A scale was picked out from the fingernails of a corpse that was fished out from the bottom of a well on a rainy night, and then scales began to grow on his own fingertips. The wound healed as fast as a knife, but he started to hear the dead man talking a little noisily. There were also scales in the medicine my daughter-in-law boiled, and the roots of her nails turned black, but she smiled and said not to think too much about it. Before my father died, his fingernails were also black, and he left behind a wooden box, which contained a map of nine wells. Buried in the wells was something called corpse marrow, which if swallowed could turn a human into a god, but at the cost of molting, amnesia, splitting into a shadow body that wanted to kill him, and emotional indifference to the point where he almost forgot how to love someone. The emperor of the current dynasty was the shadow body of his sworn enemy, the frontier saint had the face of a daughter-in-law, the dragon veins of the dynasty were made of living people, and the Taoist priest who led him into a trap spent sixty years obsessed with being eaten. Okay, so is it to become a god or a human? When you become a god, you will lose yourself and become the rules themselves. When you are a human wife, you will be strangled to death by your own immortality instinct in every life, and the cycle will last forever. In the end, he chose the third path, becoming a god but retaining the last bit of humanity. He was obsessed with catching all the people who fell at the bottom of the well, and told them about a policeman and his wife who boiled medicine to release scales. Then one day, a baby girl who was thrown into the well said incoherently that her name was Liu Niang. Forget it, just hide the scales on your hands first.
