“Are you here to take me away?”
Cai Xiulan’s palm was warm, but her five fingers clamped around Lin Yuqing’s wrist like an iron band.
The red countdown on the wooden plaque kept ticking.
> 26 minutes, 13 seconds. > 26 minutes, 12 seconds.
Nervous hugged his mourning staff, his face nearly the same color as the gray wall.
“Don’t answer,” he said.
“Why?”
“When a living person asks if you’re here to take her away, answering ‘yes’ could make the mortal world identify you as a soul-reaping agent. Answering ‘no’ could get you classified as interfering with a soul retrieval without authorization.”
Lin Yuqing looked at him. “You don’t have a ‘just passing through’ option?”
“No. Someone applied for one before. The official paperwork is still waiting in the Reincarnation Administration.”
Cai Xiulan seemed unable to hear Nervous. She stared only at Lin Yuqing, her eyes startlingly clear compared with moments ago.
“You still haven’t answered me.”
Lin Yuqing didn’t follow Nervous’s warning and stay silent.
“I’m here to find Chen Guochang.”
It wasn’t an affirmation or a denial. Years of customer-service work had taught her that when the system didn’t offer the right option, the safest response was to repeat the uncontested part of the customer’s question.
Cai Xiulan’s grip loosened slightly.
“He’s not here.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“To buy salt.”
“When did he go out?”
Cai Xiulan turned toward the dishes on the table. A thin film of oil had formed over the braised pork, and the edges of the stir-fried cabbage had dried and yellowed.
“Just for a bit,” she said. “He’ll be back soon.”
Lin Yuqing didn’t pull her hand free.
She could feel the lines and warmth in the old woman’s palm, even the slow pulse beneath her wrist bone. This wasn’t a memory imprint. Cai Xiulan was genuinely touching her.
Stranger still, the place where they touched didn’t hurt. Instead, it gradually grew hot, as if something that had been asleep for a very long time were waking along her arm.
Nervous suddenly stared at their clasped hands.
“There’s a thread on your hand.”
Lin Yuqing looked down.
An extremely fine silver-white thread emerged from the inside of her wrist, extending up her arm before vanishing into her chest. The light was faint. Each time it pulsed, it matched Cai Xiulan’s heartbeat.
“What is that?”
“It looks like a lifeline,” Nervous said, then immediately shook his head. “No. The dead don’t have lifelines. At least, not ones this intact.”
“So I really am still alive?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re an underworld agent.”
“A trainee.”
He said those two words with complete confidence.
The silver thread flashed again. The field-investigation plaque let out a sharp warning.
> Identity drift. > Mortal-world recognition rate: 27 percent. > Immediately terminate contact with the living person.
Nervous finally reacted. He swept the mourning staff between their wrists.
It never touched their skin, but a cold wind sliced through their clasped hands like a blade. Cai Xiulan staggered backward, and Lin Yuqing was yanked into the corner of the table.
The silver-white lifeline vanished instantly.
The two place settings on the table trembled at the same time.
The clarity began to drain from Cai Xiulan’s eyes. She looked at Lin Yuqing, then at Nervous standing beside her, her expression like someone waking in an unfamiliar room.
“Who are you?”
This time, she could see Nervous.
Nervous immediately took off his tall hat and hid it behind his back, as if that could make him look like an ordinary person.
“We’re from a gas company,” he said.
Lin Yuqing glanced at him.
“You came to inspect the gas at two in the morning?” Cai Xiulan asked.
“The Nighttime Anomalies Unit.”
“Which gas company?”
“Solid—”
Lin Yuqing stepped on Nervous’s shoe.
“Solid Gas Company,” she cut in. “We received Mr. Chen’s service-call record.”
Cai Xiulan frowned, apparently searching her memory for the company. After a few seconds, she suddenly smiled.
“I remember you.”
Lin Yuqing’s foot was still on Nervous’s shoe.
“You’ve seen me before?”
“No. Not seen you.” Cai Xiulan pointed to the old-fashioned landline beside the wall. “Heard you. You spoke to me on the phone.”
