I was forced to cultivate immortality when I just wanted to lie down

Chapter 171 You reap what you sow
There are countless folk arts and crafts; he has his specialty, and I have my livelihood.

These skills would never be easily passed on to outsiders unless they were one's own son or daughter.

The saying goes, "The skill is easy to learn, but the key is hard to grasp."

No matter the year, those with real skills, apart from their own children, will always maintain a certain distance from their mentors and students who have been together for many years.

Once an apprentice becomes a disciple, there are endless mountains to climb and countless skills to learn. Similarly, once a master takes on a disciple, he also has to work hard, teaching his disciple while also considering his own future.

Some clever apprentices understand the principle of "spending money to learn a skill for three years, and using that skill to earn money for three years." Here, "spending money" refers not only to money, but also to daily greetings and serving tea and water.

I wonder how much hardship one has to endure to earn even half a word of true knowledge from their master.

But this is just the beginning. Masters, apart from their own children, are always good at "holding back" on others, including their apprentices.

For example, when making stone Buddha statues, the master teaches the apprentice the skills, but when the apprentice goes to work, he can never quite capture the expression on the Buddha's face.

You think it was because he didn't study hard? No, it's because the master held back and didn't teach his apprentice what he was best at.

For example, when old people tell stories, they often say that the cat is the tiger's teacher. The cat passed on all its skills, but it didn't teach the tiger how to climb trees.

Later, the tiger betrayed his master and harbored thoughts of murdering him.

The tiger thought that as long as it ate the cat master, it would be the only one left in the world who could hunt the best, and it would be the number one in the world.

But to everyone's surprise, the cat scurried up the tree in a flash. The tiger was dumbfounded. Who would have thought that this cat was so cunning and had such a trick up its sleeve!
However, the cat survived because of this.

A true word is passed on, and a thousand volumes of books are falsely passed on.

These things are hard to judge. Masters are afraid of teaching their apprentices and then starving themselves, while apprentices blame their masters for not passing on their most treasured skills. Throughout history, many skills have been lost because of this.

In short, it is bound to be an extremely difficult thing to find a master to thoroughly understand a skill.

At present, Xu Qing has also been worshipping corpses, and he has been worshipping more than a hundred of them.

These old and young corpses, male and female corpses, mostly possessed extraordinary skills; otherwise, they wouldn't have been able to enter the prison and become death row inmates.

They were completely open and honest with Xu Qing; they were truly his mentors and friends.
In just one night, Xu Qing had thoroughly extracted all the knowledge from those one hundred corpses.

By the time daylight broke, Xu Qing hadn't learned anything else, but he had learned quite a bit about the ways to make money recorded in the laws of the Great Yong Dynasty.

Upon opening the shop door, customers were already waiting outside.

Xu Qing took out the purchase and delivery slip, and with a few clicks and swipes, completed a transaction.

"Thank you for your generosity, seventy-five coins."

Qiu Zhan paid 25 coins for collecting the body, with a final payment of 75 coins, totaling 100 coins. Xu Qing kept his word, and the burial and head-stitching were a free gift from Qiu Zhan's event, with no extra charge.

The customers who came to collect the bodies were quite generous; none of them haggled with him. Even after he had been busy until noon, more customers continued to come to him.

Xu Qing glanced at the sky and realized that his autumn harvest business was about to open for business. He couldn't afford to waste time here.

After telling the person who was to claim the body to wait at the shop entrance, Xu Qing pushed open the door to the inner room and called out, "Second Aunt, I need to go out for a bit. Could you come and help me tidy up the shop?"

As soon as Xu Qing finished speaking, the black cat that was staring at the Gu jar on the counter suddenly jumped to the ground and then turned into the side room.

Before long, a woman with a cold and aloof demeanor, who rarely smiled, followed Xu Qing out of the side room.

After handing the ledger to "Sun Erniang," Xu Qing drove the cart back to the execution ground.

In the following days, hundreds more people were killed at Caishikou.

At the autumn execution ground, there were often unclaimed corpses. Xu Qing would then shamelessly approach them and say that this was his maternal great-uncle, that was his cousin's wife, and that the monk with the ordination scars was actually his cousin.

Well, hundreds of death row inmates have all become his relatives.

Anyone who didn't know better would think it was a family rebellion that resulted in their property being confiscated and their entire clan being exterminated!
The head constable, Zhao Zhonghe, asked in confusion, "These headless corpses don't fetch a good price. Why are you taking them? Are you going to use them as filling for steamed buns?"

Qiu Zhan's headless corpse was different from ordinary whole corpses. Even if it was sent to the mortuary, it wouldn't fetch a good price. In the past, these corpses were sent to mass graves by the government and buried haphazardly. This was the first time Zhao Zhonghe had ever seen someone like Xu Qing so eager to claim a corpse.

"To be honest, Officer Zhao, I entered this profession with my master. He often said that the funeral industry must respect the dead. Even if you encounter a skeleton lying exposed in the wilderness on the road, you must bury it and let it rest in peace."

