The phone in the director's office rang seven times before Director Wu picked it up.
He said nothing.
There was no sound from the other end either, only the steady scrape of paper being fed from a machine. A few seconds later, the printer in the director's office started up on its own, and a notice with a red border slowly slid out.
Lin Yuqing couldn't make out the contents through the glass. She could only see three digits printed in the lower-right corner.
417.
Director Wu turned the notice facedown on the desk and hung up.
"Zhong Peiyun's case is off field assignment."
He stepped out of the director's office.
"The system just approved it," Lin Yuqing said.
"The hospital's corpse records are being rechecked by the Death Records Division."
"There are more than eleven hours until cremation. How long will the recheck take?"
"The standard deadline is three business days."
"By the time you're done checking, the ashes could already be back home."
Director Wu didn't deny it. "Correcting a corpse's identity isn't the same as canceling cremation. Mortal-world procedures aren't under our jurisdiction."
"But an incorrect death identity is."
Lin Yuqing turned her restricted case authorization toward him. The application status was still green, and the investigation scope clearly listed Zhong Peiyun's corpse and death identity. It hadn't been revoked.
Director Wu glanced at Nervous. "Who's leading the field assignment?"
Nervous instinctively turned to look for Xie Bi'an.
Xie Bi'an was sitting two desks away, the wooden suspension placard on his chest blinking on and off. He raised both hands to show that he hadn't even left his chair.
"I-I am," Nervous said.
"You haven't passed the on-site inspection test for an A-level corpse misidentification."
"There were twelve questions, and I got eleven right."
"You got the one wrong about whether the misidentified corpse should be brought back to the underworld."
Lin Yuqing asked, "What did he answer?"
Nervous lowered his head. "It depends on the circumstances."
"And the correct answer?"
"Absolutely not."
"Now you know."
Nervous raised his head and tightened his grip on the mourning staff. "I won't move the corpse, and I won't let her come into contact with any living person. I can lead the team."
His voice still trembled, but he didn't duck under a desk like he had during his first field assignment.
Director Wu stared at him for several seconds, then drew a gray timer plaque from his sleeve.
"Forty-four minutes. You may enter only the morgue and the corpse-transfer area. Do not go to the wards, and do not access Lin Yuqing's medical records. Return immediately if you detect a lifeline response."
He handed the timer plaque to Nervous, then looked at Lin Yuqing.
"Your body is in the hospital. Living people will be more likely to see you than last time."
"I know."
"Knowing and being able to do it are two different things."
"If I show a lifeline response, Nervous will terminate the investigation immediately." Lin Yuqing looked at him. "Right?"
Nervous froze. He clearly hadn't expected the responsibility of deciding whether to retreat to fall on him. His hands tightened around the mourning staff, then relaxed.
"Right," he said at last. "Even if you disagree, I'll open the fieldwork door and take you out."
Lin Yuqing nodded. This wasn't reassurance. It was a clear division of responsibility. She needed someone to make an unpopular decision for her before she lost the ability to judge for herself.
"You can save that line for the Death Records Division."
Director Wu didn't stop them again.
As they passed, Xie Bi'an tapped his knuckles against the desk three times.
"Morgue doors usually open outward," he said, as if speaking to the air. "Don't pull the wrong way when you run."
"You aren't authorized to advise on official business," Director Wu said.
"I'm recalling basic architectural knowledge."
Nervous removed a small piece of address object echo from Zhong Peiyun's death record. After the gray paper fell to the floor, he used the mourning staff to draw a doorframe along its edges. The first line was a little crooked. The second trembled just before it connected.
He stopped and closed his eyes, drawing another breath.
When he opened them again, the final stroke landed perfectly steady.
The door opened.
The smell of disinfectant mixed with cold air rushed toward them.
Lin Yuqing stepped over the threshold, her shoe landing on the gray tile floor of the basement level one of Antai General Hospital. Behind her, the fieldwork door rapidly shrank into a black line, and the timer plaque on Nervous's chest began counting down.
> Forty-three minutes, fifty-nine seconds.
It was 12:26 a.m. in the mortal world.
There were no windows in the morgue corridor. One fluorescent light every few yards had burned out. Two empty gurneys sat along the wall, their white sheets hanging beside the wheels and swaying faintly in the air conditioning. In the guard station farther down the hall, a watchman sat with his head lowered, scrolling on his phone. He didn't notice the two people who had suddenly appeared.
Nervous let out a breath. "He can't see us."
Lin Yuqing didn't answer.
The moment she entered the hospital, a hair-thin pull appeared in her chest. It wasn't pain, more like an invisible thread passing out through her body and extending toward some distant floor above. Whenever the elevator ran, the thread tightened along with it.
She forced herself to look toward the morgue instead of wondering which room upstairs held her body.
The ceiling above the corridor rumbled with the vibration of a gurney rolling past. Every time its wheels crossed a seam, the pull in her chest trembled. An impossible image flashed through her mind: a woman who looked exactly like her lying on a white hospital bed, her hair cut short, her arms covered in tubes. Maybe someone who had already been waiting forty-nine days sat beside her.
