
Wild Dog
One of the many rebellions that broke out against the newly established Qing dynasty was that of Yu Qi, a native of Xixia in Shandong, who led a peasant uprising against the Qing regime in 1648 and again in 1661. In the spring of 1662, his army was routed and he fled. After the collapse of the Yu Qi Uprising, the Qing troops massacred many local people. According to some researchers, following the defeat of his rebellion, Yu Qi became a monk and was the originator of the Mantis Fist style of kung fu.
During the Yu Qi rebellion, people fell like flies. A villager, Li Hualong, fled home from the mountains. The government troops happened to advance that night and he was terrified of being caught in the indiscriminate slaughter. In his desperation, he had no place to hide, except to lie stiff among a pile of dead bodies and pretend to be a corpse.
The soldiers had already gone past, but he didn’t dare to come out too soon. Suddenly he saw the headless mutilated corpses stand up in lines. One of the corpses, its severed head still attached to its shoulders, began to speak, saying, “The wild dog’s coming – what now?”
All the corpses tall and short echoed, “What now?” A moment later, they all fell down, then there was silence.
Legs trembling, Li was about to stand up, when a creature with a beast’s head and a human body appeared, bent over and bit into the skulls, sucking the brains out one by one. Li hid his head beneath the corpses in dread. The creature came over and tugged at Li’s shoulder, trying to get at his head. Li held himself to the ground to keep it out of reach, so the creature pushed aside the pile of corpses covering him, revealing his head. Terrified, Li felt around on the ground underneath him, found a stone as big as a basin and grabbed it.
When the creature bent down to bite him, Li leapt up with a yell and struck its head, hitting the mouth. The creature screeched like an owl, covered its mouth in agony and fled, spitting blood along the way. Checking at once, Li found two fangs among the blood, curved from the middle and sharp at the ends, more than four inches long. He carried them back to show to people, but nobody could say what kind of creature it was.