Daomu Biji: Restart

Xiao Hua took out his cell phone and pulled up a video to show me.

It was a video of an old man's cremation. There were a lot of wreaths with inscribed streamers⁽¹⁾ on them that could be seen at the beginning of the video. Based on the text inscribed on those streamers, it appeared to be a memorial service for an old man who had simply died of old age. I could hear people in the background speaking in a dialect I wasn’t familiar with. I could only guess the meaning of their words occasionally, so I won't emphasize the contents of these background noises in the following narrative.

I didn’t know the context behind the filming of this video; maybe naughty children and grandchildren were hunting for strange things, or maybe it was some kind of bizarre local custom. The reason I say this is because this memorial service’s setup was very chaotic and everyone mostly spoke in a dialect, which gave off the feeling that it was in a county town. After all, some funeral homes in county towns offered many strange funeral services in order to charge more.

But when old people in the county passed away and held a memorial service, their descendants should belong to the more well-off or bureaucratic local families.

And based on the different camera angles and the way it was filmed, I felt that this may have been a kind of service the funeral home provided. It was very similar to when amusement parks took your photos and then tried to get you to buy them at the exit. They filmed first without getting the consent of the ones being recorded.

The video had been edited, so it was soon time for the cremation. The old man's body looked normal, except for the extremely dense cluster of age spots on his face.

In fact, these age spots gave me the sense that something was wrong, because there were just too many of them.

The body was pushed into the incinerator—it was a new one with a small window through which you could see the cremation process—and then the relatives all retreated (not many people liked to watch corpses burn, after all). Then, someone started filming the little window.

I watched attentively as the flames rose up. The video definition wasn’t high, so it must have been taken with an older cell phone. The temperature was very hot, so the body began to burn all at once and the clothes also burned away.

But at this time, I saw an amazing scene.

The corpse quickly and suddenly turned around until it was half-lying up on its stomach and then looked through the small window.

At that moment, I could see clearly that this corpse’s eyes were opened, but there wasn’t any sign of its pupils. All I could see were the whites of its eyes. That face wasn’t the face of a living person—it was obviously a dead thing—but its movements were very swift and violent, as if it were stimulated by something.

But its facial expression was extremely cold and detached. Anyone who had ever seen a zombie would have a deep impression of its expression, because the expression on the face of a corpse was what one would call extremely “lifeless”.

That was why I was so shocked, because this corpse suddenly got up on its stomach and moved way too fast.

Its outer layer of skin completely burnt up, quickly followed by the inner layer, which caused the flesh in many places to be exposed.

Most people have seen the anatomical map of the human body and know what a person looks like without their skin, so although it was scary, it honestly didn’t give off a sinister feeling because it was something everyone had seen too often.

But after the old man’s skin was scorched off, his muscles were exposed, which was extremely scary.

The facial features formed by the muscles under the old man’s skin were all out of proportion, which definitely wasn’t the kind of face you’d see on an anatomical map. In the light of the fire, it was like I was seeing some other creature wearing human skin, but the human skin had been burned off at this time, revealing this creature’s true face. I can't describe it, but it definitely wasn’t a human face. If I had to say it, though, I thought it looked a bit like an animal’s face. But it was some kind of extremely evil animal.

This part of the recording all happened very fast, because the temperature of the flames was very high and all of the muscles were burnt black and became indistinguishable.

The cameraman finally reacted and started screaming loudly, but at this time, a voice spoke in Mandarin, "Don’t panic. It’s normal for it to move. The muscles aren’t dead yet, so they’ll curl up naturally when it’s hot."

At this time, the camera happened to be pointing directly at the incinerator and recorded a blackened mass hitting the small window.

The cameraman was truly frightened this time and immediately moved away.

The recording stopped here because the camera started to shake, indicating that the cameraman was obviously frightened. The background sounds were very chaotic.

Xiao Hua rewound the video and showed me the burnt face. After looking at it carefully, there was no doubt that it was extremely scary. The uncanny valley effect had really reached its peak.⁽²⁾

The face looked human for the most part, but there was something about it that looked almost animalistic. Since I had studied drawing and painting, however, I could directly figure out the logic behind it. Just like a baby’s forehead, if you were to draw a person’s forehead wider, it would give off a cute feeling. The principle behind this was that the proportions were close to the baby.

So the reason why this face looked like an animal's face was because the position of the eye sockets had obviously moved up and the face had elongated. After the old man's skin was burned off, it seemed like the muscles that controlled his facial features had all been dislocated by the abnormally long skull.

It was obvious that the old man’s body had started a strange metamorphosis before he died.

I looked at Xiao Hua and asked myself, did this also happen to my grandfather?

Xiao Hua said, "Shigou Diao was a special group of grave robbers at first. In order not to disturb the dead, they would eat the flesh of corpses before excavating a tomb in hopes of concealing their vital energy. Your grandfather was able to make a quick start in the Mystic Nine at a young age because he walked a crooked path. This strange energy was discovered later and had a magical effect."

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TN Notes:

(1) Pinyin is wanlian (挽联). It’s a pair of parallel verses inscribed on streamers, used as funeral decoration. Looks like this:

(2) The uncanny valley is a hypothesized relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. The concept suggests that humanoid objects that imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers. Info here. Here’s a chart (we’re in the zombie level lol)

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Sorry this is so late today (and for bailing yesterday). I've been working 11 hour days and frankly, I'm exhausted. My optional overtime became mandatory and I want my freedom back o(TヘTo). I can't promise there will be updates tomorrow or Friday but I'll certainly try. It depends on whether shit hits the fan right before I get off work…again. Hope everyone else's week is going better than mine♡＼(￣▽￣)／♡