"This is a good deed that accumulates good karma, and it has nothing to do with how much money you have."

Looking at the young man with a serious expression who had started moving the corpses again, Zhao Zhonghe thought to himself that there are still many good people in the world!
"Look at his awareness, no wonder he was able to pass the imperial examination and become a scholar."

Zhao Yuan remained silent beside him.

He couldn't even pass the preliminary examination for the imperial examination, so he was definitely not qualified to chime in.

Xu Qing has been living a very fulfilling life these days. The business of the coroner's shop is booming, and the feng shui of the Water Gate Bridge is getting better and better. By the time the autumn execution is over, he estimates that he will be able to cultivate at least five or six new mad generals.

With the five powerful generals he already possesses, his current resources far surpass those of the top-tier martial arts sects.

If we wait a hundred or a thousand years, the number of his rampant troops will probably be no less than that of some regional military governors.

Before he is confident that he can survive the lightning calamity, these strengths, which are independent of his own cultivation, are also the foundation of his existence.

The days of the autumn executions passed quite quickly. In the blink of an eye, the busiest time at Caishikou had passed. After that, the number of corpses that Xu Qing performed for the deceased each day gradually decreased from a peak of about two hundred to forty or fifty.

In mid-September, Prefect Lu, the official in charge of supervising the execution, left Linhe, leaving only Magistrate Li and County Lieutenant Dong on the execution platform.

During this time, Xu Qing ran into an acquaintance again.

To be precise, it was an acquaintance who had just been beheaded.

Several months ago, Xu was working part-time and got a job as a corpse retriever. He found a body upside down by the reeds.

Xu Qing had seen the revolving lantern of the corpse. The person's name was Zheng Deli. Before his death, he was on the Baijiang River when he was strangled by two river bandits and thrown into the river.

Zheng Deli faked his death and escaped, drifting along with the current. He survived by a hair's breadth, but was then finished off by a water tiger and strangled by the water plants in the reeds, ending up upside down.

The two river bandits were not actually bandits on the surface, but rather boatmen disguised as boatmen.

After Zheng Deli was thrown into the water, the old boatman and his assistant opened his baggage, only to find it was full of broken stones.

Many people saw Zheng Deli boarding the boat. Fearing that their secret would be exposed, the two went to the body retrieval team and told the others that Zheng Deli had accidentally fallen into the river while relieving himself and that his whereabouts were unknown.

Xu Qing couldn't stand their behavior, and also because he wanted to help Wang Shixiong's performance, he took Zheng Deli's body to the morgue of the yamen and blamed the boatman and his deputy Yuan Hu for Shui Hu strangling Zheng Deli with water grass.

After examining the body, Wang Lingyuan discovered that the deceased had indeed been strangled, and then reported the case to the authorities.

Xu Qing thought the matter was over, but he never expected that several months later, he would see the boatman from Zheng Deli's memory again.

As the saying goes, you reap what you sow.

A seed of corpses that he planted unintentionally a few months ago has now sprouted into a new corpse.

As the pages of the sutra on salvation are turned, the boatman's life, riddled with misdeeds, comes to light.

This boatman wouldn't do anything involving people, like digging up graves of childless families or kicking down doors of widows. But when the boatman got a little older, one of his cronies suddenly showed up at his door.

"Zhang Da, I have a way to make money, do you want to do it?"

"What kind of business?"

"Of course, it's a business of robbing the rich to help the poor!" Yuan Hu chuckled and said, "I see many people coming and going on the Baijiang River. These people are either traveling far away with travel expenses, or going to the port to trade with money and cash. If you and I pretend to be boatmen or ferrymen..."

"The Baijiang River is very swift. If you and I kill someone, we can simply throw the body into the water, and who will know then?"

The boatman asked in confusion, "I am old and have difficulty walking. Why don't you find someone young and strong, and instead come to me to join your group?"

Yuan Hu laughed and said, "If everyone on the boat were young and strong, the passengers would definitely be wary. But Brother Zhang is different. If others see you like this, they will relax their guard. No matter what they think, they probably would never guess that Brother Zhang, who is so old, is a murderous and thieving bandit!"

The boatman suddenly realized what was going on.

People only know to respect the elderly and love the young, but they don't know that even wicked people grow old.

The two made up their minds and the next day they bought a covered boat and started ferrying people across the water.

The two men specifically targeted lone individuals. Those people might be somewhat wary, but upon seeing the old boatman's simple and honest smile, they all relaxed their guard.

Boatman Zhang Da lured passengers onto his boat with low prices, but once they reached the middle of the river, his deputy Yuan Hu conspired with Zhang Da to strangle the passengers and throw them into the river.

In just six months, the two managed to kill dozens of people using this method.

Among them was Zheng Deli, who went to the port to buy fish on credit.

Xu Qing continued reading. Ever since Zhang Da and Yuan Hu were put on the wanted list, the two of them had been hiding in Wayao Street in Tianjin.

Wayaojie was a place where poor people lived, and it was also home to all sorts of people from all walks of life, many of whom had burdens on their shoulders.

