Daomu Biji: Wu Xie’s Private Notes - Chapter 30: Zombies and Monsters

001 Corpse Bugs (The sketch of corpse bugs is attached below.)

Corpse bugs are insects with shells. They feel very similar to a combination between a diving beetle and a water centipede, but the difference between corpse bugs and diving beetles is that corpse bugs’ front feet are particularly sharp and powerful. They are also larger, fond of darkness, and afraid of light.

Corpse bugs are very fast and amphibious, feeding on carrion corpses and small creatures that have strayed into the water. They often accumulate around floating corpses, gather in piles, and prey on each other.

I have been attacked by this kind of bug before, and feel that they are unlikely to pose a threat to animals with thick skin, such as rhinos bathing in water. They are, however, a threat to humans because they have the instinct to attack weak parts such as the abdomen. If people can’t get to the shore in time, the corpse bugs will pierce their abdomen and cause massive bleeding and death.

Corpse bugs mostly appear in the depths of mountains, rivers, canals, or swamps, and also appear in large numbers during floods or mudslides.

002 Blood Zombie (The sketch of a blood zombie is attached below.)

There are legends of blood zombies in many places, but blood zombie tombs actually refer to tombs that have a protective layer underground. For example, when ancient tombs with fire roofs, acid roofs, or cinnabar roofs are hit with a Luoyang shovel, something red will appear. This is especially true when the shovels hit acid roofs. The red soil would look like blood, but it’s because the soil contains a lot of cinnabar.

If ancient tombs have these kinds of structures, that means that the specifications are very high. As a result, others will form the idea that blood zombie tombs are full of treasures.

As to why they would think there would be blood zombies in blood zombie tombs… on the one hand, it might be hearsay; on the other hand, cinnabar is an object used for exorcism. If cinnabar is used in the soil layer of ancient tombs, that means people definitely did it in the hopes of trapping certain things in the ancient tomb. So, if tombs are sealed with cinnabar, there must be something strange with the corpses in them. In fact, the color of blood zombies isn’t a bloody red like the name implies. Instead, they are more of a garnet purple.

003 Green-Eyed Fox Corpse (The sketch of the green-eyed fox corpse is below.)

The ancient corpse was so creepy and terrifying that it was practically indescribable. A human looking like a bald fox definitely wasn’t something as basic as a deformity. I couldn’t imagine what this ancient corpse looked like before it had decayed and dried out.

Fatty said that this happened because it was possessed, but based on a large number of verified theories, it was more likely to be a rare deformity. If we classified it, it would probably be a cerebellar disorder.

There were developmental deformities that could make people’s faces extremely long, and it was also possible that the use of splints from an early age deformed his head and face, just like the ancient Incan and Egyptian civilizations used to do.

This was a man-made mythological phenomenon, and I believed that any enemy on the battlefield would be frightened when seeing such a monster.

The main function of the mask was to symbolize the gods, so at least some part of King Lushang believed in the fox totem. In history, it seemed that only one branch of the Tibetans also worshiped foxes, which I found very fascinating.

(The sketches of masks and various animal totems are attached below.)

004 Nine-Headed Snake Cypress (The sketch of the Nine-Headed Snake Cypress is attached below.)

I couldn’t find any information about this plant. There was some unconventional information about trees or other large plants that could digest animal tissues, and the scientific name for them was: CARNIVOROUS TREES.

In foreign legends, trees that were similar to the nine-headed snake cypress were called “octopus trees”. They could entangle their prey before killing and digesting it, and this kind of tree was often called “devil tree” by the locals.

Eventually, German explorers wrote in their investigation journals that the way this tree attacked animals originated from its instinct to spread seeds, just like how cocklebur stuck to animals’ fur. This particular kind of tree entangled and killed everything close to it.

