Gray Record

In Dache City, memory is tax, goods, and punishment. Anyone over the age of sixteen must pay "an unimportant memory" to the White Pagoda every month to make a paste for Master Baihuan to extend his life. Those who cannot pay taxes will be sentenced to a loss in three months, and will be captured and "washed empty", becoming immortal and empty people; "forgetting the master" who wipes away painful memories is the lowest level craftsman in the gray circle—— Forgetting the teacher and thanking him, he only wiped it away but did not mend it. He lived by the rule of "not looking in the mirror" for sixteen years. Until a post with the official seal of the White Tower was handed to his door: In three steps, all his own memories would be erased. He thought it was silencing his mouth, but it was actually stripping off his seal. He thought that others were rewriting him, but later he realized that he was born with a "blank sheet" and was the test paper numbered "Empty Shell One" in the old case of the White Tower. Even "Who am I" was copied from other people's accounts. But a knife can't sharpen a person's debts for seventeen years: the knots sewn into the mulberry paper by the adoptive mother before she died, the half piece of candy separated from the Xinzi group snow house, the twenty-one children sunk at the bottom of the river, and the father who read the debts in public and died of a "sudden illness" three months later—— When everyone in this city was arranged to be forgotten, he insisted on writing down every account with his own hands.