I picked up a copper coffin that had been hanging at the bottom of the Yellow River for thousands of years. After opening the coffin, I discovered that my father died for it twenty years ago.
From that night on, fish scales began to grow on the skin on my back, and I could tell the cause of death of each sunken corpse with my hands: the hanging ghost had mud on its feet, the water ghost had sand in its eyes, and the corpse of a woman who died in love was clutching a concentric knot. Corpse collectors on both sides of the Yellow River walked around me when they saw me, saying that I was the river god borrowing my body and resurrecting my corpse.
It wasn't until those people knelt down and begged me to enter the Nine Gate Admiral Shipwreck Bureau—the corpse in the keel, the Qin terracotta warriors with their eyes open in the bronze box, and the man in the coffin who looked exactly like me... That I knew that some corpses were fished out not to be buried, but to wake them up.
