Chapter 76: Origins

Seeing Lu Jiu’s reaction, I realized he must know something about the deadly coffin. After all, Zhang the Celestial Master is the founding patriarch of the Orthodox Taoist sect, and the Jingming School, where Lu Jiu belongs, is a branch under its umbrella. One could say Zhang the Celestial Master is also Lu Jiu’s ancestral master.

I insisted to Lu Jiu, unwaveringly, that I had seen it clearly—a thousand-year-old deadly coffin was hanging beneath the hull of that tower ship.

“If the talismans were truly written by Zhang the Celestial Master himself, then we might have brought calamity upon ourselves,” Lu Jiu said, then fell silent.

I hurriedly told him not to stand here lost in thought; the matter had already come to this point, and dawdling was useless. I urged him to tell me about the deadly coffin.

Lu Jiu gathered his thoughts and began to recount the tale, which traces back more than two thousand years. At the end of the Wang Mang era, chaos reigned across the land as peasant uprisings broke out everywhere. The largest forces were the Green Forest Army and the Red Eyebrow Army, with the Green Forest Army at its peak numbering over a hundred thousand.

Since war demanded enormous wealth, and most of the Green Forest Army were peasants, these warlords set their sights on imperial tombs, breaking into the burial chambers of Western Han emperors and plundering untold gold and silver treasures. Historical records state that some even coveted the well-preserved bodies of empresses and princesses, committing unspeakable acts.

Their deeds soon brought swift retribution. One group of Green Forest soldiers unearthed a deadly tomb west of the Yangtze River, from which emerged a corpse king—a monstrous undead. Most of that group perished on the spot. Those who escaped fared no better: not only did they die within days, but they also brought corpse poison, triggering a plague that killed fifty to sixty thousand soldiers.

Meanwhile, another uprising led by Liu Xiu, a descendant of the Western Han royal family, seized the opportunity to sweep away both the Green Forest and Red Eyebrow armies, unifying the realm and founding the Eastern Han dynasty.

After the Eastern Han was established, the corpse king continued to wreak havoc wherever it went, spreading plague in its wake.

During Liu Xiu’s reign, countless elite soldiers were dispatched; either the corpse king’s whereabouts could not be found, or entire armies were wiped out. Eventually, Emperor Guangwu Liu Xiu sought out Zhang the Celestial Master, who was then only twenty years old and not yet formally renowned, but already possessed extraordinary cultivation. Zhang the Celestial Master struggled tremendously to seal the corpse king into a coffin, bound it with Dragon Shackles, and sank it into the Yellow River. Harnessing the powerful geomantic veins of the river, he managed to suppress the deadly coffin.

Peace returned to the realm, and Zhang the Celestial Master became famous from that battle. Before departing, he warned Emperor Guangwu that the Yellow River frequently changed course; if it ever shifted, the deadly coffin would be washed out, unleashing chaos upon the land once again.

Emperor Guangwu spared no effort in managing the river. After Liu Xiu’s death, Emperor Ming Liu Zhuang succeeded him. Having witnessed the corpse king’s horrors himself, Liu Zhuang summoned the brightest minds in the nation to control the Yellow River, spending vast resources. A genius named Wang Jing made his mark during this campaign and became renowned.

Wang Jing’s achievements in water management are still celebrated, but few know that the Han imperial treasury was nearly depleted for this endeavor. Even fewer understand why successive dynasties rarely spent lavishly to tame the Yellow River, while the newly established Eastern Han spared no expense.

Under Wang Jing’s management, the Yellow River—which had frequently changed course before the Eastern Han—remained stable for over a thousand years.

This lasted until the eighth year of Emperor Renzong of Song, when the emperor recklessly decided to redirect the river southward. His actions caused a breach, and the deadly coffin was flushed out once more. The Hebei region was devastated; the corpse king rampaged through Song, and it was not until sixty years later, when the realm’s first national master, Lai Buyi, appeared, that the corpse king was suppressed again. The reckless actions of the Song emperor marked the start of the nation’s decline, and soon after Lai Buyi subdued the corpse king, the Jingkang Incident occurred.

Over the next millennium, the corpse king occasionally resurfaced whenever the Yellow River changed course, each time bringing disaster, but each time suppressed again by geomancers. The chains binding the coffin are the handiwork of geomancers from different eras.

After listening to Lu Jiu’s account, my mind was blank. The thousand-year deadly coffin was about to emerge once more, foretelling another calamity, and I was the one pressing down upon it as the ship’s escort.

Sensing my thoughts, Lu Jiu pondered for a moment and said, “Pi Yangxi, perhaps we are overestimating our responsibility. Before we escorted the ship, the deadly coffin had already been brought out of the Yellow River and hidden beneath the tower ship. Even if we hadn’t escorted this voyage, others would have. The deadly coffin isn’t our doing—what responsibility do we bear?”