Paper-Burning Proxy
My name is Qian Duoduo. I work the night shift burning paper offerings at a funeral home.
On my first night, something called the Netherworld Labor Dispatch System V3.7 bound itself to me. The System said I was its paper-burning proxy in the mortal world, employee number 039. The previous person with number 037 was named Chen Daqiang. The System said she had "gone missing."
I burned a paper-crafted crayfish and attracted a Ghost King riding a motorcycle. I burned a paper-crafted girlfriend, and a socially anxious male ghost got berated into shutting down at a funeral hall. I burned a secret manual and discovered that the System itself was a paper centipede that had lived for three hundred years.
The System wants me dead. But Zhao Guihua, the old woman I pushed into the cremator with my own hands, scratched a line into the floor beneath the underground palace: "You're more like a Zhao than I am."
She left me three things: a secret manual, a hollow paper effigy, and one sentence: Once you've learned to cry for someone else, then you can start drawing talismans.
Later, when I found Chen Daqiang, only an empty shell remained. Her features had been ripped away, and a drop of ink clung to the corner of one paper eye. The System said she was still alive, but her soul was locked inside the centipede's belly.
I crouched in front of the cremator, with a drop of cinnabar ink Zhang Wei had placed on the back of my hand. He said, "I'll keep it for you. When you finally manage to cry, I'll write it down for you."
The day the System shut down, I finally cried. For Zhao Guihua, for Chen Daqiang, and for everyone no one had ever cried for.
The System was shut down. The underground palace was sealed. Chen Daqiang's remnant soul awoke. But the final layer Zhao Mingyuan had buried during the Qianlong era had only just begun to emerge.
My name is Qian Duoduo. Number 039. The Netherworld Labor Dispatch Company's paper-burning proxy in the mortal world.
Welcome aboard. May you live a long life.
