Gu Heng was a senior auditor at an accounting firm in life. After death, she became the underworld's seventh auditor.
She thought she had merely changed workplaces: balance the books and get reincarnated as soon as possible. But the underworld's accounts were even messier than the living world's.
Meng Po used recipe books as ledgers, and three hundred years' worth of Forgetting River dew had gone missing;
Black Impermanence ran a "Last Words Collection Service," but after missing his KPI for three months straight, he was losing money out of pocket;
An old ghost had been running an unlicensed stall by the bridge for sixty-two years, selling something called "Memory Candy," made from his own memories;
A dead internet celebrity was still livestreaming sales, all because a fan in the living world left a message every day: "I want to die today too, but since you're still here, I'll wait one more day"...
Armed with her spreadsheets and professional skepticism, Gu Heng investigated them one by one.
She audited other people's books, crunched their numbers, and helped them sort through one muddled account after another.
But one day, in a paper offering package, she found a letter from the living world:
The postmark was dated three days after her death, and it read, "Son, work hard and remember to eat."
It turned out her family still didn't know she was dead.
Even stranger, among the memory jars Meng Po had treasured for three hundred years was a face exactly like hers.
The Book of Life and Death never makes mistakes, until Gu Heng discovered it had been wrong for three hundred years.
This is a story about "accounts."
Some spend three hundred years searching for a forgotten face. Some wait sixty-two years for a promise that will never be kept. Some record millions of last words, all to make up for one thing left unsaid.
Gu Heng says the books must balance. But little by little, she discovers that...
Some accounts can never be balanced. Some people can never be forgotten.
Behind some numbers lies something more important than the numbers themselves.
Theme: Every soul has something it cannot let go of. The audit is not of the books, but of the human heart.
