The red phone on the desk rang twice before Lin Yuqing reached out to answer it.
The screen displayed: Mortal-World Hospital.
The moment her fingertips touched the receiver, the electronic clock on the wall flipped to 6:01.
The phone stopped immediately.
"...You people are punctual even about this?"
A notification popped up on the screen.
> The Nighttime Anomalies Unit has ended its shift. > New cases may not be created outside working hours. > Unanswered calls have been transferred to the next shift's pending tasks.
Lin Yuqing pressed "Process Now."
> Application denied. > The caller has a direct identity relationship with the customer-service agent handling the call. > To avoid a conflict of interest, customer-service agents may not handle their own death appeals.
She pressed it again.
The system patiently rejected her with the exact same wording.
"When you were about to add my name to someone else's death, where was the conflict of interest?" she asked.
No one answered.
After six, the office seemed to turn into an entirely different place. The fluorescent lights shifted from bluish white to yellow-gray. The posted notice on the wall that read "Listen Carefully to Every Member of the Dead" rolled itself up, revealing another slogan on the back:
> Clocking out on time is also a form of merit.
The elevator, which had been completely still, began opening its doors one after another. Day-shift employees in gray uniforms filed in. Some had pale faces; some had no faces at all, yet every one of them wore a neat name tag on their chest. They stacked piles of new cases on the desks, expertly avoiding the scorch marks on the floor, the overturned chairs, and Nervous, who still hadn't fully crawled out of the filing cabinet.
One day-shift employee glanced at Lin Yuqing, then at the smoking phone on her desk.
"Night shift?"
"First day," Lin Yuqing said.
The other employee gave her an understanding look, picked up a teacup, and walked away.
Lin Yuqing had no idea what he understood.
Nervous finally yanked the corner of his uniform free from the drawer. He put his black hat back on, though the tip was still crooked to the left. "We're off the clock. First we have to turn in the object echo from the field assignment, then write the bus shelter investigation report, the soul-reaping seal anomaly report, the mourning-staff usage log, and—"
"You call that off the clock?"
"We can take the reports back to the dorm and write them there."
"That's not getting off work. That's working overtime at a different desk."
Nervous froze, as if he'd just heard an accusation of unprecedented severity.
Xie Bi'an tucked the suspension notice into his sleeve. His bronze badge had gone completely dark, leaving only a few old, characterless wooden plaques at his waist. The man who had been able to open the return-door at will only moments ago now stood among the day-shift employees like a piece of office furniture whose name had been deleted from the system but which someone had forgotten to remove.
"You can keep pressing it," he told Lin Yuqing. "Press it until tomorrow's shift starts. It still won't let you answer."
"Then who will handle it?"
"A supervisor will assign it."
Lin Yuqing looked toward Director Wu's office. The wooden door was shut tight, and a sign had appeared outside it: "Shift-Change Meeting in Progress. Please Do Not Disturb Unless the Death Is Serious."
"Does my death count as serious?"
"You don't even have a death record," Xie Bi'an said. "According to their categories, you're probably just a data loss."
Lin Yuqing stared at him.
"That joke isn't funny."
"Then you're starting to get used to this place."
He turned and headed for the elevator. Lin Yuqing remained where she was until her chair slid forward, pushing her away from the desk on its own. A line of text immediately appeared across the desktop:
> Off-duty employees must leave the work area.
"Where am I supposed to go?" she asked.
Nervous had already stepped into the elevator. At her words, he stuck his head back out. "Back."
"Back where?"
The elevator doors stopped just before closing.
Nervous looked at her, then at Xie Bi'an.
"You don't have a dorm?"
"When I woke up early this morning, I didn't even know whether I was dead. Do you think someone would have arranged a dorm for me in advance?"
"Normally, the personnel process would—"
He stopped halfway through and shut his mouth on his own.
The three of them looked together at the blank form in the office labeled "No Such Person on Record."
Xie Bi'an held down the elevator's door-open button. "Let's get something to eat first."
"The dead have to eat too?"
"No."
"Then what are we eating for?"
"Habit."
The elevator didn't go up or down. It moved backward.
When the doors opened again, a long street with no visible end lay outside. The sky was still the underworld's distinctive gray. There was no sun, but the night lamps beneath the eaves were going out one after another, replaced by pale yellow paper lanterns. Employees in night-shift uniforms poured out of the various government offices. Some dragged their feet toward the dorms, some gathered in front of stalls to complain about their supervisors, and some sat motionless by the roadside, staring at pocket watches that had stopped long ago.
Wooden signs filled both sides of the street: Soul Retrieval Division Field Supplies, Reincarnation Administration Express Haircuts, Dream Delivery Letter-Writing, Paper Effigy Repairs. Farther away stood a black elevated bridge. A long vehicle with no front end carried rows of employees through the fog.
