Every Supernatural Tale I Contain Has Official Status

From one to four in the morning, this city is closed to the outside world. Streetlamps look back at you, and things without shadows line up along the walls. They are all “Darkside Entities,” more numerous than fireworks and more annoying than weekly reports. No one handles them. Actually, someone does: the Seventh Compliance Office, a grassroots public institution that deals exclusively with urban legends. Its positions are perpetually vacant, and its offices are half underground. Chen Mo, 28, a former neighborhood mediation officer, was recruited by a wrongly delivered transfer order and became the office’s 37th director. On his first day, he discovered that most of his predecessors had never made it to retirement; the entire office had just one employee, a shadowless “Shadow Servant” who kept asking when it would become permanent staff; and the employee handbook contained just one line: “Give them official positions, and they’ll stop causing trouble.” And so his career became absurd enough to drive him mad: filing “Roll-Call Exemption Forms” for entities that call the roll, assigning Darkside floor numbers to elevators, issuing temporary residence permits to shadowless tenants. With forms, official seals, and a simple “Don’t rush, let’s follow the process,” he took control, inch by inch, of a city that should not exist. Until he discovered that the gray markings crawling over his right hand were connected to his younger sister, who disappeared during Darkside hours seventeen years ago. And the name blacked out at number thirty-four on the list, its strokes and lines, looked like “Chen.” Fill out the form first, then we’ll talk. Welcome to the Seventh Compliance Office. Please present your temporary residence permit.