[The Underworld Reopens + Heavenly Ledger Office + Nameless Youth + Settling Accounts and Judging Fates + Sharp-Tongued and Hard-Hearted + Refusing to Accept Bad Debts]
Lu Qian was born nameless, debt-free, and without a registered identity.
Other people’s debts of life could be recorded, their debts of gratitude repaid, and their unpaid taxes collected. But this living man couldn’t be entered in the official registers or identified in the official mirrors. Not even a favor as small as a meal could be attributed to him.
The Heavenly Ledger Office declared that every living person in the world had to be registered.
Anyone outside the ledger would have their name erased first, then their body destroyed.
Yet Lu Qian somehow survived.
A black snowstorm buried the Underworld’s last judgment seal in a mass grave, and left beside him a short blade that reflected no light.
From then on, the dead came to him for names, the living came to him for lives, and the Heavenly Ledger Office came to him for punishment.
Confronting the heavenly ledger looming over the world, Lu Qian gave it some serious thought:
“You decide who owes what to whom, and that makes it so?”
“Then I don’t accept it.”
Later, ten thousand souls bowed and begged for passage, and the Underworld reopened.
Lu Qian stood before the Heavenly Ledger Office with his blade in hand, smiling courteously:
“Everyone, the old accounts have come to light.”
“Who’s paying up first?”
