On the twelfth step of the convenience store staircase, an extra step appeared out of thin air.
My name is Gu Yuan. That night I reached out and touched the cold cement steps, and my fingertips turned gray from then on. The next day, a woman named Shen Hanzhi came to me and said that she was the anti-evil envoy of the Jiuzhou Anti-Evil Division. She threw me a file - my parents' car accident three years ago happened at the same minute as an S-class incident she handled.
"Your parents died probably so that I could survive."
I joined Jiushi. But the work here is different from what I thought. It's not about slaying demons, it's not about sealing away evil spirits. My first task was to answer the questions of forty-seven dead students in an abandoned classroom. Those who answered incorrectly were asked to stay. The second task is to help an old man who has been trapped for twenty years among the owners of an old community tell his passbook password to his son abroad. The password was his birthday. The old man had tried for twenty years but still couldn't get it right.
There is an anomaly in this world, and it is not about harming people. There are things that remain unfinished after someone dies - a letter whose address has been changed countless times, a pair of cloth shoes with half-filled soles, a nap bell that rings by itself at three o'clock every afternoon, and a piece of crayon that draws a crooked sun on the window glass of the ward. They are not causing trouble, they are just waiting for someone who can deliver the message.
My right hand is getting grayer and grayer, spreading from the fingertips to my shoulder. Shen Hanzhi said this is called "mirror transformation". When the gray reaches my heart, I will become a mirror. It's the same mirror that trapped forty-seven students at Red Maple Middle School and my parents' last day.
But I'm not going to wait.
I walked into the mirror and was