She didn't know whether it was a memory. All she could do was treat it as an illusion produced by her lifeline.
"Your hand," Nervous warned.
Lin Yuqing looked down. The tips of her fingers had already taken on the faintest pink tint. She took two steps deeper into the morgue, and the color faded again.
At least that confirmed her body wasn't in the basement.
A corpse-transfer form for the day hung beside the cold-storage room door. Mortal-world paper couldn't be moved, so Nervous held the mourning staff close to its surface and let the words rise into the air as pale-gray object echoes.
At 4:17 a.m., two female corpses had been registered.
First: Zhong Peiyun, medical-record suffix 417, picked up by the funeral home.
Second: unidentified, estimated age forty to fifty, placed in cold-storage locker 417.
"The same 417 was used three times," Nervous said. "Time of death, medical-record suffix, and locker number."
"It's not a coincidence."
Lin Yuqing looked farther down the form. Locker 417 had been opened at 5:02 a.m. The unidentified woman was marked "transfer complete," but the receiving unit was blank.
"The system says she was never admitted, and the hospital can't find her current location."
"Someone sent her out of here without recording where she went."
Nervous checked the form column by column. Every time a normal corpse was moved, the record showed the departure time, transport vehicle number, case handler, and receiving location. Without all four pieces of information, the locker couldn't be closed. Yet the unidentified woman's record showed complete despite all four fields being blank, as if someone hadn't bypassed the procedure so much as told the procedure those blanks were enough.
"A regular hospital employee couldn't do this, right?" Lin Yuqing asked.
"Unless they can make the mortal-world system accept a death outcome from the underworld."
They entered the cold-storage room.
A row of silver locker doors reflected the bluish-white lights. Locker 417 was on the bottom row. It had no nameplate, only the sticky residue left by a torn-off label. Nervous crouched to examine it. When the mourning staff drew near the handle, two different-colored afterglows surfaced on the wood.
One belonged to Zhong Peiyun.
The other was darker, as if someone had wiped over ink with a wet hand.
"Both corpses were in this locker," he said.
"Can you see the transfer residual echo?"
Nervous nodded. He set the timer plaque on the floor and tapped the locker door once with the mourning staff.
All the lights in the cold-storage room went out.
When they came back on, the time had changed to three days earlier, in the middle of the night.
Two hospital employees pushed corpses inside. Their faces were blurred by the residual echo, leaving only their movements visible. The woman on the first gurney wore Zhong Peiyun's wristband, her right waist covered by a white sheet. The woman on the second gurney had a distinct ring of burns around her left wrist. Her wristband bore only the words "Unidentified."
Lin Yuqing immediately recognized the second woman as the one in the coffin photograph.
The hospital employees put Zhong Peiyun into locker 417 first, then placed the unidentified woman in the adjoining locker 418. After completing the registration, they left, and the cold-storage room fell silent again.
The residual echo didn't end.
At 4:44 a.m., the corridor lights flickered three times.
A person in pale green work clothes entered alone. They wore a mask and cap. There was no hospital ID on their chest, but they were holding a scanner capable of opening the cold-storage lockers.
They pulled out Zhong Peiyun first, then the unidentified woman.
They didn't move the corpses. They only switched the wristbands.
"That's him." Nervous took a step forward.
"It's only a residual echo."
The person fastened Zhong Peiyun's wristband around the unidentified woman's wrist. The scanner gave three confirmation beeps, and a red box appeared on its screen.
> Identity conflict. > Overwrite with current death outcome?
They pressed confirm.
The red box contracted into a seal, its shape extremely similar to the cinnabar seal on the underworld's official paperwork.
A chill crept up the back of Lin Yuqing's neck.
Mortal-world medical equipment shouldn't display a death outcome from the underworld. It certainly shouldn't have an option to overwrite an identity.
The person then fastened the unidentified wristband around Zhong Peiyun's wrist and wheeled her out of the cold-storage room. As they passed the doorway, the brim of their work cap lifted in the cold draft, exposing a small patch of black lettering behind their ear.
It wasn't a tattoo.
It was a string of soul-signature code that only underworld employees possessed.
Nervous rushed forward to get a clear look at the number, but the residual echo shattered at that exact moment.
The cold-storage room returned to normal.
Only thirty-one minutes remained on the timer plaque.
"Why would a living person have soul-signature code?" Nervous asked.
"Maybe he isn't a living person."
"Fieldwork personnel aren't allowed to slip into a living person's work clothes."
"Rules saying no doesn't mean nobody will do it."
Lin Yuqing checked locker 417 again. After the wristbands were switched, the unidentified woman had been sent to the funeral home as Zhong Peiyun, while the real Zhong Peiyun had left the hospital as an unidentified corpse.
The question was who had taken her.
Nervous pressed the mourning staff to the bottom of the locker door. This time, what surfaced wasn't a scene but an intermittent wheel-track object echo. The gurney left the cold-storage room, passed through the morgue corridor, and finally turned toward the staff elevator.