Xu Qing originally thought there was nothing to see here, but just as he was about to skip these scenes, a constable from Tianjin Prefecture suddenly found Zhang Da and Yuan Hu.

The constable's surname was Zhou, and when Yuan Hu and Zhang Da met him, they addressed him as Master Zhou.

The constable cut to the chase, saying bluntly, "Zhang Da and Yuan Hu, you two have committed murder and robbery, and according to the law, you should be executed! If I capture you two today, I will receive at least a hundred taels of silver as a reward."

Yuan Hu was surprised and suspicious, but he did not try to escape.

He often dealt with government officials and knew their character. If they really intended to punish him, they wouldn't come alone and talk to him about these trivial matters.

"Master Zhou, what are you saying? We're all family, you can't arrest us, can you?" The boatman beside him said with a big smile.

Constable Zhou sneered, "I'm from an official family, you're a bandit. Who's on your side?"

At this point, Constable Zhou took out ten taels of silver from his sleeve, placed it on the table, and said in a slightly gentler tone, "I know you two are having a hard time making a living right now. You can take these ten taels of silver and use them."

Yuan Hu glanced at the silver but didn't dare to take it. He tentatively said, "Master Zhou, please speak freely. If there is anything we can do to help you, we will certainly not refuse."

Upon hearing this, Constable Zhou immediately smiled and said, "There is something. The magistrate of Baisha County recently recruited a son-in-law who ranked first in the prefectural examination. His name is Wu Zhiyuan. Have you heard of him?"

"I seem to have some recollection of it."

"That man offended someone he shouldn't have, and now someone wants him dead."

Seeing that Yuan Hu remained silent, Constable Zhou raised an eyebrow and said, "Don't you want to know who wants him dead?"

"I don't ask questions I shouldn't ask; I know the rules."

Constable Zhou stared at Yuan Hu for a while, then suddenly said, "The person who wants to kill him is the magistrate's eldest son-in-law, Yang Hong!"

Upon hearing this, Yuan Hu looked at Constable Zhou with a deep, unsettling gaze.

The latter laughed and said, "Yang Hong is cunning by nature. If he wants to use someone else's connections, I have to be careful. Speaking of which, Wu Zhiyuan has a brother. They will be going to the ferry tomorrow. I will pretend to be a yamen runner delivering official documents, and you will pretend to be a passenger. Zhang Da will talk to them and invite them to board the boat."

"Afterwards, you two should keep this matter to yourselves, but if I were to..."

Yuan Hu raised an eyebrow and said, "If anything happens to Master Zhou, we will definitely do everything we can to expose this matter."

In the coroner's shop, Xu Qing was sucking on his teeth, wondering how he could possibly perform a ritual to send off a corpse, and what the Wu brothers were all about.

As expected, the Wu brothers arrived at the Tianjin ferry crossing together early the next morning.

Zhang Da and his companions acted convincingly, and with Constable Zhou, who was also on the boat, the Wu brothers didn't notice anything amiss and boarded the pirate ship without realizing it.

until--

"What are you doing here? There are still officers on board. Aren't you afraid?"

Yuan Hu chuckled and said, "If you take someone's money, you're obligated to solve their problems. Blame it on your own ignorance for offending someone you shouldn't have."

"Say less and get this over with!" Zhou, disguised as a constable, finally revealed his true colors.

In the middle of the river, Constable Zhou carried Wu Wencai on his back, with Yuan Hu following closely behind. When they reached the bow of the boat, the two of them threw the Wu brothers into the river together.

"."

Xu Qing remained silent.

After the Wu brothers fell into the water, they did not sink but drifted away.

"Weird thing!"

The boatman gave chase, and Constable Zhou brandished a harpoon, stabbing the two men.

Just as the harpoon in Constable Zhou's hand was about to pierce Wu Zhiyuan's body, a thin layer of white light suddenly shone from Wu Zhiyuan's waist, enveloping him.

Constable Zhou and Yuan Hu took turns stabbing, but it was as if they were stabbing a mudfish; no matter what they did, they couldn't hurt the other party in the slightest.

Just as the two were beginning to feel a surge of passion, a huge wave suddenly swept in from the bow of the ship.

As the waves crashed down, the group looked up, but the Wu brothers were nowhere to be seen on the bubbly river.

Officer Zhou breathed a sigh of relief, realizing that the two of them would have little chance of survival in such a huge wave.

About a month and a half later, the boatman who had been staying in Wayao Street ignored Yuan Hu's warning and secretly ran back to Linhe to dig up the money hidden in the old house.

It was on this return trip to Linhe that boatman Zhang Da encountered Zhao Zhonghe, who was strolling down the street.

At that time, Zhao Zhonghe had just left Xu Qing's shop when the two bumped into each other in front of the coffin shop on Jingxia Street.

The funeral street was notoriously deserted; who would bother patrolling here? Zhang Dazhuan chose to walk along this secluded section precisely to avoid encountering officials.

But who would have thought that in this godforsaken, unlucky place, he would run right into Zhao Zhonghe, the living devil.

(End of this chapter)