# Chapter Five: Please Present the Soul-Retrieval Warrant
When the final stroke of Lin Yuqing's name surfaced, the ground suddenly seemed to open its mouth.
Cold seeped in through the soles of her shoes and bit into her ankles.
She instinctively stepped back, but her right foot was firmly stuck in the center of the soul-reaping seal. The shadow on the asphalt stretched straight as a line, as if someone belowground had grabbed it and was dragging it inch by inch into the red light.
A tearing sensation followed in her chest.
It wasn't pain. It was more like another self inside her had been awakened and was trying to sit up beneath her skin.
The countdown on the wooden plaque began racing downward.
> Four minutes, forty-three seconds. > Four minutes, forty-two seconds. > Soul-retrieval procedure verification in progress.
"Don't struggle!" Nervous shouted.
"You could've said that a little sooner!"
"This is my first time seeing a soul-reaping seal fill in its own name, too!"
He gripped the mourning staff with both hands and brought it down hard on the red light beside Lin Yuqing's foot.
The instant the staff struck the ground, the entire bus shelter trembled. A hairline crack split the dark-red pattern, then sealed itself like a living thing and wrapped around the mourning staff instead.
Nervous hurriedly let go. The staff did not fall. It stood straight up in the center of the seal, a line of red text surfacing across its body:
> Interference with an official soul retrieval. One violation recorded.
"It keeps track of violations, too?" Lin Yuqing asked through clenched teeth.
"The underworld can let anything slip, but employee violations? Never."
The red light crawled up her calf.
The street before her began to overlap. She could still see the bus shelter and the withered white chrysanthemums, but she could also see another layer of gray space pressing down over it: countless desks, blurry figures waiting for their numbers to be called, and a row of iron doors stretching endlessly into the distance.
She was being pulled toward two places at once.
"How do we stop it?"
"An official soul reaping can only be stopped with a rejection seal or proof that the soul-retrieval warrant is invalid."
"Where's the rejection seal?"
"Only the Seventh Lord has one."
"Where's the soul-retrieval warrant?"
Nervous looked around. "There isn't a soul-reaping agent, and there isn't a warrant."
"Then what gives it the right to grab me?"
"Your name is already on the seal!"
"A name isn't a document."
Lin Yuqing forced herself to breathe.
The tearing in her chest grew heavier, and her fingers had gone numb with cold. She was terrified—so terrified that only one sentence her former supervisor had repeated over and over remained in her mind: If the procedure is wrong, don't process it. If the information is incomplete, reject the submission. And if something goes wrong, leave a record proving it wasn't your responsibility.
She spoke to the empty bus shelter.
"Requesting verification of the soul-retrieval warrant."
The red light paused for half a second.
> Soul-retrieval procedure in progress. > Do not obstruct official duties.
"Please provide the soul-retrieval warrant number, issuing department, page number in the Book of Life and Death for the retrieval target, and the name of the soul-reaping agent carrying out the execution."
Nervous stared blankly at her. "You're talking to the seal?"
"At least it seems more capable of understanding human speech than some customers."
The patterns on the ground began flickering.
The iron doors in the gray space closed one by one, as if the system were searching for a file that didn't exist.
> Query in progress. > Query in progress. > Query timed out.
The restraints around Lin Yuqing's feet loosened for an instant.
"Now!"
Nervous lunged for the mourning staff and used his entire body weight to pull it free of the red light. The end of the staff brought up a small patch of burning seal-pattern, like tearing off a copy of official paperwork before the ink had dried.
The soul-reaping seal immediately let out a piercing shriek.
> Soul-retrieval warrant not obtained. > No death record exists for the retrieval target. > Error: Unable to confirm whether Lin Yuqing meets the criteria for death.
"Under Rule One, a case cannot be created without a death record," Lin Yuqing continued. "Therefore, soul retrieval cannot be carried out. Please return this to the original issuing department for additional documentation."
For the first time, she felt genuinely grateful for a set of absurd regulations.
The red light withdrew from her calf to her ankle.
But the countdown did not stop.
> Time remaining: Two minutes, fifty-nine seconds. > Soul-retrieval procedure suspended pending additional documentation.
"It's only suspended." Nervous snatched up the mourning staff. "Run!"
He drew the first line in the air.
It came out crooked, as if the wind had blown it sideways.
"Could you draw a straighter line?"
"Someone's being taken for soul retrieval right next to me! I can't draw straight!"
The second line was even more crooked than the first. The third was only halfway done when a new prompt lit up in the center of the soul-reaping seal.
> Additional-documentation request accepted. > Estimated processing time: Three to five business days.
Lin Yuqing paused. "So we have three days?"
Without looking back, Nervous drew the final stroke. "The underworld's business days aren't the same as the mortal world's."
"How are they different?"
"Sometimes it's one day. Sometimes it's a hundred years."
Pale blue-white light from the Death Appeals Center finally seeped through the doorframe.
Nervous threw the mourning staff through first, then shoved Lin Yuqing forward. The moment her right foot left the ground, the soul-reaping seal contracted violently, like a taut red cord wrapping around her ankle.
She fell backward.
