At the Cloudmoss County morgue, Xie Buyan pried open the coffin and immediately recognized that the corpse had been switched. The drowned man from the Xie family of Dongdi Xiejia Bay, whom he'd handled three days earlier, had a horizontal scar across his chest and was missing two teeth on the upper left. The young man in the coffin was ten years younger, had all his teeth, and had green moss from the well water at the morgue embedded between them. That moss only grew along the rim of the shadowed well at the north wall. The black dirt under his fingernails came from the back courtyard too. The half-finger-wide water stain along the coffin lid's left edge had been rubbed from the outside in by a sleeve. The person who switched the corpse knew the morgue's schedule and knew whose name was written on the death report. Xie Buyan turned up the report's third line, where the person liable for the corpse debt was none other than Xie Buyan himself. The old clerk rolled up the report and tucked it into his sleeve, telling him he had to complete the burial, amend the report, and leave his fingerprint that very night. But Xie Buyan had been struck off the rolls as a hired hand and had no authority to write anything. He had lived under these rules twelve years ago: one corpse, one examination report, one corpse debt. Once your name was written down, you had to answer for the dead. The corpse porters were already backing away, and the man snacking on melon seeds had slipped off. Meanwhile, the morgue had declared that the body of the actual drowned man from Dongdi still hadn't been found in any coffin, even though it had to be buried before nightfall.