A general store was taking in paper boxes burned in the mortal world. The clerk broke the seals and pulled out three paper phones of different models. Two had no screens; the other began endlessly playing an advertisement the worshiper had forgotten to turn off the moment it powered on. The stall next door hung a banner that read, "We Stand in Line for Reincarnation Numbers—Guaranteed Useless." The owner was asleep facedown on the table, with a stack of number tickets beside him that people had actually claimed before.
There were scam advertisements here, regular customers who never paid their debts, and employees who started lining up the moment they clocked out. Death hadn't made anything more solemn. It had merely swapped out the forms and kept all the hassles of life running.
"This place isn't just offices?" Lin Yuqing asked.
"The underworld is huge," Nervous said. "There are government offices, dorms, transfer waiting areas, review waiting areas, and eighteen—"
Xie Bi'an coughed.
"And eighteen places that aren't suitable for a new hire to visit on their first day off," Nervous amended immediately.
They sat down at a breakfast stall with no sign. The owner brought over three bowls of soy milk. There was no steam rising from them, but when Lin Yuqing leaned close, she could smell a faint, scorched fragrance. Every sesame flatbread beside them was missing a corner, as if someone had taken a bite before it arrived.
Lin Yuqing took a sip.
The soy milk had no taste.
The next second, she remembered the breakfast shop beneath the office building in the mortal world. The paper cups were always too thin, and the female clerk would draw a circle on the lid with a red pen to remind her that this cup had no sugar. She even remembered a rainy morning when she'd held an umbrella in one hand and a phone in the other, hurrying through puddles to clock in.
The memory appeared with such completeness that she almost thought she could look up and see that gray office building.
Then the flavor vanished.
She was still sitting on the sunless street, holding a bowl of cold soy milk.
"The food here isn't for your stomach," Nervous said. "It's for your memories."
"What happens if you eat too much?"
"Some souls keep remembering their favorite flavors from life and refuse to enter the reincarnation cycle. That's why the employee cafeteria has limits."
"What about you? What did you remember?"
Nervous took a bite of the flatbread's remaining portion and thought seriously for a moment. "Forgetting to eat breakfast before an exam."
"That's not a good memory."
"That's why I usually only eat half."
Xie Bi'an sat across from them, drinking tea. His cup was older than the others, with a repaired gold line along the rim. He took three sips without his expression changing once.
"What did you remember?" Lin Yuqing asked.
"Debt."
The owner immediately called from across the stall, "Seventh Lord, good to know you haven't forgotten!"
Several nearby tables burst out laughing.
Xie Bi'an calmly pushed the bill toward Nervous.
"Why me?"
"My pay has been suspended."
"But I'm only a trainee—"
"Then you'll work harder to pass the exam."
It was the first time since waking up that Lin Yuqing had heard anyone around her genuinely laugh. It wasn't a satisfaction-survey sound effect played by the system, or the soft chuckle Xie Bi'an used to dodge questions. It was simply a group of people who had just gotten off work sitting at a breakfast stall and making fun of a former Black Impermanence who refused to pay his debts.
For a moment, the underworld didn't feel like the world after death.
It felt more like a company so large it had no exit.
She lowered her head and looked at the soy milk. After Chen Guochang's case ended, she hadn't had a moment to herself. Now that the phone had stopped ringing and the screen was no longer forcing her to choose, the questions buried beneath work mode began surfacing one by one.
Where was her body?
Why had the hospital called the underworld?
Had anyone looked for her during those forty-nine days?
If she really was still alive, was there an unused bowl beside her hospital bed?
Lin Yuqing gripped the cold rim of the bowl, her knuckles slowly turning white.
"Don't think about it right now," Xie Bi'an said.
"You know what I'm thinking?"
"Everyone who learns they might still be alive has about the same expression."
"You've seen a lot of them?"
"I shouldn't have seen any."
After saying that, he shifted his gaze to the street.
Lin Yuqing didn't continue asking. She discovered that when Xie Bi'an truly didn't want to answer a question, he didn't joke around.
After breakfast, Nervous took her to the employee housing office. It was a gray building resembling an old household registration office. Three rows of ticket machines lined the lobby, and a sign on the wall read: "Souls, Please Register for an Underworld Registry Entry. Employees, Use the Right Side."
Nervous pulled a ticket from the right-side machine.
The slip read: People waiting ahead: 0.
There was no employee at the counter.
They waited ten minutes before a face covered in white cloth slowly rose behind the counter.
"Application type?"
"Dormitory for a new employee," Nervous said.
"Name?"
"Lin Yuqing."
The keyboard clacked twice.
"No underworld registry entry."
