Corpse Retriever

Chapter 4

Li Sanjiang carried Li Zhuiyuan on his back as he returned home, just as the sky began to show a faint light.

Cui Guiying took the child from him. Li Sanjiang spoke with Li Weihan for a while longer before leaving.

Li Zhuiyuan was settled on a mat bed. His eyes closed for a moment, then opened again.

He couldn’t sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, it was as if he saw that little yellow oriole dancing in the fishpond again.

Cui Guiying and Li Weihan didn’t go to the inner room to rest. Instead, they sat in the kitchen.

The woman kept rubbing her fingers until they turned red. The man smoked his water pipe, one bowl after another.

Looking at the sky that had already brightened, Cui Guiying stood up and said, “I’ll go make breakfast for the kids.”

Li Weihan exhaled a puff of smoke and said, “The smoke’s rising a bit early.”

Cui Guiying had no choice but to sit back down, looking at her man. “Then how long do we have to wait?”

“Until someone comes to tell us.”

“Who’s coming to tell us?”

Li Weihan didn’t answer, just kept sucking on his pipe.

After sitting for a while longer, a knock came at the door:

"Guiyinghou, Guiyinghou.”

It was the neighbor next door, Zhao Simei.

Li Weihan tapped his water pipe and said, “The notice has come.”

Cui Guiying got up, yawning and rubbing her eyes as she opened the door, puzzled. “What’s the matter, Simeihou?”

Zhao Simei grabbed Cui Guiying’s arm and shook it hard.

“Big Beard’s family has dead people!”

“What?”

“Two dead. Big Beard and his youngest son. Just seen floating in their fishpond. Everyone’s going to look. Come on, let’s go see!”

“Let’s go!”

Before leaving, Cui Guiying shouted toward the inner room, “Yinghou, the rice is washed. You make breakfast later.”

“Got it, Grandma.”

With the response, Cui Guiying went out with Zhao Simei.

Li Weihan waited a bit, touched the opened pack of cigarettes in his pocket, set the water pipe on the table, and left the house too.

Zhao Simei’s earlier knocking had already woken the children. Knowing something big had happened, they got up one after another and ran out to see the commotion.

No matter how Yingzi shouted “Brush your teeth, wash your face” behind them, she couldn’t call them back.

At this moment, Big Beard’s fishpond was surrounded by people. More villagers kept coming down the village path—men, women, old, young, whole families in tow.

Two bodies floated on the fishpond. No one went to deal with them, even though a small boat was parked right by the pond’s edge.

It wasn’t that the villagers were so cold-hearted, though Big Beard’s family had a bad reputation in the village.

The reason no one helped bring the bodies ashore was that those two bodies looked like biscuits soaked too long in a bowl—bloated beyond recognition, their surfaces showing a translucent, meaty crystal color, like two giant slabs of human-shaped pork jelly.

Everyone knew drowned bodies swelled after soaking too long, but how could two people, alive and well just yesterday during the day, turn into something like rehydrated wood ear mushrooms overnight?

It was just too eerie, so no one dared to step forward and touch the bodies.

Big Beard’s wife knelt by the pond, wailing loudly. But she only knew how to cry, not what to do next. When people tried to comfort her, she ignored them, just kept howling about her bitter fate.

Finally, Big Beard’s eldest son rushed back from town, and at last, there was someone to take charge.

But this eldest son, seeing his father and younger brother like that on the pond’s surface, was so scared his face twitched. He didn’t dare go down to retrieve them either and could only beg someone to fetch Li Sanjiang.

Li Sanjiang arrived, pushing a cart loaded with his tools.

When he got there, he first glanced at the situation on the pond’s surface, then backed away, waving his hands frantically.

“This damn thing, I don’t dare fish out! Fishing it out will curse my lifespan, curse my lifespan! Find someone else, quick, find someone else!”

His outburst caused an uproar among the onlookers. Villagers began whispering to each other, speculating what kind of sin Big Beard’s family had committed to attract such foul evil.

Soon enough, some villagers brought up the matter of Little Yellow Oriole. After all, the funeral band had nearly come to blows at Big Beard’s house yesterday. In the village, it was hard to keep secrets.

At this point, Li Weihan spoke up too, telling those around him about his experience yesterday, taking his grandsons boating on the river. He said his grandson fell into the water, had nightmares about seeing a woman walking in the water, and was so scared he fell into a delirious stupor. Zheng Datong came to look but couldn’t help, and it was only Liu Xiazi who came and dealt with it.

Immediately, many people gathered around to hear Li Weihan’s story, chiming in with their own opinions.

Cui Guiying stood beside Li Weihan, looking tense. On any other day, when she wasn’t cooking or washing, she could sit on the dam with the village women and gossip for three days and nights. But today, she was wooden, too nervous to speak.

Her heart felt weak and panicky, like a thief shouting to catch a thief, or a cat deliberately crying for a mouse.

Panzi, Leizi, Huzi, and Shitou started talking too, saying they saw a female water ghost yesterday who nearly dragged their Little Zhuiyuan down as a substitute ghost. She was out for revenge!

For a moment, it was like a grand open-air tea party had started. After the Little Yellow Oriole matter was talked dry, the still-unsatisfied villagers dug up Big Beard’s family’s old, moldy sesame and rotten millet stories to stir-fry again.

