I, the Last Priest of the Ancestral Hall

In the twenty-fourth year of Guangxu's reign, the Reform Movement of 1898 took place. I, Shen Duqing, became the last contract officer of the Shen family. His duty is to manage the accounts - to manage the thousand-year blood debt signed by his ancestors and mountains and rivers. The uncle died on the river beach, with all the blood drained from his body, holding the expired mountain deed in his hand. Zhu Pi glared: "Penalty for breach of contract: collection by pulse, guarantor: the entire Shen family." I opened the account book. Grandfather's last words are on the last page: "In the winter of the Renyin year, the seventh contract expired. Gengzi. Renewer: Kong. Penalty for breach of contract: extermination of heirs." Extinction. At this time, the imperial court wanted to destroy ancestral halls and build schools, the railways wanted to seize ancestral graves, and foreigners wanted to build churches on the foundations of ancestral halls. Rules are being crushed by the times. But the debt will not be voided. The mountain has come to collect the first toll, and it is the person on my pillow who died silently at night. The water comes to ask for the interest of the blood meal thirty years ago. It is the cousin who drowned in the provincial capital school and hugged the wordless account book tightly in his arms. The tribesmen said: You are a contract official, you have to find a way. What can I do? I can't draw talismans, and I can't catch ghosts. I'm just a bookkeeper. My only weapons are this old book full of dead people's debts, three sticks of unbroken incense, and a mouth that can still reason with the "rules". —— (Folklore legends × clan elegy × rules-based wits × darkness in the late Qing Dynasty)