goes, thieves don't steal from the sick, and robbers don't steal from prostitutes.

The former means you can't steal the money for medical treatment when someone is sick, and the latter means you can't steal the money a woman earns by selling herself!

Even in the lowest trades, this was a bottom-line rule!

After all, stealing a prostitute's redemption money was a great evil. If it got out, not to mention ordinary people, even petty thieves would be ashamed of it!

Just as a group of people in front of the Cuiyun Building were aggressively looking for someone, something happened at the Lihua Courtyard across the street!

It turned out that Qu Zhicai hadn't had enough after stealing once. After losing his money at the gambling den, he actually made a comeback. Although he was careful this time and found another girl at the Lihua Courtyard to steal from, his luck was bad, and his romantic luck was also bad. He was caught red-handed by the girl.

In his panic, Qu Zhicai had to jump off the attic and run away naked.

Although it wasn't broad daylight, running naked under the moon was not a good thing. A patrolling government office runner saw this scene and thought it was some flower-picking thief committing a crime at night. Without thinking, he chased after the man like a dog seeing a cat.

On the side of the brothels and gambling dens, the patrol captain and garrison soldiers also moved upon hearing the news, and everyone started chasing toward the Lihua Courtyard.

Passing through the vegetable market and bypassing the tube-shaped street, the patrol captain finally joined forces with the night-patrolling government office runners until they reached the outside of the Cui family mill.

"Where is the person?"

"Reporting to the captain, the thief has dived into the alley!"

"Oh? If I remember correctly, that should be a dead-end alley."

"Follow me!"

Patrol Captain Zhao Zhonghe rushed into the alley first to capture the freeloader, but unexpectedly, as soon as he entered, he saw someone beside the freeloader, preparing to climb over the high wall into the mill.

This was truly "good things come in pairs, and meeting thieves also comes in pairs."

Seeing that the person was about to retreat into the courtyard, Zhao Zhonghe took out the crossbow he had prepared without thinking.

Seeing this, Xu Qing's vision went black.

Because the small crossbow wasn't shooting anyone else, but him, Xu!

Back then, when he climbed into the alley at the corpse-grinding mill to escape, he had encountered a group of government soldiers rushing into the alley. He hadn't expected that it was all because of such a trivial matter!

When Xu Qing saw this, Qu Zhicai's "legendary" life hadn't ended yet.

It was the middle of winter in the first month, and Qu Zhicai, naked, was taken to the guardroom by the group.

After interrogating him all night, they learned from Qu Zhicai that he had taken the girl's redemption money and used it all to improve the gambling den's performance!

Tsk, you're quite warm-hearted!

The gambling den owner thought, how did this matter get linked to me? If this got out, would our gambling den's reputation still exist?

Thinking of this, the gambling den owner held his breath and scraped together the girl's redemption money.

Look, even someone who runs a gambling den has higher awareness than Qu Zhicai!

At this time, not only the brothels and gambling dens, but also the people in the guardroom had a fire in their hearts, so they secretly held back their malice and came up with a damaging trick: not giving Qu Zhicai bedding or clothes.

By the next day, looking through the prison door, the person involved in stealing from prostitutes and gambling had curled into a ball and was completely silent.

Having read the life of the freeloader, Xu Qing also felt a bellyful of fire, wanting to kick the other person a few times.

If Qu Zhicai hadn't run into the mill alley, he wouldn't have been shot by the patrol captain.

He still remembered that when he met the captain two days ago, the other party was still holding his dog-beating stick, saying he smelled of perfume and was sissy!

The more he thought about it, the more angry he became!

Finally, the Scripture of Salvation gave the corpse a rating: Human Grade, Low Quality.

Seeing the rating, Xu Qing was inexplicably relieved.

This was the first time he had hoped that the corpse rating wouldn't be so high.

As for the reward from the Scripture of Salvation, it was a witchcraft curse from the Shu region, called the "Green-Winged Cicada Money-Returning Curse."

There was a record in the Southern Border Witchcraft Chronicles that there was an insect in the south called the Green-Winged Cicada, which looked like a cicada but was larger. Whenever the Green-Winged Cicada laid eggs on tree leaves, if you took its larvae, the mother would fly back along the trail no matter how far away she was.

Witches used this as a technique. Borrowing the characteristic that the mother and child would gather back together after being separated, they would apply the blood of the mother and child cicadas to money. Once the money with the mother's blood or the child's blood was spent, it would fly back. This was the origin of the saying "Green-Winged Cicada Returns Money."

However, the Green-Winged Cicada Money-Returning Curse before Xu Qing didn't need to use the blood of the mother and child cicadas. One only needed to pinch the Money-Returning Curse on the silver money to give it the characteristic of automatic return.

After Xu Qing understood this method, he was speechless for a long time.

Isn't this still freeloading?

The obsession of this freeloader is truly powerful. Even the instinct derived after death doesn't forget this path.

(End of chapter) ===== CHAPTER 14 =====