"She has an employee badge."
"No underworld registry entry."
"She also has a forty-nine-day review case."
"That's a case, not household registration."
The counter pushed out a rejection slip.
> Unable to confirm whether the applicant is a soul, a living person, or a regular employee. > Please obtain an identity before applying for housing.
Lin Yuqing stared at it for a long time. "If I could obtain an identity first, I wouldn't be here applying for temporary housing."
The employee beneath the white cloth paused, then pushed the rejection slip another inch forward.
"Next."
"There isn't anyone ahead of us or behind us."
"Next."
Nervous pulled her away from the counter. "Don't argue with Housing. They can make an applicant wait until reincarnation."
"So where am I sleeping tonight?"
"You can go to my dorm."
"The underworld-agent trainee dormitory prohibits overnight stays by the opposite sex," Xie Bi'an said.
Nervous's ears immediately turned red. "I only meant I'd give her the bed and sleep in the hallway to write reports!"
Xie Bi'an tore a strip from the back of the suspension notice, wrote a few words on it, and stuffed it into a narrow gap beneath the rejection slip.
After a moment of silence behind the counter, a bronze key emerged.
"Nighttime Anomalies Unit, temporary holding room, one-day use," the employee beneath the white cloth said. "Extensions must be reapplied for each day. Do not bring room items into the reincarnation cycle, summon living people, or leave death messages on the walls."
"Aren't you suspended?" Lin Yuqing asked.
"I just know where to slip a rejection form."
The temporary holding room was located in the employee dormitory behind the Death Appeals Center. The room was tiny, containing only a wooden bed, a desk, and a mirror that reflected no image. Outside the window, the elevated bridge carrying the headless vehicle ran directly past. Every few minutes, the gray fog was sliced open by its body.
Nervous hung his spare jacket over the back of a chair. "If you need anything, knock on the wall next door. I live on the third floor downstairs, in the room near the emergency exit."
"Why did you choose the emergency exit?"
"It feels safer."
"Does the exit actually work?"
Nervous thought about it. "I don't know."
He left with his reports. Xie Bi'an stood outside the door without coming in.
"The hospital call," Lin Yuqing said. "You knew it was going to happen?"
"No."
"Do you know which hospital my body is in?"
"Even if I did, I couldn't tell you."
"Because of the rules?"
"Because the moment you touch information connected to your body, your lifeline might forcibly pull you back. Getting back doesn't mean you'll wake up."
For the first time, Lin Yuqing didn't immediately argue.
"What's the worst that could happen?"
"Your soul returns to your body, but your consciousness gets stuck between the two sides. The underworld can't find you, and the mortal world can't wake you."
"How is that different from now?"
Xie Bi'an looked at her. After a few seconds, he said, "Right now, you can still ask questions."
He closed the door for her.
The room fell silent.
Lin Yuqing lay down on the wooden bed, only to realize that souls didn't get tired—or at least she didn't. She closed her eyes, but her mind was still full of the bus shelter's red light, Cai Xiulan's hands putting away the empty bowl, and Chen Guochang's back as he walked into the reincarnation cycle.
She turned to face the wall.
A regular electronic sound came from inside it.
Beep.
Pause.
Beep.
Like the machine monitoring a heartbeat in a hospital.
Lin Yuqing sat up. At some point, a small red light had appeared on the desk, with a notice from the Death Appeals Center tucked beneath it.
> The mortal-world hospital call has completed conflict-of-interest recusal. > Assigned agent: Pending assignment. > System-captured one-second identity-verification recording.
She pressed play.
First came hurried footsteps, followed by the sound of someone rifling through papers. A strange woman spoke from a great distance away:
"Lin Yuqing, twenty-seven years old, hospitalized for forty-nine days—"
The recording cut off there.
The electronic sound inside the wall rang again.
This time, Lin Yuqing heard it clearly.
It wasn't interference from the phone.
It was some body that was still alive, answering for her.
## Terms in This Chapter
- **Underworld registry:** The household registration data the underworld uses to confirm the identities of souls and permanent employees. Without an underworld registry entry, a person cannot properly apply for housing, transportation, or certain daily services. - **Memory meals:** Meals eaten by underworld employees to preserve habits from life. Their purpose is not to fill the stomach, but to briefly awaken memories associated with flavor. - **Temporary holding room:** A short-term room for personnel whose identities have not yet been confirmed and who cannot enter the ordinary soul waiting areas. It must be reapplied for each day. - **Conflict-of-interest recusal:** Customer-service agents may not handle death appeals involving themselves or anyone directly connected to them. The case must be assigned to another employee to prevent the death result from being altered or concealed.
> The underworld organization and rules in this work are fictional settings. Some names are drawn from Chinese folk beliefs.