My name is Xiao Lin. After I changed my job in 1952, I was assigned to the Eighth District Archives of Beijing. This red building from the Republic of China is filled with old files that no one has read. A salt merchant's wife was hanged on the third floor. Last year, a female expert from Nanjing jumped to her death. My colleagues said that the building was haunted, but I didn't believe it at first—I didn't even blink when artillery shells exploded at my feet on the battlefield to resist U. S. Aggression and aid Korea. What ghosts could I be afraid of?
But that night shift, I saw with my own eyes the shadow of a woman wearing a cheongsam floating into the basement. I chased it down and dug out a blood contract from three hundred years ago in a dusty wooden box. Gu, the elder of the museum, told me the truth: his ancestors had been guarding this thing for three hundred years, and he no longer wanted to guard it. He asked me to figure out what's inside that door for him -
There was a name locked in the coffin-sized box, and the last person who saw it was dead.
I opened the dusty file and found the last words carved on the door frame by Expert Shen before jumping off the building: "Don't let him find the third copy. The third copy is not in Beijing."
I am 26 years old, I have been doing archival work for two months, and now I have to figure out a three-hundred-year-old case within a week. This is not file sorting, this is wiping the butts of the living and collecting the bones of the dead.