Nervous stopped struggling.
The only sound in the living room was the steady click of the oscillating fan.
“When?” Lin Yuqing asked.
“The day Guochang went out to buy salt.”
“What did I say to you?”
Cai Xiulan’s lips moved, but she didn’t answer immediately. She walked over to the landline and lifted the receiver to her ear.
“Hello?”
There was no sound on the other end.
“Guochang went out to buy salt,” she said into the empty receiver. “Call back later.”
She hung up and turned back toward the dining table. Halfway there, she stopped, as if she had suddenly remembered there were people behind her.
“What did you just ask me?”
Lin Yuqing suppressed her impatience and repeated the question.
This time, Cai Xiulan thought for even longer.
“You said… don’t open the door.”
A chill crept across Lin Yuqing’s back.
“Why couldn’t I open it?”
“You said the person outside wasn’t Guochang.”
The dark-red handprint on the door remained where the memory imprint had last appeared. Its five fingers were spread wide, its edges like ink that hadn’t quite dried.
“Did someone knock afterward?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
Cai Xiulan looked at the door.
“He told me to open it. He said he was back.”
“Did you open it?”
“I…”
Her expression suddenly turned frantic.
“I don’t remember.”
At that moment, the dishes on the table made another faint sound.
As if pulled back into another memory by the noise, Cai Xiulan hurriedly sat down and picked up her chopsticks.
“Guochang, dinner’s ready.”
She no longer looked at Lin Yuqing or answered any more questions.
Nervous lowered his voice. “We have to go. Her mortal-world recognition rate hasn’t dropped since she saw us.”
The plaque displayed:
> Time remaining: 21 minutes, 40 seconds > Mortal-world recognition rate: 29 percent
“She said she got a call from me seven days ago.”
“She could have mistaken you for someone else.”
“She doesn’t even recognize her husband’s memorial portrait, but she remembers a voice she heard only once?”
“That’s what makes it dangerous.”
Lin Yuqing walked toward the landline beside the wall.
The machine was very old, with grease caked in the gaps between its buttons. Beside it lay a note slip covered in groups of numbers written in different-colored pens. Her daughter was at the top, followed by the neighborhood chief, the hospital, and the clinic she visited regularly.
The bottom line contained only four words:
> Incoming call from Sunny
Lin Yuqing’s breath caught for a beat.
Sunny was what her grandmother had called her. After her grandmother died, almost no one called her that anymore.
The company she had worked for when she was alive knew her only as Lin Yuqing. Her ID badge, pay stubs, and customer-service recordings all used her full name. Even when her coworkers ordered drinks for her, they wrote only “Lin” on the cup. She had never used the nickname on social media, and the only person in her contacts who called her that could no longer possibly make a phone call.
Yet those two words were written in a stranger’s home.
Lin Yuqing stared at them too long. The surface of the paper seemed to waver. Beneath the four words, several previously invisible impressions gradually surfaced, as if someone had once placed another sheet over it and written there.
The first line read “2:14 a.m.”
The second line also read “2:14 a.m.”
There were six lines in all, with the dates running exactly from the day Chen Guochang died through yesterday. A tiny circle had been drawn at the end of every line. The first five were crossed out; beside the sixth was half of a blurred fingerprint.
“This wasn’t just one call,” Lin Yuqing said. “Someone called her for six days in a row.”
Nervous leaned toward the note slip, his nose nearly touching the wall. “I can’t see the impressions.”
“Only I can see them again?”
“Maybe it isn’t seeing.” Nervous hesitated. “Some records suppressed by the system don’t really disappear. No one can identify them anymore, that’s all. You can hear the voice buried beneath the recording, so maybe written words work the same way for you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s the third time you’ve said that.”
“This is the first time tonight I’ve encountered a customer-service agent with no death record who can still be grabbed by a living person,” Nervous said earnestly. “By comparison, I think I’ve answered pretty well.”
The writing wasn’t Cai Xiulan’s. The earlier lines were crooked, but the final four words were neat and forceful, and the ink was newer than the rest.