They followed the wheel tracks.
The watchman in the guard station was still scrolling on his phone. As Lin Yuqing passed the doorway, he suddenly looked up.
"Who's there?"
Nervous stopped.
"Don't look at him," Lin Yuqing whispered.
The watchman set down his phone and walked out of the guard station. His gaze didn't land on Nervous. It followed Lin Yuqing directly.
"Miss, you can't come in here."
The lifeline in her chest suddenly pulled tight.
Somewhere above them, a heart monitor beeped—the exact same sound as the one inside the walls of the temporary holding room. The back of her hand gradually took on the blood-colored flush of a living person, and for the first time, the soles of her shoes left clear shadows on the mortal-world floor.
"He can see you." Nervous's voice trembled.
The watchman reached for her shoulder.
Lin Yuqing stepped back. She couldn't touch a living person, and she couldn't let one touch her. The first time she'd gone into the field, Cai Xiulan had grabbed her. Within seconds, the system had nearly identified her as a living person. This time, her body was in the same building. The consequences would come even faster.
The corridor was too narrow, and the closed cold-storage door was directly behind her.
Nervous stepped across and blocked the two of them.
The watchman's hand passed through his body.
Nervous went white with terror, but he didn't move aside. He struck the empty gurney beside them with the mourning staff. Since he couldn't move an original mortal-world object, the staff passed through the rail, stirring up a blast of icy underworld wind.
The transfer form hanging on the wall rustled loudly in the wind.
The watchman was drawn to the sound and turned his head.
"Go!" Nervous said.
They took the opportunity to pass through the staff elevator doors.
No living person had pressed the elevator button, so it shouldn't have been running. When the wheel-track object echo touched the panel, the button for basement level one went out on its own, and a previously nonexistent option appeared at the very bottom.
> Corpse-Transfer Level.
"Does the hospital have a basement level two?" Lin Yuqing asked.
Nervous checked the mortal-world floor plan. "No."
The button lit up by itself.
The elevator began to descend.
The timer plaque showed twenty-three minutes and forty seconds.
Outside the doors was no hospital corridor, but a narrow passage between the mortal world and the underworld. Wristbands with their names torn off covered the concrete walls. Every one of them bore the same remaining number: 417.
The wheel tracks extended deep into the passage.
Xie Bi'an's voice suddenly came through the timer plaque.
"Come back immediately."
Nervous nearly threw the plaque away. "Aren't you not allowed to interfere with official business?"
"The fieldwork door just closed on its own." His voice was mixed with heavy static. "You're no longer on any floor registered to Antai Hospital. The location display says—"
The signal cut out for a moment.
"Says what?" Lin Yuqing asked.
"It says you've already returned to the underworld."
Nervous gripped the timer plaque, his face whiter than the corpses in the lockers. "We should go back."
He was talking about the rules, and about the responsibility Director Wu had given him.
Lin Yuqing didn't ask him to continue. The wheel tracks led into an unknown area, the fieldwork door had closed, and the person who had taken Zhong Peiyun might be an underworld employee who had been struck from the rolls. By every safety rule, they should retreat now.
But Nervous saw half of a wristband object echo lying beside the tracks. It bore no name, only part of Zhong Peiyun's family's contact information and the marks of having been folded over and over.
"Her family is still waiting," he said quietly.
This time, he was the first to take a step into the passage.
Lin Yuqing looked behind her. The elevator doors were still open. Inside was the mortal-world hospital; outside, ashes from burned underworld paperwork drifted down from the ceiling one piece at a time.
This wasn't a normally existing floor.
It was a corpse-transfer passage someone had illegally built between the hospital and the underworld.
From the end of the wheel tracks came the sound of a metal gurney rolling.
A person in pale green work clothes passed through the mist. They were pushing a corpse covered by a white sheet, and the soul-signature code behind their ear was plainly visible.
Nervous raised the timer plaque and aimed it at the string of numbers.
The scan produced only two lines.
> Identity: Removed from the rolls. > Former department: Death Appeals Center.
The person stopped.
They didn't turn around.
From beneath the white sheet on the gurney, a hand wearing the unidentified wristband extended into view.
A long surgical scar showed at the right waist.
They had found the real Zhong Peiyun.
But the person who had taken her also knew they were there.
## Terms in This Chapter
- **Corpse-transfer chain**: The complete record from the hospital confirming a death, moving the corpse into cold storage, handing it to the transport crew, and receiving it at the funeral home. If any segment lacks a time, destination, or recipient, the corpse's identity may become disconnected from the record. - **Identity overwrite**: An anomalous operation that forcibly replaces a corpse's original data with an existing death outcome. Normal mortal-world equipment should not have permission to connect to underworld death records. - **Corpse-transfer level**: A hidden passage illegally built between mortal-world medical facilities and the underworld. It can bypass normal soul-retrieval and corpse-transfer procedures. Its current purpose and creator remain unknown.
> The underworld organization and its rules in this work are fictional settings. Some names are drawn from Chinese folk beliefs.