The Police Are Looking for Someone Whose Portrait Is Identical to Mine

Seven people went down the mine. Six came back up. I was the seventh.

I spent fourteen years living under someone else’s work ID.

People without contracts don’t get work IDs. There was one buried in the dirt. I picked it up and called out the name on it.

From that day on, I was Zhou Liben. I went to work, paid social insurance, and sent money every month to a tofu stall in the west of the city.

For fourteen years, the first thing I did each morning was turn my work ID around when I hung it up. The name faced inward.

Someone once asked me why. I said the photo didn’t look good.

I went to six departments and asked them to open that mine. Six times, they gave me the same answer: “Prove who you are first.”

Fourteen years later, the city bureau investigated the mine and recruited someone who knew construction sites. I applied under the name Zhou Liben.

The first case they wanted to investigate was that mine, the case where I was the one who died.

I had no System, no supernatural powers. I had only the five steps I’d learned on construction sites: count what’s there, check where it came from, look for traces, check its location, and note what’s missing.

Later, they copied those five steps into their casework procedures.

And the suspect profile they pieced together using those steps looked exactly like me.