In the twenty-first year of the Republic, a strange rule spread through Wujin City.
After nightfall, never call anyone by their full name. When crossing a bridge, never answer to your old surname.
Because there were people in the city who were clearly still alive, yet their families no longer recognized them. Their names could not be found in the household registers, and even the old homes where they had lived for decades no longer bore their names.
People called this phenomenon "name loss."
In the south of the city lived a woman named Qi Zhaomian. Beautiful beyond compare and always dressed in a plain, long gown, she restored old archives for a living. No one knew where she came from. They only knew that she could uncover, from altered old documents, the secrets others desperately wanted to hide.
Some paid her to find people. Some knelt and begged her to restore their names. Others wanted her dead as soon as possible.
Then one rainy night, a man who should have been dead walked into the archive room and handed her a deregistration certificate.
"Miss Qi, I'm still alive. But my daughter doesn't recognize me anymore."
Qi Zhaomian took the paper and found a line of faded writing on its reverse.
Nineteen years ago, someone had used her name to guarantee the disappearance of seventy-three strangers.
But that year, she was only seven years old.
Only later did she understand:
The truly terrifying thing about this city wasn't that the dead refused to leave.
It was that someone could decide which living people had never existed at all.
