Living Roster

The roll call is at Mao hour. Three hundred and seventy-two people, three hundred and seventy-two names on the book. Shen Mu read them one by one, and when he reached the 370th one, he paused—— The name on the booklet was reported dead three months ago. The pension was eighty taels and four cents, stamped with his own hands. "Cui Wu." Someone in the team responded. "Arrived." ——The dead man has arrived. Shen Mu is the core official of Yanmen Town Army's former department. If you don't join the stream, you won't count as an official. His only job is to check the roster, issue pensions, and verify the security seal. There are four brochures in the army. If he is entered on the register of active soldiers, he will be paid; if he is entered on the register of dead, his family will receive eighty-two cents; if he is entered on the register of missing persons, he will not get a cent and he will have to wait for seven years; if he is entered on the register of deserters, his wife and daughter will be confiscated from the church and his parents will be exiled. Every stroke he writes is the life or death of a family. He only has one thing - verifying names. One soldier was illiterate, so he painted his own sickle, bucket, and fish. He could recognize whether this stroke was painted by himself. Was the dead man's mark drawn by the dead man himself? One hundred and thirty-seven military tablets were dug out of the ditch outside the city. Ninety-six, this person is not found in any book. In that battle, the book recorded that five hundred people participated in the battle. But the soldier cards come from six different battalions. The military medicine woman Sanqi recognized the marks on her body, and he recognized the marks on the paper. Her man has been on the missing persons register for six years, but she doesn't recognize him because he has no bones. And the man standing behind him took him out of the pile of dead people and raised him for eleven years. The people he raised will eventually uncover him with their own hands. Thirty thousand names are still waiting for someone to read them again one by one.