My name is Lin Xia. With no other choice, I became the night-shift corpse watcher at a funeral home. On my first day at work, the corpse of a woman suddenly sat up on the security monitor, with half a bloodstained pearl earring caught beneath her fingernail. But the employee handbook clearly said, “Clean and disinfect corpses before placing them in the cabinets.”
Even stranger, I received an anonymous text: “Employee Rule No. 7: After midnight, the crematorium must never be left without lights. Violators lose ten years of their lifespan for every hour.” But on the back of an old rulebook I found in a veteran employee’s locker, someone had written in blood: “The rules are a trap. Darkness is the only way out.”
The moment I touched the woman’s wrist, an electric current shot through my brain. Her husband had abused her while she was alive, and on the night she died, that man had sneered in front of the freezer: “You shouldn’t have seen that insurance policy.” From then on, I unlocked the ability to “read memories by touching corpses,” at the cost of my rapidly dwindling lifespan.
The numbers on the morgue cabinets change on their own in the middle of the night. Screams from my coworkers echo out of the cremator. A mysterious lamp keeper appears carrying seventeen kerosene lamps, claiming the oil is made from night watchmen’s souls. And in the director’s office safe lies a file on an “Immortality Project” that experiments on living people.
“Want to stay alive?” the System prompt whispers in my ear. “For every rule you solve, you can exchange it for one more day of life.” But when I open the latest page of the rulebook, I find these words staring back at me: “Rule Zero: A corpse watcher must never trust their own eyes.”
