I Exorcise Corpses and Collect Debts at the Zhou Sect

At No. 7 Dongliu Lane, I settle accounts by day and return corpses by night.

Those who can enter, come in. Those who can’t are sent back where they came from.

I thought I was just an apprentice at the Zhou funeral house, until one night someone brought in a corpse that should never have crossed the threshold. Cabinet B, Drawer Three opened, and with it came the old Zhou family’s ledger of lives.

The dead may demand their names, but the living must not answer.

Corpses can be returned, accounts can be settled, and lives can be borrowed.

But when every old debt was finally charged to me, I understood:

I hadn’t come here to learn how to handle the dead.

I was the life that had been pledged against this debt all along.