Her silver-white lifeline lit up from her chest again. One end remained inside her body, while the other passed through the fieldwork door and stretched deep into the underworld.
The soul-reaping seal seized her shadow.
The lifeline pulled her back.
Both forces tightened at once.
She finally understood that Xie Bi'an's claim that "both sides only take half" had not been a joke.
Nervous lay sprawled inside the doorway, both hands gripping her wrists. He was so light that his entire upper body was dragged back toward the mortal world. His black peaked cap fell between the two worlds and was instantly sliced in half by the doorframe.
Only one minute remained on the wooden plaque's countdown.
"Let go," Lin Yuqing said.
"No."
"You'll be taken, too."
"Fieldwork Rule Twelve: You can't leave your partner at the scene."
"There are only ten rules on the wall."
"The interns made up the ones after Rule Eleven."
Nervous's voice trembled with fear, but his fingers only tightened around her wrists.
Lin Yuqing looked past him at the underworld office. Xie Bi'an was still nowhere near his desk. In the distance, there were only rows of empty desks and flickering fluorescent tubes.
No one was coming to help them.
She looked down at the red light wrapped around her ankle and suddenly realized that the pattern wasn't a complete circle. When Nervous had pulled out the mourning staff, he'd taken a piece of the seal's surface with it.
The gap was tiny—just large enough for one finger.
Enduring the tearing in her chest, Lin Yuqing bent down and pressed her index finger into the gap.
"The soul-retrieval documents are incomplete," she said. "Under procedure, I request that they be voided."
> Documents incomplete. > Reverification in progress.
The red cord loosened.
Nervous yanked hard, and the two of them tumbled through the doorway together.
The fieldwork door slammed shut behind their feet.
> Time remaining: Ten seconds.
The underworld floor was cold and hard. Lin Yuqing lay facedown, gasping for breath. It took her a long time to confirm that her chest was still whole and that no part of her had been left behind at the bus shelter.
Nervous rolled onto his back beside her and first felt for his head, only to discover that his cap had been reduced to its front half.
"My hat..."
"Call it a workplace injury."
"Interns don't get workplace injuries."
"Then list it as fieldwork supplies."
"That'll come out of my pay."
"You get paid?"
Nervous fell silent.
They had rested for less than half a minute when every phone in the office rang at once.
More than a hundred phones, all producing the exact same ring.
Lin Yuqing pushed herself upright against the corner of a desk. None of the phones displayed an incoming number, and their screens showed no call records. Only the red light on her desk blinked on and off, urging her to return and answer it.
"Don't touch them," Nervous said.
She didn't touch the phone.
First, she looked at the mark on her ankle.
Five dark-red finger marks formed a ring, with the still-wet character for Lin floating in the center. The soul-retrieval procedure had not been completed, but it had not truly been voided, either.
"How do I get this off?"
"Use a rejection seal."
"Where's Xie Bi'an?"
Nervous glanced toward the empty desk. "The Seventh Lord usually doesn't stay away this long."
The ringing suddenly stopped.
The office fell into dead silence.
A second later, Xie Bi'an emerged from the farthest shadows. His sleeves were dusted with black ash, and he carried a sealed wooden box in one hand. The usual careless smile was gone from his face.
The instant he saw Lin Yuqing's ankle, he stopped.
"Who stamped that?"
"A seal with no soul-retrieval warrant, no soul-reaping agent, and the ability to fill in its own name," Lin Yuqing said. "You don't look surprised."
Xie Bi'an set the wooden box on the desk and crouched to examine the ring of red marks. He didn't touch them directly. Instead, he took an old bronze seal from his belt.
Eight small characters were carved into the bottom:
> Life span not yet exhausted. Retrieval denied.
Lin Yuqing recognized that cinnabar-red color.
Beneath the soul-reaping seal at the bus shelter in Chapter Four, there had also been a small rejection mark that someone had deliberately ground away.
"You've seen the same seal before," she said.
"Don't move your leg."
"Where did you see it?"
"Move again and your foot will return to the mortal world first."
Xie Bi'an pressed the bronze seal onto her ankle.
There was no impact. Yet Lin Yuqing felt her entire leg sink, as if she'd stepped straight into icy water. The dark-red finger marks went out one after another, leaving only the character for Lin still clinging to her skin.
Xie Bi'an frowned and stamped it again.
The character did not disappear.
"Why is it still there?" Nervous asked.
"It isn't trying to take her soul." Xie Bi'an withdrew the bronze seal. "It's filling in her death record."
Lin Yuqing looked at him. "Explain."
"Someone entered your name into Chen Guochang's seventh case closure. Once the seal is completed, the system will treat you as the death result for that case."
"Why can Chen Guochang's case use my name?"
Xie Bi'an raised his eyes. "Because you heard something you weren't supposed to hear."
That was as good as admitting he knew about her anomaly.
Lin Yuqing was about to press him further when a prompt suddenly appeared on the screen:
> Fieldwork data for Case B-0714 has been returned. > One new object echo discovered. > Proceed with voice association match?
