Lin Bei is a delivery rider, earning seven thousand yuan a month and enjoying every minute of it.
That is, until he delivers a plate of rice with braised chicken to a gray apartment building, stumbles upon a kidnapping, and takes a photo. A mysterious department promptly recruits him.
He thinks that from now on, he’ll use the delivery skills he has honed over three years to take on powerful figures, crack strange cases, and level up as he goes.
But hidden behind the photo is the truth about his own origins.
The children recorded as numbers, buried in volume after volume of old ledgers and nearly forgotten, are entangled with his past.
He pursues criminals and digs through decades of old records across dozens of cities before slowly uncovering the real answer:
The people he protects aren’t just those involved in major cases.
Every person reduced to a number and stripped of their name deserves to have a light kept burning for them, someone who remembers their name, and someone waiting for them to come home.
From a light beneath a lamp at No. 12 Ginkgo Road to the first lights coming on in the far north, he has traveled a very, very long way around.
Only after completing that circle does he understand:
A name is not truly lost as long as someone remembers it.
Only when the lights are on and everyone is home can they eat in peace.
At the end of his journey, his place to return to is right beneath this one light, among this family.
City life · Mystery · Family bonds · Protection · Searching for one’s roots
There’s more than spicy hot pot in the delivery bag. There’s also someone who has forgotten where he came from, and the place he belongs.
This is the kind of book that you can't put down once you pick it up. The protagonist, Lin Bei, is a food delivery boy. There is a "kidnapping" at the beginning, in which he takes back an old boy. As a result, an old business card and a page of names lead him step by step into a game of changing the names of children who have been numbered. The pace is fast, and the first-person narrative is very energetic. When you watch it, you will think that it is going to fight and kill all the way. But the more you read, the more you find that what really touches you is the energy of "someone is willing to light a lamp for you and remember your name." What I like most is the way it buries the thread. Grandma's account book, the letter left by my mother, a word from my uncle, the red strip of cloth under the old ginkgo... They seemed to be scattered old things, but in the end they were all gathered into one place. It does not talk about "family affection", but lets each character light the lamp for the children in the dark until they can't even remember their own names - Mr. Zhou's old house that has never been lit, and the paper lantern that the debtor has hung in the clock shop for decades and has not dared to light. These details are more important than any touching. The emotional lines are also clean. There is no bloody relationship between Lin Bei and Su Wanqing, it's just "wherever you go, this light will light up for you." The heroine is holding the lights in the house one by one for him to prevent them from being extinguished. This kind of restrained companionship is more attractive than sprinkled sugar. If I'm sorry, it's probably that there are a few lines in the middle that are so densely intertwined that I have to be patient and smooth them out slowly, which is not suitable for ten lines at a glance. But after figuring it out, the sense of completeness of each link is very satisfying. Recommended for those who like a bit of suspense but warmth in their bones. What it actually says is: someone must remember your name before it is lost.