The Calamity Bureau: I Help Ghost Stories Close Their Accounts

On his twenty-fourth birthday, Zhou Jiming learned that he had already been dead for eighteen years.

His employee number vanished from the company access system, his signature disappeared from an insurance claim, and a “Second Deregistration Notice” revealed that his mother had personally erased his identity when he was six. After that, someone renewed it eighteen times. Now the nineteenth renewal was overdue. Before midnight, he had to complete the calamity deregistration for the “Registered Bride” or lose his name forever.

At the Linqi Calamity Bureau, everyone else had only one testimony in their lifetime. But whenever Zhou Jiming personally deregistered a calamity, he could add one of its rules to his own death file.

The more calamities he deregistered, the closer he came to the truth about his mother's disappearance. And the more he realized that the thing that truly needed to be deregistered might never have been those urban legends at all.