My name is Chang Youyu, I am twenty-two years old, I dropped out of high school and I owe a debt of 80,000 yuan. I set up a fortune-telling stall in front of the antique market and earned fifty yuan a day. My grandfather is a fortune teller. Before he died, he left me a tattered book without a cover and said: All debts owed must be paid. I always thought he was talking about money. Until that day, a man in a Chinese tunic suit came to me and said that the broken book was a key - my father disappeared with it. For fifteen years, no one was seen alive, and no corpse was found dead. Later, I went to the Northeast and spent half a year chopping firewood on the kangtou, and learned how to see things; I went down to the tomb and found a way to survive in the darkness of the landslide; I entered the department that is said to be responsible for "these things" and got a work permit numbered 0749 - only one difference from my father's number. Only later did I realize that there is another kind of account in this world. For thousands of years, there are always some things that have not been dealt with - a burial that should not have been done, an unsealed tomb, a debt that has not been repaid, and a person that has not been sent away. They will not disappear on their own, but will be passed down from generation to generation. In our industry, we call it: old accounts. The names of those who pay for others, from Zhou to Qing, are all recorded in the same book. They are called Night Watchmen. My name is Chang Youyu. Grandpa gave me this name in the hope that I would have more than enough every year. But when I was twenty-two years old, I owed 80,000 yuan. It was many years later that I realized that the "surplus" he meant was not about money - it was about you still standing here after everyone else left. This is not the path I chose. But now that we have embarked on it - all debts in this world will eventually be collected by someone.