I believed that if such trees really existed, they might be nine-headed snake cypresses. It was possible that the ecological characteristics of this tree made it so that it killed animals and then used the rotting carcasses to attract insects to spread its seeds. Because of this, corpse bugs were attracted by the corpses on the trees and gathered around the snake cypress.

From my experience, the snake cypress couldn’t kill its prey, and must have relied on the corpse bugs to do so, creating a very clever symbiotic relationship. At the same time, the corpse bugs’ excrement was excellent nourishment for the tree, because it was more delicate and suitable for the growth of plants than the decomposed corpses.

This kind of symbiotic relationship also existed among other plants and animals, but I think the relationship here may have been designed by someone. It was like the setup of fish farming or rice fields, which was a kind of wisdom in the agricultural community.

005 Forbidden Woman (Sketches of the frontal view of the Forbidden Woman, the Forbidden Woman mural in the undersea tomb, and the Forbidden Woman crawling are shown below.)

The legend of the Forbidden Woman was widespread among the southern ethnic minorities, from the Miao and Yao tribes in Yunnan to the fishermen in Hainan. The Forbidden Woman had always been a concept that often appeared in legends.

Among the fishermen in Hainan, the Forbidden Woman represented a kind of disease and disaster. They were often depicted as having a big belly and looking damp, which was similar to the large number of corpses that floated up on the beach after a tsunami. Moreover, a large number of corpses gathering together meant that it was easy for an epidemic to break out.

Because of this, I speculated that the Forbidden Woman was a product of fishermen combining the impression of floating corpses and disasters for thousands of years. People at that time didn’t understand the relationship between dead people, disasters, and diseases, so they fabricated such a god. [Note: In Taiwanese versions, the Forbidden Woman was depicted as a “monster”]

We met the Forbidden Woman after we entered the tomb passage. She was a monster with a lot of hair and looked exactly like a corpse that had been soaked in water for a long time. Now I was scared every time I saw women with a lot of hair.

006 Sea Monkey (The sketch of the sea monkey is attached below, it looked very interesting.)

The legendary creatures known as sea monkeys that are often heard about in coastal areas were said to have been discovered in a reservoir in Guangxi when the reservoir was being cleaned up.

Sea monkeys are called outcropping ghosts in Changsha, and water lion ghosts in Guilin.

The difference between these legendary creatures and other creatures is that sea monkey legends can be found in almost all places, which is very intriguing. Maybe it’s because people are afraid of the mysteries lying below the water’s surface. According to the elders, this kind of animal is said to exist in almost any place with water, such as wells and even tanks.

The details of all the legends are different, but they have one thing in common—this kind of thing is in the form of a human, and is incredibly powerful in the water. But to be honest, my imagination is far less horrible than what I really saw.

007 Human-Faced Birds (Various sketches of human-faced birds are attached below.)

Almost all civilizations in the world have mentioned human-faced birds, and they appear in all kinds of religions and myths. This is especially true when it comes to China and India’s history, and it isn’t because China was deeply influenced by Buddhism.

Careful observations revealed that in the legend of China’s Yellow Emperor, Jiutian Xuannü (1) appeared in the form of a human-faced bird.

After that, Buddhism started to be introduced to China and began developing in the Wei, Chin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties.

Based on this, Kalaviṅka (2) in Buddhism shouldn’t be considered the prototype of Jiutian Xuannü in Chinese mythology.

(Although there are lots of records of human-faced birds in “The Classic of Mountains and Seas”, it’s been said that the last couple of volumes were forged by later generations. As a result, I won’t include the book in my theory.)

The earliest surviving image of a human-faced bird in China was discovered at the “Hongshan Culture” site on the Mao Naohai Mountain in the hinterland of the Laoha Hebei Desert in Inner Mongolia. It was from the Neolithic Age, and archaeologists believed it was an ancient owl that resembled a human-faced bird. This ancient owl was now extinct.

In ancient times, Inner Mongolia was far from the Central Plains culture and belonged to the land of the Northern warlords. Since it was close to the northeast, however, I wondered if we had seen this kind of owl at the bottom of Changbai Mountain.

