Illuminating Bones with Rhinoceros Horn

The Book of Jin records: The waters at Niuzhu Point were unfathomably deep. Wen Jiao lit a rhinoceros horn to illuminate them and saw bizarre demons at the bottom, revealing the boundary between the living and the dead.

People know only that burning a rhinoceros horn can reveal evil spirits. What they don't know is that the thousand-year-old horn was eventually driven into the left eye socket of a young mortician.

On the night shift in Cleansing Room No. 2 at the Qingzhou Funeral Home, mortician Zhou Ye received Unidentified Corpse No. 14, a drowned body.

The corpse was covered in seven layers of black lacquer to seal its soul. Clutched in its arms was a recorder with no battery that played by itself:

"Zhou Ye, no matter who calls your name, don't answer! Pull the rhinoceros horn spike from my left eye and survive!"

A living body cannot contain the bones of the dead. Every time Zhou Ye handles a true bone, he takes another step toward the gates of hell:

A [Scorched Rhinoceros Horn] wedged into his left eye, burning his yang energy to see through the knots that bind a corpse's skin. Every ten seconds he looks, his body temperature plummets;

A [Sound-Quelling Death Bone] fused into his left hand, with a single finger able to silence every living voice within three meters;

Three pins securing a [Red Candle Fire Bone] in his left chest. His heart hangs over burning coals as he scrapes away charred flesh day and night, reapplying lacquer to seal off the corpse water that eats into his bones!

The evil spirits and vicious people in this world are masters of stealing bodies, wearing skins, shifting tendons, and changing fates.

Some peel the skin off a living person's back to make an official robe, then sit on the throne in the provincial capital's headquarters and issue orders;

Others pull out all 206 of their hard bones, turning themselves into three zhang of limp tendons that hide in a deep courtyard, hanging from threads to seize souls.

While others tremble in fear under eerie rules, Zhou Ye simply tightens his waterproof apron and takes out his paper-thin willow-leaf bone knife.

"Beneath every face is a skeleton, and behind every rule lies a fatal knot. I've been a mortician for two years. I'm the one who strips the dead and cuts away their bones. No corpse has ever stood up by itself right in front of me."