Nervous took the object echo of the note slip from Cai Xiulan's house out of his black cloth bag. The thin gray paper floated in front of the screen, and the six lines reading "2:14" lit up one after another.
When Xie Bi'an saw the words "Sunny calling," his expression turned cold for an instant.
"Where did this come from?"
"Cai Xiulan's house." Lin Yuqing watched his reaction. "She said she heard my voice seven days ago. After that, someone called her again every day at 2:14."
"Are you sure it was your voice?"
"She recognized it. It also appeared in Chen Guochang's death residual echo."
Xie Bi'an didn't answer. He reached out and started the voice association match.
The screen pulled up six case-closure recordings in sequence.
The first: "Would you accept this death?"
The second: "Would you accept this death?"
All the way through the sixth, the waveform of the customer-service question was exactly the same.
Lin Yuqing had listened to her own customer-service recordings every day in her old life. Even when someone repeated a sentence in the most standardized tone possible, their breathing and pauses could never be identical down to the last detail.
These weren't six phone calls.
It was the same recording copied six times.
The system compared the waveform against the voiceprints of every current employee.
> Similarity: 99.7 percent. > Voiceprint source: Lin Yuqing.
"Impossible," Nervous said. "She only started work today."
"More accurately," Lin Yuqing said, staring at the screen, "I only woke up today."
Xie Bi'an reached to close the window.
Lin Yuqing was faster and pressed down on the mouse.
"Keep going."
The system began analyzing the background noise beneath each recording. The first contained only electrical interference. The second added a muffled knock. In the third, Cai Xiulan could be heard calling her husband to come eat.
By the sixth, the voice only Lin Yuqing could hear surfaced again.
"Sunny, don't answer for him again this time."
No subtitles appeared on the screen.
Nervous tilted his head. "I still only hear static."
But Xie Bi'an turned to look at Lin Yuqing.
He had heard it.
"You know who she is?" Lin Yuqing asked.
"No."
"You reacted just now."
"Because you reacted."
"She called me Sunny."
"A lot of people could find out your childhood nickname."
"Cai Xiulan knows it, too. Are you going to tell me this was just a conversion error?"
Xie Bi'an's fingers stopped beside the mouse.
The two of them stared at each other for a moment before he looked away first.
"The first six weren't genuine appeals filed by Chen Guochang," he said.
Nervous asked, "But the voiceprint is the same."
"It is his voice, not a complete soul."
Xie Bi'an opened the underlying data for the first case. The appellant's name, time of death, and soul-retrieval location were all recorded. The only blank field was the one used to identify the soul signature.
The second through sixth entries were the same.
"These are echo appeals," he said. "A dead person's intense fixation can sometimes combine with a living person's repeatedly reenacted memories to produce a brief echo. It can say things the dead person said and remember things the dead person remembered, but it isn't the actual soul."
Lin Yuqing thought of Cai Xiulan setting the same dish on the table every day and saying, "Guochang, come eat," all over again.
"She forgets every day that her husband is dead, so every day she creates a new memory of waiting for him to come home."
"Chen Guochang wants to go back, and Cai Xiulan is waiting for him to return. Their fixations meet at 2:14, and the system mistakes the echo for a new appeal."
"Then why copy my voice to answer for him and accept it?"
Xie Bi'an looked at the six blank soul-signature fields.
"Because someone doesn't want the system to discover that the real Chen Guochang never entered the reincarnation cycle."
All more than a hundred phones in the office lit up again at the same time.
This time, there was still no ringing.
The screen on Lin Yuqing's desk switched to the seventh case by itself. The appellant field originally read Chen Guochang. The text flickered a few times, then slowly changed into her name.
> Appellant: Lin Yuqing > Case status: Awaiting closure > Scheduled soul-retrieval time: 6:00 a.m. today
The electronic clock on the wall read 5:12.
Only forty-eight minutes remained until the end of the night shift.
The telephone receiver lifted slightly by itself.
Chen Guochang's voice came from inside.
"Miss, have you found the way home?"
Lin Yuqing looked at her name and picked up the receiver.
"Not yet."
"Then what do we do?"
She paused for a second.
This time, there was no standard script and no rule that could tell her the answer.
"First, I'll find you," she said. "Then I'll take my name out of your death."
The screen began a new countdown.
> Forty-seven minutes, fifty-nine seconds.
## Chapter Glossary
- **Rejection seal**: A seal used by an authorized soul-reaping agent to reject or halt an erroneous soul retrieval. Xie Bi'an's rejection message reads, "Life span not yet exhausted. Retrieval denied." - **Soul signature**: The identity marker the underworld uses to identify a complete soul. Voices, memories, and names can all be imitated, but in principle each complete soul has only one soul signature. - **Echo appeal**: A brief appeal formed when a dead person's intense fixation overlaps with a living person's repeatedly reenacted memories. An echo possesses fragments of a voice and memory, but it is not equivalent to a complete soul. - **Death-result backfill**: An anomalous procedure in which the system enters another name as the death result when the original case cannot be closed. In this story, it is a dangerous mechanism that has been exploited or tampered with.
> The underworld organization and its rules in this story are fictional settings, and some names are drawn from Chinese folk beliefs.