When the countdown hit forty-seven minutes and fifty-eight seconds, Xie Bi'an unplugged the phone line from Lin Yuqing's desk.
Chen Guochang was still speaking through the receiver.
"Miss?"
The raspy voice wasn't cut off. Instead, it came from every phone in the office whose light was on. More than a hundred identical voices overlapped out of sync. Some asked whether she'd found the way, some called for Xiulan, and some had been reduced to nothing but indistinct panting. Together, they sounded like a crowd of people trapped inside the walls, all waking at once.
Nervous hugged his mourning staff. "The lines are all unplugged. Why are there still voices?"
"Because what's calling now isn't a phone," Xie Bi'an said.
He pressed the bronze plaque against the desktop. Dark red lines of light spread along the edge, encircling Lin Yuqing's seat. The countdown on the screen paused for an instant, then new text appeared.
> Unauthorized interruption detected. > Soul retrieval procedure transferred to internal execution. > Please complete the death outcome before the end of the night shift.
"How long can you hold it back like this?" Lin Yuqing asked.
"It should have held for fifteen minutes."
"Should have?"
Xie Bi'an looked at the corner of the bronze plaque, blackened by the soul-reaping seal. "Now? Probably long enough for us to finish talking."
Lin Yuqing didn't ask how many words that meant. She turned back to the screen and placed her fingers on the keyboard again.
The electronic clock on the wall read 5:12 a.m.
They had returned to the Death Appeals Center before 3:05. After that, nearly two hours had gone into taking apart six recordings. Nervous had scanned the object echo brought back from the bus shelter layer by layer. Xie Bi'an had pulled up the overwritten soul-retrieval records. Lin Yuqing had compared the voiceprints, breathing, and pressure marks on Cai Xiulan's note slip over and over. It wasn't until 5:12 that the seventh case suddenly replaced the appellant with her.
This wasn't an ordinary countdown.
Something hidden inside the system had realized they were investigating in the right direction.
"Let's confirm one thing first." Lin Yuqing pulled up the first six cases. "The creation time listed here is 2:07 in every one. But Chen Guochang didn't die until 2:14, and the residual echo formed at 2:14 too. Can a dead person file an appeal seven minutes before dying?"
"No," Nervous answered immediately.
Xie Bi'an shot him a glance. "That was a good answer for once."
"I know things occasionally."
Lin Yuqing opened the lower-level incoming-signal records. The screen was blank at first. A few seconds later, gray text hidden beneath the case fields appeared.
> Original signal received: 2:14:03. > Case display time: 2:07. > Time source: The deceased's final complete action.
She remembered the residual echo in the bus shelter. Chen Guochang had left home at 2:07 to buy salt for his wife. At 2:14, he had collapsed beside the bus stop sign.
"The system didn't receive the appeal at 2:07," she said. "Someone entered the time Chen Guochang left home alive as the case creation time."
"Why make it seven minutes earlier?" Nervous asked.
"Because there's a genuine soul-retrieval record at 2:14," Xie Bi'an replied. "If a death, soul retrieval, and appeal all appear in the same hour, the audit automatically requires a soul-signature match. Change it to 2:07, and the three records won't be grouped together."
"Then it copied my voice once a day to answer 'accept' for the echoes without soul signatures." Lin Yuqing stared at her name. "On the seventh time, it would assign the missing death outcome to me."
The skull in the upper-right corner of the screen slowly rotated once, as if nodding at her.
She clicked "Enter Death Outcome." Along with her name, the fields now contained an attachment requirement that hadn't been there before.
> Basis for execution: Soul-retrieval warrant. > Binding status: Death record missing. > System action: Awaiting additional documentation.
Lin Yuqing stared at the three lines.
"So the soul-reaping seal at the bus shelter couldn't take me away directly."
"You don't have a valid death record," Xie Bi'an said. "A formal soul retrieval has to match the death record, soul-retrieval warrant, and soul signature at the same time. Without one of them, the soul-reaping seal can only request additional documentation. It can't complete the handover."
Nervous suddenly understood. "So when you told it to return the case for additional documentation just now, it stopped even though you cited the appeal rules."
"Not because everything I said was technically correct," Lin Yuqing said. "Because its own paperwork was incomplete."
Back when she handled customer complaints, she'd seen plenty of people wave around an unrelated regulation and demand that the company give them the answer they wanted. Sometimes they succeeded not because the regulation actually applied, but because the caseworker checked further down and discovered that the company had made an even more serious mistake.
