Gather Dust

The rain in the lower city always carries a pungent smell of coal tar. Here, warmth is the only debt that mortals need to repay. In his tenth year of working at the crematorium, Lu Chen finally got the paperwork to become a regular employee. He brought back a pair of white canvas shoes full of longing, hoping to give his dependent sister a decent home. But when he opened the door, all he saw was two dazzling, pure white figures, and the tears being forcibly peeled from his sister's eyes. The men didn't even look at him. Like handling waste paper, they lightly erased the "human" emotions in Lu Wan's eyes. They took Lu Wan away, trampled the white shoes to pieces, and conveniently corrected traces of Lu Chen's existence like deleting a line of typos. Mortal sharp knives could not cut through the wall called "rules", so Chase Lu could only return to the crematorium that exuded the aura of death. He opened the furnace door, grabbed the gray-black residue that defied common sense of physics with his bare hands, and swallowed it hard. The heart stopped, dead spots spread, and the body temperature permanently dropped to 35 degrees Celsius. Since this rotten reality wants to harvest all temperatures, Then I will drag all of this into the extreme cold. "I'm not redeeming, I'm just... Collecting ashes."