# Chapter Nine: I'm Not the One in the Coffin
Lin Yuqing lay in the temporary holding room for five hours without falling asleep once.
The lodging facility's instructions didn't say whether the dead needed sleep. Whenever she closed her eyes, a steady beeping came from inside the walls; whenever she opened them, the sound disappeared. She replayed that one-second hospital recording twenty-seven times. The woman stopped at exactly the same point every time.
“Lin Yuqing, twenty-seven years old, hospitalized for forty-nine days—”
Everything after that had been cleanly cut away, as if by scissors.
At 11:40 p.m., the brass key sprang out of the lock on its own, reminding her that her one-day lodging period was about to end. She had no choice but to return to the Death Appeals Center and wait twenty minutes early for her shift to begin.
The office hadn't fully switched into nighttime mode yet. The day-shift employees were handing things over. Some were piling unresolved cases into black carts; others stood before the shredder, slowly feeding the names no one had claimed all day into its blades. The lights on the wall shifted from yellow to white one by one, like a sunset with no warmth.
Lin Yuqing sat at her station. The first thing she did was open the Seventy-Seventh Review case.
> Appellant: Lin Yuqing. > Case status: Conflict-of-interest recusal. > Handling employee: Wu Wende. > Initial review deadline: Seventy-two hours.
So Director Wu had a name after all.
She opened the hospital incoming call, and the screen immediately demanded supervisor authorization. She checked the call's source; supervisor authorization. She downloaded the one-second recording; supervisor authorization. Even checking what she had been forbidden to view required supervisor authorization.
“The access controls here are very thorough,” she said.
“Thank you.” Director Wu's voice came from behind her.
Lin Yuqing closed the sixth rejected window and turned to look at him. “That wasn't a compliment.”
“I know.”
Director Wu had changed back into his dark uniform. Her case file was tucked under his arm. He didn't set it on her desk, only pulled out a thin sheet of paper.
“Your physical body still exists, and your lifeline hasn't been severed. The rest of the data won't be disclosed to you until the source verification is complete.”
“Why did the hospital call?”
“It's being investigated.”
“What was my accident?”
“It's being investigated.”
“Do you ever say anything besides ‘it's being investigated’?”
“Remember to clock in on time.”
The clock on the wall flipped to midnight.
The skull on Lin Yuqing's desk lit up, and her employee status changed from “Off Duty” to “Available.” Director Wu took the paper back and headed for the supervisor's office.
“Within seventy-two hours,” she said to his back, “I want to see the complete initial review results.”
“You're the appellant now, not the customer-service agent handling the case.”
“When I used to handle complaints, I hated customers who kept asking for updates.”
Director Wu stopped.
“So I know exactly how to ask.”
Before the wooden door to the supervisor's office closed, she thought she saw the corner of his mouth twitch.
Nervous rushed into the office at 12:03 a.m. His black hat was cocked even worse than yesterday, and he was hugging a thick stack of reports.
“I finished it!”
He put the documents on the desk. The title at the top read: “Report on the Mourning Staff's Contact with an Anomalous Soul-Reaping Seal During Non-Retrieval Use.” It was forty-seven pages long.
“You spent the whole day writing this?” Lin Yuqing asked.
“I slept for half an hour in the middle.”
“Didn't you say you could take the report back to the dorm and write it?”
“Yeah.”
Nervous looked completely unaware that anything was wrong with that.
Xie Bi'an was the last to appear. He was still dressed in white. His bronze plaque was gone from his waist, replaced by a temporary wooden plaque hanging on his chest.
> Suspended pending observation. > Forbidden from handling official business.
“What are you doing here?” Lin Yuqing asked.
“Observing.”
“Your plaque says you're not allowed to handle official business.”
Xie Bi'an pulled out the chair beside her and sat down. “That's why I'm only touching the chair.”
The moment he settled in, the first phone rang.
It wasn't the red phone on Lin Yuqing's desk, but a gray receiver diagonally across from them. The day-shift employee assigned to that station had already left, and no one on the night shift had taken over. The ringing continued. The screen showed no name, only a countdown that kept shrinking.
> Time until the body is cremated: 11 hours, 56 minutes.
Nervous looked at Lin Yuqing. “Does this count as a new case?”
“The phone is ringing.”
“Whenever you say that, I get a bad feeling.”
Lin Yuqing picked up the gray receiver.
“Hello, you've reached the Death Appeals Center of the Underworld Bureau of Life and Death Administration. How may I assist you?”
A woman's restrained breathing came from the other end.
“I need to correct the identity of a body.”
Lin Yuqing switched the screen to case-filing mode. “Please provide your name, your last complete memory, and the time and cause you believe you died.”
“Zhong Peiyun, forty-five. My last memory was in a hospital. I came out of the bathroom, the lights in the hallway kept flickering, and then someone called my name from behind.”
“And the time and cause of death?”
“Three days ago. I don't know what time. The system says heart failure.”
