In the 1970s, I Solved Cases While Gossiping at the Neighborhood Committee

In 1975, Mai Xiaoman became the youngest neighborhood committee mediator on Chunfeng Street.

On her first day at work, before she had even stepped through the gate, someone dumped a basin of foot bath water over her. Two middle-aged women were brawling in the street over a chicken, and onlookers had packed the alley shoulder to shoulder. In the chaos, she picked up a household registration booklet lying on the ground, and a mysterious System called the “Neighborhood Archive” suddenly activated.

The System offered no shop and no combat boosts. It had just one function: when she touched an archival object connected to someone, she could see a few scattered keywords and hazy fragments from the past.

The keywords in the chicken theft case were “chicken feathers, a Qianmen cigarette butt, a dog hole.” Following the clues, Mai Xiaoman discovered that someone else had stolen the chicken: a fourteen-year-old boy who needed the money for a ticket to the Northwest, where he hoped to find his older sister, a sent-down youth who had been missing for three years.

That was only the beginning.

In the days that followed, her mediation logs filled up with all kinds of “trivial neighborhood squabbles”: a model husband staying out all night, strange noises at the textile mill in the middle of the night, a grocery ration booklet stolen from an elderly woman living alone... Each case seemed like an ordinary domestic matter, but the fragments in the archives were like puzzle pieces, pointing one by one in the same direction:

Someone surnamed Lan.

The night of the torrential rain in 1967. The storm drain on Chunfeng Street. Three lives lost. The truth had been buried for eight years.

And those “little things” had never been little at all.