In a large number of legends, the human-faced bird played a role in spreading the “gospel”. Whether it was Jiutian Xuannü awarding the Yellow Emperor war scripts, or Kalaviṅka spreading the wonderful news of the Buddha, they all brought heavenly culture to the people of Earth.

What was even more strange was that there were mortals in China that were depicted as human-faced birds. For example, the genius doctor Bian Que (3) looked like a human-faced bird, but I later discovered that this was actually a misconception.

There were actually many Bian Que, because that was what all the famous doctors were called in the Spring and Autumn Period. The real Bian Que was a mythological character from the Xuanyuan era that belonged to the same line as the Yellow Emperor. Based on this, I highly suspected that the Bian Que who looked like a human-faced bird was the same kind of creature as Jiutian Xuannü.

It was difficult not to make associations like this since there were many records of human-faced birds in Chinese mythology.

If we look at it from a realistic viewpoint, I feel like maybe there’s an ancient civilization that we haven’t discovered yet. Maybe people from that time domesticated and trained this kind of owl with a human’s face and bird’s body, and the owls played very important roles in wars and transportation.

Moreover, this kind of owl might have appeared frequently in tribal wars, and may have transported a large amount of intelligence and medicine, making other tribes mistakenly think that it was a kind of god.

This mysterious ancient civilization was obviously very low-key, or its mystical character led to all the remaining materials about it in the world being destroyed. The few remaining traces of these owls were at the giant bronze door under Changbai Mountain. They went extinct after the civilization had vanished, leaving only a few survivors underground to guard the last traces of their masters.

It sounded far-fetched, but I figured it made sense. Furthermore, using owls to spread information had me thinking of the image of witches in Europe during the Middle Ages. Every witch there had an owl as a pet. This was a bit fun. Was it the magical world of Hogwarts behind the huge bronze door?

008 Thousand-handed Guanyin Zombie (The sketch of the Thousand-Hand Guanyin Zombie is attached below.)

This is a zombie that gives people a lot of thoughts, and it’s not only because of its many weird hands that make it look like a spider.

I have no idea if this is a rare deformity or some kind of disease, but the hands looked very flexible and powerful, so the deformity at least didn’t affect their quality of life.

Of course, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to control so many hands, but obviously, if you lived on a ridge or cliff, this deformity would make things like fishing in the water easier.

Could it be some kind of evolutionary result or man-made choice? For example, in King Wannu’s clan, maybe one’s status was determined by the number of hands they had.

People with only two hands were considered relatively inferior, and as the number of hands increased—and the degree of deformity became more serious— the status of those people would become higher and higher. Therefore, people in the clan hoped that their children could marry people with more hands. Those people who had more hands had higher status, so that meant they had more wives and concubines.

It was just like those African tribes whose indigenous people worshiped albinism. Albinos received the same treatment as gods in the tribe. They strove to make albinos intermarry and obtain a “god” with completely white skin. As a result, when these indigenous people saw white people appear at that time, it was as if they were seeing gods. They immediately gave in and hardly dared to resist.

(The sketch of a thousand-hand giant fighting with the Mongolian army is attached below.)

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TN Notes:

(1) In Chinese mythology, Jiutian Xuannü is the goddess of war, sex, and longevity. Wiki link

(2) Kalaviṅka is a fantastical immortal creature in Buddhism, with a human head and a bird’s torso, with long flowing tail. Wiki link

(3) According to legend, Bian Que the earliest known Chinese physician. Wiki link

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BIG BIG BIG shout-out to Tiffany for working her ass off to get you this giant chapter. And kudos to my fabulous self for finding all those pictures lol. I’m sorry the quality varies so much, but I did the best I could. I think I found all of them, so hopefully none are missing (but we’ll never know unless someone actually has the illustrated copy mwahahaha)