For thirty years, he carried "other people's daughters" for a living. On his final job, he lifted the white cloth and found his own daughter's face beneath the red cord.
Chen Fan, known in the trade as "Old Hauler," is the most experienced transport man in the ghost-marriage industry. Over thirty years, he went from a novice with shaking hands to a numb old hand, from "remembering only the numbers" to "secretly adding names," and from "for her sake" to "not knowing what to do."
He had one rule: don't look, don't ask, don't think. Don't look at their faces, don't ask their names, don't think about them when they were alive.
Until the final job. He lifted the white cloth and saw the red cord. Yiyi's face. The body he had inspected with his own hands was the daughter he had raised for twenty-four years.
His three layers of dreams collapsed: professional instinct assessed her as "Grade A"; a flashback showed her smiling; and the System's backlash whispered in his ear, "Those are the rules."
The rules? To hell with the rules.
He burned through thirty years of savings to build a transparent shelter beside his daughter's grave, displaying all his tools and writing by hand, "My daughter was my last job." When the industry came with gasoline, he faked his death and disappeared into the mountains. With a pencil and scrap paper, he wrote out his confession, one page a day, carving the names of three hundred nameless girls back into the world.
Lin Yue climbed the mountain trail for four hours to find him. "I'm the daughter of your first job." She didn't want revenge, but reconciliation. She only wanted to know what her mother looked like in her final moments.
