Daomu Biji: Restart

I had never seen a real shuikao before. When Uncle Three showed me some old things in the past, there was an old shuikao included among them. My first impression was that the shuikao looked like a huge wine bag, but I didn't unfold it or try to put it on. The best shuikao were made of fish skin. After the scales were scraped off, the fish skin was tanned into leather and then coated in tung oil. Like this, the fish skin became elastic and very thin.

Most people back in the day used fur seal (1) skins to make shuikao because there were so many fur seals living along the coast of China. This kind of skin was actually stronger and had a certain heat retention, but shuikao made of fur seal skins were difficult to preserve and very troublesome to maintain. They could crack as long as they became a little dry and they had to soak in oil for a long time before they could be used again.

This shuikao looked rubbery since the skin was completely black, but when I looked at it closely, I found that it was a special kind of big fish skin. This kind of fish definitely came from the deep sea. Those who owned this kind of shuikao usually made a living by going underwater.

This kind of shuikao was extremely precious to those who worked in the underworld, as well as those who bought from them. The ancient technique of making shuikao had been lost now, which wasn’t a treasure that could be measured by money. Logically, it was absolutely impossible to easily discard it in a tomb, so there had to be a special reason for it.

The first thing I thought of was whether this shuikao’s owner had died here and they had left it as a kind of memorial. But I had never heard of such a thing. To Chinese people, putting clothes somewhere high up was more like sorcery. There was a legend in southern China that said when moving a grave, the clothes that accompanied the body didn’t rot, so they had to be taken out, washed, and placed on the beams of the descendant's home. This indicated that when their ancestors were buried in the grave, other things had been buried as well. This was a kind of custom that usually happened in mountainous areas.

The reason for this sounded creepy. The feng shui masters of old would tell you that this was because many old people living in the mountains were no longer human before they died. They had become possessed by mountain demons and the like, but they were too old to do evil and remained buried in the coffins.

After the old bodies had rotted away, the mountain demons would leave. At this time, the descendants would take the clothes back to their home and place them on the beams. It was only when this was done that the old peoples’ souls would return to their clothes and be buried again.

When the clothes were put back in the coffin, a feng shui master was needed to burn a small part of them and look at the ashes. Sometimes, those clothes had to be placed on the beams of their home for more than ten years before they could be encoffined again. If some of the burned ashes looked red, then that indicated that the family may have serious problems in the future.

Was this fish skin shuikao left in this ancient tomb for the same reason? I asked myself.

Did someone hope that something in this tomb would get attached to this shuikao?

Whatever the reason, this thing had to be related to feng shui, and I suddenly realized that this shuikao was probably part of a feng shui array. If so, there should be other things set up in other places here. It seemed that when Uncle Three came here last time, he was accompanied by a very powerful feng shui master who set up an array here.

I became worried when I thought of this, since I was the one who had destroyed the fish skin earlier. I couldn’t figure out why Uncle Three had set up an array at that time.

After examining it carefully and seeing the fine lines of fish scales, I realized that I really was looking at a shuikao. Once the skin had been processed, it took careful scrutiny to notice such things.

At this time, I suddenly frowned. There was a name written on the shuikao.

Qi Yu.

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TN Notes:

(1) Fur seals are more closely related to sea lions than true seals. More info here.

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Hope you got your reading pants on dears. Mama's putting 6 Reboot chapters out tonight hahahahaha