Book of Calamity Bones: When I Scrape the Bones, I Also Scrape the Sky

There are a total of forty-seven households in Lanke Lane, with a population of less than 300 people. Shen Ci is the lowest-level bone scraper here. He shaves off the calamity marks on the seventh segment of the back and earns three to five cents for a living. He had a problem that he couldn't tell others - he could hear the bones talking: the disasters of the living were as dull as crying, the trills of fake disasters were like laughter, and the last words left in the bones of the dead were as thick as rust. It's just that every time I hear the true pattern, it's like a knife in my own bones. That winter, he heard words from an old man's spine that did not belong to a living person - sacrifice one hundred thousand living bones. That night, the golden-patterned executioner from the Department of Bones came through the snow, leaving only one sentence: Someone will come to take you within three days. Within three days, people began to die in the alley. The spine pushed out the flesh, the black lines were restrained, and the marrow of the person was drained alive. There were rumors in the alley that he was the cause of the disaster, forcing him to show his bones to prove it. But when he looked through the tax book mixed with ashes, he discovered that the dead people were all those who had been touched by the "prophecy" recently. Bone disease is not a natural disaster. Some people sprinkled things into water, rice, and lamp oil in the name of collecting taxes. From a tax book to the Secretary of Bones, from Lanke Lane to the sacrificial altar that is a three-hundred-year cycle - he wants to listen all the way. The deeper you listen, the harder you dig.