Chapter Eighty-One: Playing Dead

A doctor examined him and said the body was beyond saving, so he was sent to the morgue and left there for days. Then one night, while the two men were drinking outside the boiler room, the furnace suddenly began to make strange noises.

At first, it was a normal thing. During cremation, a corpse can sometimes jerk upright from the heat, even letting out a terrible cry. Old Liu had been frightened stiff when he first started this work, but after a while he had grown used to it.

That night, however, things were not so simple.

As they were drinking and snacking by the duty room door, a body in the furnace suddenly sprang up and hammered furiously at the glass, its mouth shrieking in agony. Old Liu, despite his experience, had never seen anything so horrifying. The man’s eyes were vicious and poisonous, and the two of them were shaken to the core.

Old Liu wanted to shut the furnace down and check, but the younger man urged him to keep it burning. In the end, they chose to watch in silence as the body’s struggles grew weaker and weaker, until it too was reduced to ash.

When the last remains were collected, Old Liu noticed something gleaming inside the furnace, as if two little ornaments had survived the fire. After the heat died down, he reached in and pulled out two pieces of jade cicada.

He was baffled. The cremation heat should have been enough to reduce even jade to nothing. Yet these two pieces were untouched, cold as ice, as though they had just been lifted from a spring.

Old Liu laughed and gave one piece to the young man, saying they might fetch a few thousand if sold later. But the younger man, still haunted by the shrieking corpse and its murderous stare, took the jade and fled the crematorium at once.

Not long after, Old Liu died in a most uncanny way. His body was drained of blood, and a thin film, like a cicada shell, had grown over his skin.

Since bringing that jade cicada home, the young man had dreamed almost every night of standing beneath a colossal tree, where countless cicadas clung to a human body and fed upon it. And when he drew near, he would discover that the body was his own.

He rolled up his sleeve and showed us his arm. A hard, horny layer covered the skin, looking no different from a large cicada molting.