> There’s a rule in our village: the dead must be watched over by a corpse keeper for seven full days.
> Grandpa watched over corpses for thirty years, but before he died, he warned me, “Don’t ever come back to take over.”
> I was working away from home when the village chief tricked me into returning, forcing me to inherit the job.
> On my first night keeping watch, the old man in the coffin suddenly sat up and grabbed my wrist.
> His throat rattled as he rasped, “Beneath the village… lie three thousand wronged souls…”
> I was so terrified I tried to run, only to find every door and window in the ancestral hall locked shut.
> That was when I remembered the sentence blacked out in Grandpa’s notebook:
> “A corpse keeper doesn’t watch over the dead… They watch over the living…”
