Taotie's Book of Hundred Ghost Mechanisms

Zhao Xiaoman is the most useless constable in the Great Yin dynasty, yet no one can beat him at finding roast goose in a corpse's stomach. He can't tell an ink painting from an erotic one, but he can identify which black mine produced the arsenic. He can't recite the law, but he remembers the fennel seeds in the rotting flesh at the mass grave three years ago. This good-for-nothing, cursed as a “human slop bucket,” is always chewing on evidence at crime scenes and weeping uncontrollably, until he bites through a human-skin lantern and tastes bits of his little sister's baby teeth mixed into the lamp oil. On the night he was seven, he curled up in a pickle jar and watched the whole village be turned into human candles. Three hundred everlasting lamps were lit in the imperial mausoleum amid screams. Now a living skeleton with scriptures carved into its spine floats down the river, a bronze corpse with sprouts growing from its eye sockets crawls out of an ancient tomb, and beneath the osmanthus cakes delivered by the Deputy Director of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau clings ash from the wick that was once pushed into his sister's skull. “Divine Physician Xiao of the Jishitang Clinic, the way you save people by cutting out their bones is exactly the same as the way you cut open my mother to take her fat.” Zhao Xiaoman licks the corpse poison off his blade and laughs maniacally on an altar where nine hundred human candles burn. “Now it's your turn to find out what it feels like to be pickled in a vat of lies and left to dry.” In this world, human candles light the banquets of the powerful, while wronged souls are built into the foundations of palaces. All he has to do is chew up the foulest secrets inside every corpse and spit them out into the sunlight.