Lin Mo runs a free bookstore in an old alley in Jiangcheng. The only thing he accepts is the karmic debt of the dead.
A broken incense stick means a lie. Wine poured with a trickle means a traitor. Two knocks on the door mean someone is dead. These are the rules of the Ruins Market, and the only way he can stay alive.
Huan sprawls across the checkout counter and says, “Meow. You’ll die in three days.”
He looks down. The name written on the yellow paper the customer hands him is his own: Lin Mo.
The person who brought the paper is his ten-year-old self.
And on page thirteen of the book he has been wiping clean for ten years, a crooked line of writing appears: “Big brother, don’t wipe me away.”
He has been wiping it for ten years. The more he rubs the writing, the deeper it gets, as if someone is carving each stroke with a fingernail from the other side of the page.
He doesn’t dare stop. Huan said that if he wipes away those words, his ten-year-old self will truly disappear.
But he’s even more afraid to wonder: if his ten-year-old self is already dead, then who exactly is he now?
