Chapter Fourteen: Lama Oil

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The fat man’s brow furrowed hard, and he hissed through clenched teeth, “What the hell is this disgusting crap?”

Indeed, whatever was in that coffin was terrifying beyond words, but once it came suddenly into view, all we felt was revulsion.

The little coffin was packed full of body parts, drenched in fresh blood, as though they had only just been hacked off and stuffed inside. They were no ordinary severed limbs and torsos, but flesh that had been cut into palm-sized pieces with a blade. On top sat a head split into four or five pieces, with brain matter and fluid still oozing slowly down through the skull, as if the person had not quite died yet.

The severed hands and feet inside were definitely not from a single person. Just by looking, I could make out parts belonging to at least two bodies. And as we stared at all this, too horrified to know what to do, the mound of flesh before us suddenly twitched.

The fat man whipped out his gun and was about to pull the trigger, but Blossom held him back with one hand.

“Wait.”

As soon as Blossom spoke, I saw something dark wriggle up from among the chunks of flesh.

“Damn it, what the hell is that?” I muttered.

Then that thing pushed aside the shredded remains covering it and crawled up from underneath. Only then did we see that it was a rat, pitch black all over except for its tail and snout, which were flesh-colored.

It was only a rat, but it still gave me a real fright. It was nearly half a meter long, and even after seeing the three of us alive and breathing, it didn’t seem afraid in the slightest. There was still a severed finger clamped in its mouth, and it was covered head to toe in blood. It turned to stare at us, and its unnaturally large eyes seemed to brim with malice.

The fat man still wanted to grab it, but Blossom told him not to act rashly, so the three of us stood there locked in a stalemate with the giant rat. But before long, it suddenly turned around and burrowed into the narrow gap between the coffin and the hidden compartment. That opening was far too small for a rat of its size, yet it forced its way in, without the least sign of strain.

“Damn it, that shredded corpse in this box still looks fresh. Could it be...” The fat man glanced at us. “Could it be the three people Professor Chen mentioned?”

I frowned, sensing something was off.

If those three had fallen victim inside here, I would not have been surprised by whatever miserable death they met. But this was dismemberment, and then the pieces were packed into a coffin beneath a stone slab weighing several hundred jin. Hm... if a zombie or a ghost were killing people, would they go to such trouble?

Looking closely at the scene before me, no matter how I thought about it, it looked like murder and concealment of a body. And only a human could do such a thing.

The thought made me shudder. If those three had been killed by someone else entirely, then things had just become far more complicated.

After I voiced my suspicion, the fat man also frowned.

“Hard to say. Maybe these people had some kind of falling-out over something, and those three unlucky bastards insisted on coming in, so they got killed. But butchering a body into this state takes a lot of work too. If this is meant to hide a corpse, it seems like far too much trouble.”

“It may not even be three people,” Blossom said. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. I don’t think things are that simple.”

The fat man clicked his tongue. “It’s not that hard to figure out. We just need to take the body parts out and piece them together. Then we’ll know whether there were really three people. Staring at them like this, there’s no way to tell who they are anyway, but there might be some clothes from their archaeological team underneath.”

I took that as nothing more than a joke. Those body parts had been chopped into palm-sized pieces; to piece them back together would be no easy task, especially when there was more than one body involved.

Besides, handling someone’s remains in that gloomy ancient tomb was creepy enough. If the others suddenly came over and saw the three of us crouching around a heap of shredded flesh, they might well be scared to death.

Still, I also felt that this pile of mutilated remains had been arranged by someone with intent. If so, what exactly was the purpose?

To keep it from being discovered? Some perverse habit of storing body parts? Or was there a deep grudge between the dead and the one who dismembered them?

The three of us were discussing it when the fat man and Blossom both fell silent.

Their expressions startled me, but then the two exchanged a look, and the fat man said, “There’s something in the coffin.”

“Huh?” I blinked, then looked back at the mass of body parts in the coffin. “Something? Apart from the hands and feet, what else could there be—”

Halfway through, a flash of realization struck me, and I immediately understood what the fat man and Blossom meant.

Just as the fat man said, dismembering several people to this extent and then tossing them into a coffin was an enormously laborious undertaking. But since that person had gone to such lengths, there had to be a reason vital to him.

Earlier, we had only paid attention to the body parts and overlooked the coffin itself, and the purpose it had originally served.

The person who created this horrifying scene may well have intended to use those remains to conceal something beneath them.

At the thought, cold sweat began breaking out across my back.

I guessed that the body parts in the coffin had probably been placed there no more than a day or two ago, and within a radius of several dozen li over that same period, the only people around had been that archaeological team. So the only ones who could have done this were likely members of the team.

Almost without thinking, I glanced back. Blossom saw what I was thinking and lowered his voice. “Don’t panic. Let’s first figure out what’s going on inside the coffin, and then decide whether we keep following these people.”

“The bodies are piled up like that. How are we supposed to figure it out? We can’t exactly—” As soon as I said that, my heart gave a jolt. “Damn it, you don’t mean to say you want—”

The fat man grinned at me. “What’s a corpse? Once you’re dead, you’re just a pile of meat. I can’t be bothered with all that.”

“But...” Just imagining having to reach into that sticky pile of severed flesh made my whole body go numb and weak. “Aren’t you disgusted by this at all? What if we catch some corpse poison or germs or something?”

“Pah.” The fat man rolled his eyes at me. “Can you be a little more reliable? Did you really just say germs? You’re even more squeamish than those two idiots. If grave robbers were afraid of that, why bother touching burial treasures at all? Step aside and let me handle it.”

With that, the fat man knelt beside the hidden compartment. He first estimated the coffin’s height, then rolled his short sleeves up to his shoulders and was just about to reach in.

“Hold on,” Blossom said suddenly.

“What is it? Even you think it’s gross?” The fat man looked a little pleased with himself, as though he had finally found something he could do better than Blossom.

Blossom did not answer. Instead, he took a small bottle from his backpack.

“There’s nothing to fear from body parts. We just don’t know what’s inside, so it’s better to take precautions.” With that, he unscrewed the cap, placed the mouth of the bottle against the fat man’s shoulder, and tipped it downward. At once, I saw a streak of black liquid run down the fat man’s arm.

“What is thi—ugh...” I had barely stepped closer when a foul stench rushed into my nose, so vile it nearly made me vomit. The smell was even worse than the corpse odor in the coffin.

The fat man looked somewhat surprised. “Damn, monk oil. Blossom, where did you get something this good?”

Blossom only smiled, then replaced the cap and spread the black liquid evenly over the fat man’s arm.

Only later did I learn that the thing the fat man called monk oil was regarded in tomb-robbing circles as a sacred substance for warding off evil and repelling ghosts. Put plainly, it was a kind of corpse oil.

It was said that to obtain this sort of corpse oil, the body had to be that of a monk or lama from a monastery, and they had to have lived to more than ninety years of age and died of natural causes.

There was an even stricter condition: those monks or lamas had to have gone their entire lives without ever seeing a woman. Monks in the central plains usually had broad contact with the outside world. Not to mention seeing women, there were plenty who had also known them intimately.

Of course, the lamas of the western regions were no better in that respect than the monks of the central plains. So the ones that met the requirements for monk oil were mostly ascetics. In ancient times there were many such men, and back then it was called Bodhi Blood. In recent years, the only place rumored to have produced it was the Tibetan region, so people in the trade changed the name from Bodhi Blood to monk oil.

Whether monk oil is genuine or not depends mainly on its smell. The stenchier it is, the more authentic it tends to be.