The screen pulled up her information.
> Name: Zhong Peiyun. > Time of death: Three days ago, 4:17 a.m. > Place of death: Antai General Hospital. > Cause of death: Acute heart failure. > Case level: C. > Appeal purpose: Body correction.
This was the first time Lin Yuqing had seen “body correction” as an option.
“Which part is wrong?” she asked.
“The person in the coffin isn't me.”
Nervous, who had just sat down in the office, stood up again.
Lin Yuqing checked the screen. The death certificate, body transport record, family confirmation, and funeral-home intake records were all there. Nothing was blank, and no name had been scratched out. At the very bottom, it even said:
> Body identity verification: Matches. > Family identification: Complete. > Biological specimen: Consistent.
“Your family already confirmed the body,” she said.
“I know.” Zhong Peiyun's voice trembled. “My husband and daughter were both there. They looked at her and called her Peiyun.”
She said her husband had stood beside the coffin for a long time, never daring to touch that swollen face. Finally, when the funeral-home staff urged them to hurry because of the auspicious hour, her daughter took the body's hand and slipped on a silver bracelet they had bought for their twentieth wedding anniversary. The bracelet was too small and caught above the wrist bone. The staff said swelling after death was perfectly normal and that they could just tie it on with a red thread instead.
“My husband didn't recognize her,” Zhong Peiyun said. “He just believed the hospital wouldn't hand him someone else.”
Lin Yuqing stared at the green check mark beside “Family identification: Complete.” Someone forced to sign their name at the most frantic moment of their life became, inside the system, an unquestionable proof of identity.
“Did your daughter say anything seemed wrong?”
“She kept asking why my hands had gotten so thick. The funeral-home staff told her it was because of the IVs and the swelling from being hospitalized.”
Every unreasonable detail already had a reasonable-sounding answer waiting for it.
“How do you know what happened in the coffin?”
“Someone called my name in the wake just now. I opened my eyes, and I was standing beside the coffin.”
Xie Bi'an had been lounging against the back of his chair. At that, he lifted his eyes.
“A wakeback vision,” he said.
Nervous reminded him quietly, “You're not allowed to handle official business.”
“I was talking to myself.”
Lin Yuqing ignored them. “What did you see?”
“That woman was wearing the clothes my daughter picked out for me, and her hair had been cut the same way as mine. Her face was horribly swollen, but I could tell she wasn't me.”
“Was there any clearly identifiable feature?”
There was a brief silence on the other end.
“I have a long surgical scar on my right waist. I donated a kidney to my older brother when I was twenty-six, and that's where it came from.”
Zhong Peiyun drew a breath.
“The person in the coffin doesn't have it. She has a ring-shaped burn on her left wrist. I don't.”
Lin Yuqing pulled up the body photographs.
The system first displayed a warning, asking whether the handling employee needed to view them. After she clicked Agree, the screen showed a middle-aged woman lying beneath a white cloth. Her face was difficult to identify because of the swelling. Her right waist was covered by the shroud, and her left hand was pressed against her side, hiding the wrist.
The only clear detail was a small section of a hospital ID band showing beside the wrist.
> Zhong Peiyun. > Antai General Hospital. > Medical record suffix: 417.
The time of death was also 4:17.
“The system performed a biological specimen comparison,” Lin Yuqing said. “The results showed a match.”
“That's impossible.”
“I'm not saying you're mistaken. I need to know what it compared.”
She opened the specimen source.
The screen spun for a long time. In the end, it displayed only an image of a family member's signature. Zhong Peiyun's husband had signed beneath “Do you confirm the deceased's identity?” The same image had been copied three times and attached to the family identification, biological specimen, and body transport fields.
“This isn't a specimen,” Lin Yuqing said.
“It's the family's confirmation.” Nervous leaned closer to the screen. “The system treated the same signature as three kinds of proof.”
“If the family confirmed the body, how could they still have identified it incorrectly?”
This time, Xie Bi'an wasn't talking to himself. He reached toward the screen, and the wooden plaque on his chest immediately emitted a shrill warning.
> Suspended personnel may not operate cases.
He pulled his hand back. “Look at the admission and death records separately.”
Lin Yuqing did as he said.
The Zhong Peiyun in the admission record was forty-five years old and had been accompanied to the ER by her family because of dizziness. The Zhong Peiyun in the death record was also forty-five, with the same medical record number—but it included kidney dialysis treatment she had never received.
The two sets of data appeared to belong to the same person, but the hospitalization dates were one day apart.
“Two people in the hospital were placed under the same medical record,” she said.
Zhong Peiyun asked urgently, “Then where is my body?”
The screen began searching for unidentified bodies submitted during the same period. It listed three entries, then quickly deleted two. The last entry had no photograph, only a status.
> Unidentified woman. > Estimated age: Forty to fifty. > Source: Antai General Hospital. > Body status: Not admitted. > Current location: No record found.
“It hasn't been sent to the funeral home yet,” Nervous said.
