Mr. Song and the others are already in the hotel. The waiter and the shopkeeper are also there, and they're talking about the corpse. The narrator says that this is the first of many stories they'll be told in this chapter. The first story is called "corpse," and it's about a group of coachmen who stay at an inn. The coachmen fall asleep, and the corpse wakes up and wants to kill them, but the coachman covers his face with a blanket. Everyone calls him "A'xiu," and he feels like he's a character from the fairy tale "A-Xiu."