"Paper Burning Agent"
My name is Qian Duoduo, and I work as a paper burner on the night shift at a funeral home.
On my first night on the job, something called "Underworld Labor Dispatch System V3.7" Tied me up. The system said that I am the paper-burning agent in Yangjian, number 039. The last person numbered 037 was named Chen Daqiang, and the system said she had "lost contact".
I burned a paper crayfish to attract the ghost king on a motorcycle; I burned a paper girlfriend to make the male ghost scolded in the mourning hall until he became autistic; I burned a secret manual and discovered that the system itself is a paper centipede that has lived for three hundred years.
The system wants my life. But Zhao Guihua—the old lady who I personally pushed into the incinerator—carved a line of words with her fingernails under the underground palace: "You are more like the Zhao family than myself."
She left me three things: a secret book, a hollow paper figure, and a sentence - wait until you learn to cry for others before you put on the talisman.
Later, when I found Chen Daqiang, she was only an empty shell. Her facial features had been removed, and there was a drop of ink hanging from the corner of her paper eye. The system says she is still alive, but her soul is locked in the centipede's belly.
I squatted in front of the incinerator, and on the back of my hand was a drop of cinnabar ink that Zhang Wei had lit for me. He said: "Save it for you first, and then write it down when you really cry."
The day the system shut down, I finally cried. For Zhao Guihua, for Chen Daqiang, for all the people for whom no one has ever cried.
The system is shut down. The underground palace is sealed. Chen Daqiang's remnant soul woke up. But the last layer that Zhao Mingyuan buried during the Qianlong years has just been revealed.
My name is Qian Duoduo. No. 039. The underworld labor dispatch company is a paper-burning agent in the underworld.
Welcome. May you live a long life.
