The Corpse Collector’s Secret Journal

On the hidden side of this world lies a realm where people make their living off the dead.

My name is Lin Jiu, and I’m a corpse collector. This trade has one ironclad rule: we only collect those who died violently, never those who passed peacefully. The victims of sudden, wrongful, or cursed deaths are our “clients.”

When I was nineteen, my master left me to watch the house for the first time. A rush job broke the quiet: a villa south of the city, with a generous fee. I set out as the rules required, unaware that the woman’s corpse was eight months pregnant and had been tortured to death by her lover. This was the most vicious case in the corpse-collecting trade: the Twin Mother-and-Child Fiends.

That collection nearly cost me my own life.

My master died of his injuries after saving me, leaving behind only a book called The Secret Records of Corpse Collection and one last warning: “You haven’t just crossed the Twin Mother-and-Child Fiends. You’ve stumbled onto thirty years of this underworld’s hidden accounts.”

It turned out that corpses were big business in the shadows.

The wealthy bought corpses of violent-death victims to ward their homes and bring them wealth and power. Corpse-driving sects sent the dead marching through the night. Those who walked the yin paths carried messages for the departed. Funeral criers could soothe souls with their wails, or summon evil. Some even sold “human flesh from the dead,” claiming it could prolong life. Shaolin, Longhu, Maoshan, and Laoshan: these prestigious orthodox sects looked down on people like us, while the authorities kept a close eye on this gray zone.

Seven lineages and thirteen trades, each with its own agenda.

And I, a rookie corpse collector who had broken the rules, stepped into this unfathomable underworld with the unresolved Twin Mother-and-Child Fiends at my heels. Starting with a single corpse, I gradually uncovered mystery after mystery: the true cause of my master’s death, the uncle who betrayed his sect to found the Heavenly Dao Sect, the seal on the ancient Corpse Ancestor, and the ultimate secret guarded for a thousand years by the corpse collectors…

Collecting a corpse isn’t the end. It’s the beginning.