Chen Yu, a relic organizer, has been in the industry for seven years and has dealt with more than 2,300 deaths. His world is well-ordered - classified, emptied, and sealed. He does not evaluate the living or empathize with the dead.
Shi Ran appeared in Room 401, Building 7, Cuiyuan New Village. She claimed to be the distant niece of the deceased, and while helping to organize the belongings, she used an almost preparatory gesture to learn in detail how to get along with the space after death. Chen Yu later saw a diagnosis in her bag: a rare hereditary sudden death syndrome with an average survival time of 33 days.
She didn't cry. Her obsession is to see how someone will sort out "their" belongings before she dies.
In 33 days, they completed a list: watching the sunrise, eating cakes without preservatives, walking on the road at three o'clock in the morning, taking a rusty hairpin out of the warehouse that had been waiting for thirty years... She taught him that death is not a disaster that needs to be rehearsed, but a farewell that needs to be rehearsed. He taught her that relics are not discarded trash, but memories that are claimed.
In the early morning of the 33rd day, Shi Ran passed away quietly in the white sweater of his childhood, holding the hairpin in his hand.
Seven years later, Chen Yu is still in the industry. His warehouse contains hundreds of unclaimed relics, as well as the diary she left for him. He spent seven years writing the last page and could never finish it.
This is a novel about "relics". It is not the relics of the dead, but the things left by the living - those unclaimed memories, unspoken love, and unfinished laughter. They are each other's relics and continue to sort out other people's farewells in this world.
Intention: We will eventually become someone's relic. The significance of relics never lies in who leaves them, but in who claims them.