It was the same here.
Except the company's mistakes could kill people.
"To cancel the additional filing, we have to return the original death outcome to Chen Guochang," she said. "Where is the real Chen Guochang?"
Every voice in the office stopped at once.
More than a hundred phones were still lit, but not one of them answered.
Xie Bi'an dragged the first case into the soul-signature search. The blank field flickered faintly. A line of gray so thin it was nearly invisible appeared on the screen, stretching toward the Reincarnation Administration.
> Search result: Case closed. > Reincarnation status: Delivered. > Soul signature: None.
The second through sixth cases all returned the same result.
"How can they deliver him without a soul signature?" Lin Yuqing asked.
"What was delivered was the case-closure status, not the soul," Xie Bi'an said.
"You people only check whether the system box is ticked even for reincarnation?"
"The Reincarnation Administration's target this year is to route each dead soul within twelve breaths on average."
"I take back the question."
She shouldn't have expected anything from the performance metrics here.
Nervous pulled the seventh case aside. He didn't click "Delivered." Instead, he gently tapped the appellant field with the end of his mourning staff. The wooden plaque vibrated twice, and a small overlapping gray shadow fell out from behind Lin Yuqing's name.
> Chen Guochang. > Status: Not yet delivered.
The gray text appeared for half a second before her name covered it again.
"It's underneath!" Nervous said excitedly, his hat slipping to one side. "His soul signature is trapped beneath the seventh case."
Lin Yuqing rechecked the seventh call. Chen Guochang's voice and memories were similar to those in the first six calls, but there was one thing the others hadn't had—he waited for her to answer.
The first six echoes only repeated what they remembered. The real Chen Guochang could be confused, could get angry, and would ask whether she was still there when she paused.
He had been in this call the whole time.
It was just that, in the system's eyes, a complete dead soul had become an unnecessary attachment.
"Mr. Chen," Lin Yuqing said into the receiver of the unplugged phone, "can you hear me?"
A few seconds later, the phone closest to her emitted a faint burst of static.
"I'm here."
The other phones didn't repeat him.
"I need to confirm something only you could answer. What was the last thing you said to your wife before you left home?"
"I said..." Chen Guochang paused for a long time. "I said we were out of salt, and I'd go buy some at the end of the alley."
The first six recordings lit up on the screen at the same time. Every echo continued with the same answer:
"Xiulan is waiting at home for me to eat."
Only the real Chen Guochang hadn't said that.
"What else?" Lin Yuqing asked.
"She didn't recognize me then."
His voice dropped.
"She picked up a bowl and asked who I was. I was a little angry, so I told her I'd explain when I got back."
A very soft intake of breath came through the phone.
"But I never made it back."
The gray shadow on the screen gradually sharpened. His name, time of death, and the address of the bus shelter surfaced one after another beneath Lin Yuqing's data. At last, a fragmented soul signature appeared.
> Soul-signature integrity: 49 percent. > Missing portion: Soul-retrieval handover record. > Temporary location: Undelivered Items Holding Office.
"We found him," Nervous said.
Lin Yuqing didn't celebrate right away.
"What does forty-nine percent mean?"
"After his soul was reaped, it wasn't sent into the reincarnation cycle and wasn't returned to the Death Appeals Center either," Xie Bi'an said. "Things whose soul-retrieval handover fails are treated as undelivered items and temporarily stored between two departments."
"Dead souls can be treated like lost paperwork?"
"In principle, no."
"I'm starting to hate it when you say 'in principle.'"
Xie Bi'an didn't smile. He took the oldest bronze plaque from his waist and turned it over. Carved into the back was a character Lin Yuqing had seen at the bus shelter—the character for rejection.
"The Undelivered Items Holding Office only accepts inquiries from the original soul-reaping agent," he said. "The executor listed on Chen Guochang's soul-retrieval warrant wasn't Nervous or me."
"Who was it?"
The screen answered for him.
A hidden soul-retrieval warrant unfolded from the end of the gray line. The name and time were clear, but the executor field looked as if it had been scraped with a blade, leaving only a rough white scar. Beneath the scar was the same vermilion seal as the one at the bus shelter.
> Executor: No such person on record. > Deliverer: Xie Bi'an.
Nervous looked at the screen, then at him. "But you said you didn't reap him."