“Do you know her?” Nervous asked.
“No.”
“Then how does she know—”
“I want to know too.”
Lin Yuqing reached for the note slip, but her fingertips passed straight through the paper.
A moment ago, a living person could hold her. Now she couldn’t even touch a piece of paper.
She tried a second time. The result was the same.
Nervous took out a small black cloth pouch and held its opening over the note slip. The paper didn’t move, but a wisp of pale-gray shadow was drawn into the pouch, condensing into a thin copy.
“We can only take the object echo. We can’t move the original in the mortal world,” he explained.
“If you had that thing, why didn’t you take it out sooner?”
“You didn’t ask.”
Lin Yuqing was beginning to understand why he always failed his exams.
Before leaving the living room, she took one last look at Cai Xiulan.
The old woman was still putting food onto the empty seat’s plate.
“Guochang, dinner’s ready.”
This time, an extremely faint human shape appeared behind the empty chair.
Chen Guochang stood there with a bag of salt in his hand. He looked at his wife, his lips repeating the same sentence over and over.
Not “I’m back.”
“I can’t get in.”
Lin Yuqing was about to move closer when the plaque issued another warning.
> Mortal-world recognition rate: 32 percent. > Immediate departure from the living person’s residence recommended.
Nervous drew a doorframe in the air. The two of them passed through the wall and arrived in the apartment building’s stairwell.
There was no wind that night, yet the motion-activated lights came on all the way from the sixth floor to the first, as if someone invisible were hurrying downstairs.
They chased after the lights.
With every floor they descended, another wet handprint appeared on the wall. The handprints were about the height of Chen Guochang’s shoulders, but they weren’t facing downward. They climbed from the first floor all the way back to the sixth.
Lin Yuqing stopped at the third-floor landing. “He came back after he died.”
Nervous tapped the wall with his mourning staff. The handprint immediately scattered into gray mist, then reappeared one step higher the next second.
“It isn’t a complete soul. It’s only the thought of going home,” he said. “Every time he thinks of his wife, he makes it one floor farther up. Every time Cai Xiulan forgets, he gets pushed back outside the door.”
The old woman’s muffled cry drifted down from upstairs.
“Xiulan, open the door.”
The voice fell down the stairwell one floor at a time, until all that remained was the scrape of soles dragging across concrete.
Lin Yuqing looked toward the unopened door on the sixth floor. For the first time, she felt that being forgotten might be closer to true disappearance than death was.
The plaque skipped another seventeen seconds.
She didn’t linger.
The grocery store at the end of the alley had already pulled down its metal shutter. A string of faded plastic pennants hung beside the sign. Less than a hundred yards down the street stood a bus shelter with only one signpost.
A bundle of wilted white chrysanthemums lay on the ground.
Beside the flowers was half a packet of damp salt.
Nervous crouched down and tapped the ground with his mourning staff. The first strike made no sound. The second produced a muffled thud. On the third, a ring of dark-red markings surfaced in the gray asphalt.
The markings spread outward from the base of the signpost, eventually forming a complete soul-reaping seal.
“This is where Chen Guochang was taken,” he said.
“Why does the system say he died at home?”
“The location was changed, or this seal was never reported.”
Nervous held the plaque close to the ground. Red light swept over the soul-reaping seal, revealing several lines of text visible only to them:
> Soul-retrieval subject: Chen Guochang > Soul-retrieval time: 2:14 a.m. > Execution status: Complete
Lin Yuqing looked at the electronic clock at the street corner. It was 2:37 a.m.
“He left home at 2:07 and died at 2:14,” she said. “Cai Xiulan also received that call at 2:14.”
“The times match.”
“No.”
She remembered her own call.
No number, no record, and no ring. It appeared every day at 2:14 a.m.
Seven days ago, at that same time, a woman whose voice sounded exactly like hers had called Cai Xiulan and warned her not to open the door.
“Let’s look at the death echo first,” Lin Yuqing said.
Nervous didn’t move right away.
