From the start, Xiao Yifan binds himself to the Merit System and blacks out: he turns out to be a “nine-life evildoer” whose name is on file with the Ten Halls of Hell.
[Ding! Please make a charitable donation.]
“Give me a break. I collect debts. It's a miracle if I don't rob people.”
[Ding! Please help the old man who fell by the roadside to his feet.]
“Here, sir, use my... thing as a cane first. No, wait, let me help you up.”
Grumbling as he racks up merit, he grows increasingly alarmed by what he uncovers: his debt-collecting underworld boss of a master, Old Wu, who always borrows his gong, and Sister-in-Law Li, who lets him buy tofu pudding on credit, are all reclusive experts. Then the Underworld's soul theft case erupts, and Meng Po drags him before the Mirror of Retribution.
In the mirror, his nine lives appear: an orphan who gave away his flatbread in a famine, a physician who delivered medicine during a plague, a passerby who shared his umbrella on a rainy night.
“Someone used the deputy judge's brush to paint over every good deed you did in your nine lives, one stroke at a time, and turn them into evil.”
The ledger-altering brush is still being used in the Ten Halls. His soul is firewood that has burned for three hundred years without being consumed.
Old Lei Gong bristles. “Kid, we're going to collect this debt with interest!”
So the former debt collector heads into the Underworld with a peachwood sword. He storms the Blood River Sect, breaks the soul-burning furnace, and overturns the Sixth Hall. Right in front of the Ten Halls' Yama Kings, he clears the false charges from his nine lives and restores a single word: “good.”
[Ding! The accounts of nine lifetimes are settled.]
In this life, he left his umbrella with someone caught in the rain. Not a single raindrop from those nine lives fell in vain.
Zhang Guolao, can you write less?