"Soul retrieval and handover are two different things." Xie Bi'an's voice was flat. "Someone reaped Chen Guochang, then put the incomplete handover under my name."
Lin Yuqing looked at the rejection plaque in his hand.
"Just like forty-nine days ago?"
Xie Bi'an raised his eyes.
The countdown changed to thirty-one minutes and six seconds.
He didn't ask how she knew about the forty-nine days, and he didn't brush it off with a joke as he had before.
"You asked me earlier whether I heard that woman call you Sunny," he said.
Lin Yuqing tightened her grip on the receiver.
"You heard it."
"I couldn't hear the words she said," Xie Bi'an replied. "But I could hear the rejection seal being pressed down along with the muting. Forty-nine days ago, I stamped the same seal once."
"On whose soul-retrieval warrant?"
His gaze fell on her name.
At the far end of the office, a lock suddenly turned.
The wooden door to the supervisor's office, which hadn't opened all night, retreated inward by an inch. There was no light behind it. Director Wu stood in the darkness, holding a disciplinary notice that had just finished printing.
"Xie Bi'an," he said. "Your plaque has been suspended."
The red circle of light on the desk went out in response.
The countdown started again, moving twice as fast as before.
> Twenty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds. > Twenty-nine minutes and fifty-seven seconds. > Twenty-nine minutes and fifty-five seconds.
Director Wu walked to Lin Yuqing's desk and pulled away the soul-retrieval warrant with the executor's name scraped off.
"The Chen Guochang case will retain its original conclusion," he said. "The six echoes have already been registered in the reincarnation cycle. Reversing them would create six nonexistent reincarnation vacancies."
"So the real Chen Guochang stays in the undelivered items holding office?" Lin Yuqing asked.
"The error has already happened. What we need to handle now is which correction will cause less harm."
"Filling in my death is the one you think will cause less harm?"
Director Wu looked at her as if she were an overdue official document that no caseworker was willing to sign.
Lin Yuqing knew that expression too well. Her old supervisors had also told her, whenever the system made a mistake, to calm the customer first and close the case first, while responsibility could wait for the end-of-month review. Those errors amounted to a bill, a refund, or someone's wasted afternoon at most. Here, the same method was being applied to death: as long as the report looked complete, the missing person could be stuffed into any field that couldn't talk back.
But she could talk back now.
Chen Guochang could still talk too.
If the system had to make one of them shut up before it could maintain its version of correctness, then that correctness had been false from the start.
"You don't have a death record," he said. "To the system, you're better suited than Chen Guochang to bear a nonexistent death."
In the phone, Chen Guochang asked softly, "Miss, are they asking you to die in my place?"
Lin Yuqing didn't look away.
"Not in your place," she said.
She dragged the seventh case from the additional-filing page back to the Death Appeals Center and clicked "Final Review." A warning window immediately filled the screen.
> Reversing the first six case closures will upgrade the case to Level S. > The customer-service agent who handled it must assume responsibility for the erroneous case closures. > Continue?
"It's for those six answers that never existed."
She clicked confirm.
Every phone erupted in a piercing ring at once.
Director Wu changed expression for the first time.
A new transfer option appeared in the center of the screen.
> Original appellant located at: Undelivered Items Holding Office. > Retrieval deadline: 6:00 a.m. > Overdue disposition: Destruction.
Lin Yuqing looked up at the clock on the wall.
5:30 a.m.
She had half an hour to retrieve a man who had been dead for seven days from the underworld's lost-and-found.
Chapter Terms
- Three-Part Verification: A formal soul retrieval must have a valid death record, a lawful soul-retrieval warrant, and an identifiable soul signature at the same time. When the data is incomplete, the soul-reaping seal can only request additional documentation and may not complete the soul-retrieval handover. - Undelivered Items Holding Office: A temporary storage area for souls that, after soul retrieval, fail to enter the appeal or reincarnation procedure because of an abnormal handover record. Since the system treats dead souls as cases awaiting delivery, it is possible for a death to be recorded while the complete soul cannot be found. - Final Review: The last investigative procedure that can be activated when the dead reject the death conclusion. Once activated, the original case closure may be revoked and the case may be upgraded, with the customer-service agent who handled it required to assume the corresponding responsibility.
> The underworld organizations and rules in this work are fictional settings. Some names are drawn from Chinese folk beliefs.