Strange Tales from Zangdi: The Snowland Corpse Buddha

On a night of blizzard, Langda is bound to a skull altar and watches as his sister is sacrificed to the Nine-Headed Corpse Mountain God. With no way out, he bites into a priest's eyeball and awakens the Netherworld Eye, glimpsing a frozen corpse of a Witch King. He pulls free a blood-fed bone flute and calls forth a tide of corpses! He devours the mountain god and rips out his enemy's spine to make a human sinew rope, but inherits the blood curse of “devouring kin and killing those he loves.” The Bon cult's Demon-Slaying Hall uses human-skin drums to claim lives, while camel-dragon insect curses tear souls apart. Deep in the Shitualin, a vine like an umbilical cord coils around an infant corpse, whispering. The Twin-Body Forest Lord parts the mist, and on its body of rotting flesh and white bone is none other than Langda's newly grown scorpion tail! Ancient forbidden arts of esoteric religion return to the world: living people are skinned and made into thangkas to imprison souls, while flesh-and-blood mandalas feed evil Buddhas. Only when Langda swallows the heart of his hundredth reincarnated child and a corpse lotus blooms from his shoulder blade does he realize he is the vessel for the resurrection of a world-destroying god. He walks the divine path paved with menstrual blood and crushes the kingdom of human-skin Buddhas: “The Demon-Slaying Hall sentenced me to guard Shitualin for eternity?” “Today, I will use the bones of eighty thousand monks as steps” “to trample the Buddhist kingdom of the mortal world and purge this so-called altar of the gods in blood!”