The Seventieth Gatekeeper

Introduction to the work "Qi Men": In an unfinished building at three o'clock in the morning, college student Lin Ye woke up from a hangover-like dizziness. A bleed-like countdown was embedded on the screen of his mobile phone - [179 hours until the "door" opens]. The snake-bird wooden plaque inscribed with "Led to the Forest" in his pocket was bone-chilling, and the landlord's WeChat message calling for rent was still on the lock screen. When the man in black's cane cracked the floor tiles, he realized that the "Forgotten Ferry Agreement" forgotten ten years ago was no lie: he was the 79th "Gatekeeper", and he was going to plug the cracks in the boundary wall within seven days to prevent those "fish that slipped through the net" that gnawed at memories from pouring into the world. The eyeballs in the oden soup bucket, the blinking butterflies in the herbarium, the stray cats that can speak human language... There are truths that subvert cognition hidden in the cracks of ordinary life. The warning text message from the unknown number and the green eyes of the black cat flashed alternately. When Lin Ye found his photo appeared in the "missing persons" column of an old newspaper from the Republic of China, he was shocked to realize that this gatekeeper game might have started before he was born. The anxiety about the rent increase has not yet dissipated, and he is already riding a broken bicycle carrying takeout boxes, shuttling among the crowds of people and strange objects. After all, compared to a three hundred yuan increase, turning the whole city into a monster canteen seems more worth the headache.