I retrieve corpses, and I retrieve the truth. And the one lying deepest in the Yellow River is my father.
My name is Chen Zhenshui, and I’m the last professional corpse retriever on the Yellow River. I have three rules: I don’t retrieve bodies found standing upright, bodies dressed in red, or unclaimed bodies that have been in the water for more than three days. Then, on a night during the Qingming Festival, I pulled a “standing corpse” clutching a human bone from beneath a bridge pier. The QR code on the bone led to a missing person’s report for my father, who disappeared twenty-eight years ago.
The folklore scholar Lin Shuying, whom the police brought in, told me it was a “soul-snaring raft.” Soon after, a bride in red drowned in a wedding pond, a worker hanged himself at a construction site with a “reverse-bow sha,” and blood seeped into the tomb of a guardian of the town. Each murder corresponded to a Yellow River taboo that had been broken.
Every clue pointed to a madman named Shen Canglang. He wanted to complete a “Sevenfold Sacrifice,” renew the legendary pact of Yu the Great, and bring a century of peace to the Yellow River. Lin Shuying and I were the final sacrifices he had chosen. I was descended from the “guardian of the town,” while she was of the bloodline of the “pact-breaker.”
On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, the gates of hell would open wide. Shen Canglang planned to use my father’s bones, dipped in the blood from her heart, to complete a sacrifice that had continued for eighty years.
But what I eventually dredged up was the truth: seven old people who willingly died in 1942, my grandfather’s uncorrupted corpse from 1958, and the fragments my father hid before sinking into the abyss in 1998. Pieced together, the inscription on the Yu King’s Cauldron was no spell to suppress anything. It was a four-thousand-year-old pact of “symbiosis.”
Interesting and beautiful,