Zhou Yan spent ten years writing rules for other people. Notices for weddings and funerals, contracts for dividing up family property, announcements at the village entrance: he wrote them all. He never followed a single one himself.
On the night of the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, he woke up in the stairwell of an old apartment building. The floor numbers jumped from 4 to 6, and a ledger bound in kraft paper had appeared in his hand.
Only later did he learn that every place in this world had two layers: the one people could see, and the one that operated according to rules. When the rules were broken for too long, the hidden layer swelled up and enveloped people. This was called a Lockdown.
There were no ghosts in a Lockdown. Only people who were still going about their lives by the rules. If you called out to them, they would answer, but they wouldn't come with you, because it wasn't time for them to clock out yet.
The rules weren't posted on the walls. You had to figure them out yourself. Failing to figure them out didn't count as breaking them, but once you knew the rules and still broke them, it was recorded in the ledger immediately. So the faster he figured things out, the sooner he went into debt.
He had a ledger. He could record debts, redeem them, and even take on other people's debts by transferring what they owed into his own name. This was how he saved people, and also why he could never escape.
An old apartment building, a night bus, a factory bathhouse, a small-town video parlor, a wedding banquet that never ran out of food... Behind every door, someone was waiting for him to wake them up.
Then he turned to the ledger's final page. Beside a name written in fresh ink were two words: Take over. The person who had written them was his grandfather, who had gone missing three years ago.
