Xu Zhiwei, a female estate liquidator in Linzhou, is good at restoring the true life of the deceased from wills, debts, accounts and lies about relatives. She received an unusual commission: the late female entrepreneur Liang Zhaoqiu left a will worth tens of billions, and designated the beneficiaries as twenty-seven female workers who died in a factory fire eighteen years ago. What's even weirder is that one of the "dead" just used his ID card to take away Liang Zhaoqiu's ashes.
Xu Zhiwei traced old fires, compensation lists and missing accounts, and discovered that behind the so-called accidents back then was the silence created by factories, families, charity funds and local powers. Those women did not die neatly. Some of them had their identities replaced, some had their names sold by their families, and some actively chose to disappear from their original lives.
As the investigation deepened, Xu Zhiwei discovered that her mother had been involved in notarization fraud, and her childhood background was also related to the "ninth daughter." She must decide whether to defend the truth that will make it into the courtroom or reveal the full truth that will hurt living people. In the end, she allowed the erased people to have names again, and also personally destroyed the professional identity that she relied on for survival.
Purpose: This is a social suspense novel with heritage investigation as the entry point. On the surface it is a bizarre will case, but on the inside it is a story about female identity, labor value, family control, institutional silence and "who has the right to define a woman's life".