Ghost Accounts

When a person dies, are their debts wiped out? No.

The person dies, but the debt remains.

And it keeps accruing interest.

My name is Gu Changsheng. I'm a junior bookkeeper at the Futong Money House in Yingtian Prefecture.

My grandfather passed down a pair of eyes that can see what others cannot in a ledger:

What kind of creditor stands behind every debt.

Some creditors are alive, wearing blue robes and cloth shoes, standing beside the account page and waiting to collect.

Some creditors are dead, with green faces and white eyes, standing beneath the line of ink and waiting for one life to pay for another.

The living owe money. The dead owe lives.

And I'm caught in the middle,

keeping accounts for the dead.

On the seventh day of the first lunar month, I opened an old ledger and found a line of cinnabar writing beside the name of someone who had been dead for twenty-one years:

One life per day. Current debt: eight lives.

I counted it up. It had been exactly eight days since the fifteenth day of the twelfth lunar month.

One life a day.

But only one body had been fished out.

Who were the other seven?

What chilled me even more was this:

At some point, another name had appeared in the ledger.

It was my own.

Gu Changsheng.

The dead don't default on their debts.

But some people

are more terrifying than ghosts.

During the Jiajing reign of the Ming Dynasty, an accountant of yin and yang keeps accounts for the dead.

Behind every bad debt, a ghost waits.