Not long after, Big Beard’s second son arrived with his wife, two daughters, and their husbands. The daughters hugged their mother and cried together. The two sons and two sons-in-law stood with Li Sanjiang, negotiating a price.

Li Sanjiang drove a hard bargain, claiming that fishing out two bodies at once, plus their eerie condition, warranted ten times the usual price for retrieving one body.

Once the money was settled, Li Sanjiang set up an offering table, lit candles, burned paper, and added an extra half-hour of “calling friends and companions,” chanting rhythmically, drawing everyone’s attention.

Though his performance wasn’t as flashy as the funeral band’s, everyone knew the band was just for show, while this man was the real professional.

During this time, two Santana cars pulled up, each with a police light on top. The town’s police station had arrived.

Normally, if someone drowned, it was just a drowning, no big deal. But this time, two people, father and son, drowned right at their doorstep. That changed things.

The police took a look at the situation and were stunned for a moment. They’d seen bloated bodies before, but never ones bloated so exquisitely.

Seeing this, they could only wait for the bodies to be retrieved before doing anything. They didn’t interrupt Li Sanjiang’s ritual but stayed back by their cars on the road, smoking and waiting patiently.

Finally, Li Sanjiang finished his preparations. He slaughtered a rooster, sprinkled a bowl of what might or might not have been real black dog blood, and then went down to the pond, rowing the boat to the center.

First, he used a “guiding hook” to pull the bodies to the boat’s side, then a “soul-returning basket” to secure and lift them onto the boat. Next, he covered them with a “homecoming net,” rowed back to the pond’s edge, bent down, lowered his head, and used a specific technique to hoist the bodies onto his back before stepping ashore.

This was an important rule among body retrievers: the retriever’s feet had to touch land first before setting the body down, because this was “delivering” and “carrying” them home.

Finally, only when the family called out could the body be set down. This completed the job, ensuring the dead knew they’d truly returned home and wouldn’t linger as restless ghosts following the retriever.

After repeating the process twice, Big Beard and his son ended their drifting and were laid on two straw mats.

When it was all done, Li Sanjiang glanced nervously at the center of the fishpond. He’d only done his job properly, not daring to probe deeper.

Heaven knew if she was still in there.

The police came over and cordoned off the bodies, but the villagers didn’t care. They kept craning their necks from a distance to look, with occasional frightened screams from children piercing through.

Li Sanjiang collected his pay, packed up his tools, lit a cigarette, and pushed his cart back home. The villagers all stepped aside to let him pass—no one wanted to get close to someone who’d just handled corpses.

The police began their formal investigation, setting up a temporary office at Big Beard’s house. The village secretary came to assist, calling people over, boiling water, and serving tea.

Big Beard’s wife couldn’t say much. She just woke up to find her husband gone from her side, and it was a passerby who saw the two floating in the pond and alerted her.

The deputy chief asked the village secretary who in the village had grudges with Big Beard’s family. The secretary scratched his ear and replied dryly:

“Well, that’s quite a few.”

Next, a long line of people with grudges came forward to give statements.

Li Weihan, who told the “Little Yellow Oriole” story, along with Panzi, Leizi, and the others, were also called in for questioning.

At first, the police thought another body had been found and sent officers with Li Weihan to search that river section, but they found nothing. Plus, Li Weihan’s story was too bizarre, so they chalked it up to a rural old man spinning superstitious tales for his grandsons.

They didn’t know whether to take the statement seriously. Li Weihan, seeing no one believed him, got anxious, insisting over and over that what he’d seen was real, urging the police and others to trust him. Eventually, the village secretary had to “coax” him away.

The funeral band that caused a scene yesterday was also summoned for questioning, but they’d gone to the next township for work the day before and had an alibi for the whole group.

As for Little Yellow Oriole’s disappearance and the related disputes, since neither she nor her body was found, and the responsible parties—Big Beard and his son—were already dead, it was just filed as a missing person case.

In the end, the father-and-son drowning was concluded as an accident. The rough story was that Big Beard and his son got drunk at night, went to the fishpond to mess around, and both drowned.

Big Beard’s family didn’t push for further investigation. After the funeral, the two sons and two daughters started fighting over dividing the property, tearing into each other viciously, giving the village another topic to chew on.

That day, after finishing their statements, it was already dusk. Li Weihan and Cui Guiying walked home with the children. The kids were ahead, the old couple behind.

Cui Guiying patted her chest, still shaken, and asked, “Why’d you go out of your way to talk about it? You even got called in by the police. Scared me to death.”

Li Weihan tossed the empty cigarette pack from his pocket onto the roadside, pursed his lips, and said, “It’s what Uncle taught me. You’ve got to say it, not bottle it up. Xiao Yuanhou’s matter—Zheng Datong and Liu Jinxia know something about it too.”

Cui Guiying grumbled, “Just tell them and swear them to secrecy.”

Li Weihan shook his head. “Even if adults can keep a secret, can kids hold their tongues?”

“This…”

Li Weihan let out a long breath.

He said, “Uncle said the best way to keep a secret is to say it out loud in front of everyone.”

(Continue in Next Part)