Ledger City has its rules: when someone is at the end of their rope, they sign a life contract, with twelve days to repay.
If they fail to pay on time, the contract shatters and they vanish. The shards are priced and traded on the market.
Chu Suan is a debt collector, settling the accounts of the dead and collecting from the living. He has handled forty-seven death contracts without ever failing.
On the forty-eighth, the debtor had been dead for three months. Their life contract had shattered into seven pieces, each in the possession of a different stranger.
Seven chains, seven living people, and a bad debt with no traceable origin.
Then he turned to the end of the contract, where his own name was written in the guarantor field.
After forty-seven dead accounts, he had finally become a number on the ledger.
He investigated for seven days and uncovered something he should never have found: these dead accounts weren’t debts owed by people. They had been created by the System. Those slaves bound by life contracts weren’t unable to repay; they had been designed to fail. And every time he settled an account, he was keeping the System alive.
Chu Suan stared silently for a long time at the line of data in the System log. The signature was his. He had absolutely no memory of signing it.
“Is a debt collector really settling other people’s accounts, or taking the fall for them?”
No one told him the answer. The last person who found out had gone mad.