“The echo left after a soul retrieval is different from an ordinary memory. You might feel what he was experiencing before he died.”
“Will it hurt?”
“You’ll think the pain is yours.”
“Eleven minutes left.”
“Seventeen minutes.”
“We still have to walk back. Don’t you know how long it takes you to draw a door?”
Reluctantly, Nervous laid the mourning staff across the soul-reaping seal.
The dark-red markings lit up at once.
The bus shelter, streetlights, and entire street faded of their color simultaneously. Time rewound seven days. The shelter’s electronic advertisement froze at 2:13:57 a.m.
Chen Guochang came slowly from the alley, carrying the salt.
He had no external injuries, and no car had hit him. When he reached the signpost, he simply stopped, as if he had suddenly forgotten the way home.
A telephone rang in the distance.
Not a cell phone.
It was the old-fashioned telephone on Lin Yuqing’s desk.
Chen Guochang heard it too. He raised his head and looked toward the empty bus shelter.
“Hello?” he said tentatively.
A standardized female voice sounded through the air:
“Would you like to accept this death?”
It was Lin Yuqing’s voice.
She stood outside the echo, yet heard herself answer as clearly as if she were there.
Chen Guochang shook his head. “I’m not dead yet.”
“The system shows that your soul-retrieval procedure has been completed.”
“I want to go home.”
“Would you like to accept this death?”
The same sentence played a second time, with not the slightest change in intonation.
Chen Guochang turned to leave. The soul-reaping seal on the ground suddenly flared. The shadow his body cast behind him stretched long beneath the lights, then stopped in place while his body continued forward.
One step.
Two steps.
When his third step landed, the shadow peeled completely away from the soles of his feet.
The old man clutched his chest and collapsed beside the signpost.
No soul-reaping agent appeared.
There was no soul-retrieval warrant.
Only the seal on the ground, dragging Chen Guochang’s soul out of his body on its own.
Nervous’s mourning staff began to shake violently.
“The seal was stamped in advance,” he said. “Someone knew he would pass through here.”
After Chen Guochang fell in the echo, the soul-reaping seal didn’t go dark.
A second identical seal settled over the first layer of red light.
Then a third, a fourth.
Every other day, at the same time, a new seal covered the old one.
Six overlapping soul-reaping seals corresponded to the first six records in the system—cases marked closed and sent into the reincarnation cycle.
The seventh layer remained blank.
Lin Yuqing crouched down, trying to make out the characters in the center of the seal. The instant she leaned closer, the red light at the bottom layer suddenly flipped upward.
A voice buried beneath the six layers of markings slipped into her ear.
“Sunny, don’t answer for him this time.”
She jerked her head up.
“Did you hear that?”
Nervous didn’t answer.
He was staring at the ground, every trace of color gone from his face.
The blank seventh soul-reaping seal began to seep red light.
In the center, where Chen Guochang’s name should have been written, new characters emerged stroke by stroke.
Lin.
Yuqing.
The plaque let out a piercing continuous alarm.
> Time remaining: 4 minutes, 44 seconds. > Mortal-world recognition rate: 51 percent. > Warning: Field personnel have been registered as a soul-retrieval subject.
Chapter Terms
- Lifeline: The life connection between a living person’s soul and body. A normal dead person’s lifeline breaks after death; Yuqing still possesses a complete one, an important clue to the abnormality of her identity. - Soul-reaping seal: An underworld seal confirming a soul-retrieval order and its execution. Under normal circumstances, a soul-reaping agent should leave one according to a soul-retrieval warrant. It should not activate or be used repeatedly on its own. - Soul-retrieval trace: The trace left at the scene of death after a soul has been taken from its body. Ordinary living people cannot see it; it can be used to verify the location of death and the soul-retrieval process. - Object echo: A memory copy left behind by an object in the mortal world. Underworld agents on field assignments cannot move the original, but they can take away the object echo as investigative material without altering the scene.
> The underworld organizations and rules in this work are fictional settings. Some names are drawn from Chinese folk beliefs.