“And it's not in the hospital morgue either.” Lin Yuqing stared at the line that said no record found. “If this unidentified body is Zhong Peiyun, then who is the woman in the coffin?”
The gray phone suddenly gave three short alert tones.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
“Did you hear that?” Zhong Peiyun asked.
“Hear what?”
“The hospital announcement system. Those three tones play every time it's about to broadcast a notice.”
Lin Yuqing didn't answer.
She had heard the same sound in the temporary holding room.
That one-second hospital recording began too abruptly. She had always assumed the first three tones were just transfer noise. Now she pulled up the recording, slowed it down, and layered it over the background sounds in Zhong Peiyun's last memory.
The waveforms were identical.
> Sound source comparison: 100 percent. > Suspected location: Antai General Hospital.
The conflict-of-interest rule prohibited her from investigating her own case.
But it said nothing about handling another deceased person's body appeal.
“Ms. Zhong, there are less than twelve hours until the cremation,” Lin Yuqing said. “We have to find your body before then, and we also need to confirm the identity of the woman in the coffin.”
“What happens if you can't find it?”
“The wrong person will be cremated under your name. Your family will never know who they sent away.”
She pressed Freeze Case.
> Case level changed: A. > Reason: Body, soul signature, and death identity do not match. > Emergency deadline: 11 hours, 42 minutes.
The screen asked whether she wanted to request a field assignment.
Nervous held his mourning staff. This time he didn't hide beneath the desk. He only glanced first at the forty-seven-page report he hadn't turned in yet, as if he could already foresee how thick the next one would be.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
Lin Yuqing looked at the two completely identical hospital alert tones.
“Antai General Hospital.”
The supervisor's office door opened at the same moment.
Director Wu stood behind it, still holding Lin Yuqing's Seventy-Seventh Review file.
“This case,” he said, “is being reassigned.”
Lin Yuqing didn't release the receiver. “Why?”
“The case location is connected to your Seventy-Seventh Review. If you continue investigating, you may access restricted information about yourself.”
“The conflict-of-interest rule prohibits me from handling my own appeal. It doesn't prohibit me from entering the same hospital.”
“Rules aren't there for you to pick apart and exploit.”
“That depends on whether the rule is clear enough.”
Director Wu walked to her desk and pressed the reassignment button. The system requested a new handler, and he entered his own employee number.
The screen turned red.
> Reassignment failed. > Designated employee is currently handling the related Seventy-Seventh Review. > Simultaneously taking over a death case from the same source may compromise independent review.
Very quietly, Nervous said, “I think you have a conflict of interest too, Director.”
Director Wu didn't look at him.
He entered another number. The system showed that the day-shift employee had left for the day; the third employee was in the field; and the fourth had not completed body-correction training within the past three years and was therefore unqualified to handle the case.
Xie Bi'an leaned against the back of his chair. “We're short-staffed tonight.”
“Suspended personnel aren't to offer opinions.”
“I was only describing the situation around the chair.”
Zhong Peiyun heard their argument through the phone.
“Ms. Lin,” she asked, “you aren't going to reject the case, are you?”
Lin Yuqing looked at the cremation countdown. Eleven hours and forty-one minutes.
To the system, that was still enough time to reassign the case, return it, or wait for supervisor approval. To Zhong Peiyun's family, it was all the time they had left before sending a stranger into the crematorium.
“No,” she said.
She switched the receiver to call hold and submitted the field-assignment request again. This time, she added a note:
> Investigation limited to Zhong Peiyun's body and death identity. If information concerning Lin Yuqing is discovered, seal it immediately and transfer it to an independent handler.
The system checked for more than ten seconds.
> Conflict-of-interest conditions satisfied. > Limited handling authorization: Approved. > Restricted items: Lin Yuqing's medical records, hospital room, medical treatment, and family information.
Director Wu stared at the word “Approved” and did not press Reassign again.
“Do you think avoiding your own medical records means you won't see anything you shouldn't?” he asked.
“I don't know,” Lin Yuqing said. “That's why I need to investigate.”
The phone in the supervisor's office suddenly rang.
Director Wu turned around. That phone wasn't connected to an outside line and was normally used only for notices from within the bureau. Yet its screen was displaying the same medical record suffix as Zhong Peiyun's body.
> 417.
For the first time, he didn't pick up the phone immediately.
## Terms in This Chapter
- **Wakeback vision**: When the dead are strongly called by their family, they may briefly see the wake or farewell ceremony. They can only observe and generally cannot directly contact the family or the body. - **Body correction**: A type of death appeal used when the body's name, identity, transport location, or soul signature has been mismatched. If it isn't completed before cremation, the correction process becomes much more difficult. - **Biological specimen verification**: A procedure that verifies a body's identity using blood, tissue, or other identifying data. Visual inspection or a family member's signature may not be used as a substitute.
> The underworld organization and rules in this work are fictional settings; some names are drawn from Chinese folk beliefs.