Heaven's Prisoner: Enter My Crucible

On the Night of Soul Offerings, ash from burning paper all over town swirled against the wind, drifting toward the mountains in the northwest. While everyone else watched the spectacle, Xiao Che counted: two hundred and thirty-seven pieces, not one more, not one less. A world where even the ashes from burned offerings wouldn’t line up was not right. In his previous life, he was a quantitative analyst who died at his desk. In this one, he became a boy in Huishui Town who nearly burned to death, bringing only two things with him: memories from both lives merged together, and a ledger no one else could see. The more he recorded, the stranger things became. The register at the talisman shop showed that in one hundred and thirty years, thirty-one children had been taken, with not a single one ever returning. When he placed his palm on the spirit-testing stele, it didn’t feel like it was assessing his aptitude. It felt like a grain merchant picking up a handful of rice, rubbing the grains to judge their quality, weighing them, and estimating their price. The copper token his grandfather left behind grew hot night after night at the foot of the mountain, but fell silent as soon as Xiao Che entered the mountains, as if it had recognized something. The sect leader was kind and amiable, but as he spoke, he rolled a string of wooden talismans between his fingers. Every time he reached the seventh one, he paused for half a breath, as if exchanging a secret signal with someone. His parents said that cultivating immortality was wonderful: one could ascend to heaven in broad daylight and bring honor to the family. But Xiao Che checked his ledger. Not a single person who had ascended had ever returned. The chant for the soul offering said, “Soul, come back, and enter my furnace.” The furnace? Whose furnace? And who was the trial by fire meant for? They weren’t cultivating immortality on this mountain. They were raising a crop. Xiao Che wasn’t in a hurry. By day, he dried talismans, kept accounts, and counted roof tiles. At night, he recorded every anomaly in his ledger, marking each one: Unverified, pending proof. He wasn’t cultivating immortality. He only wanted to settle this account, one entry at a time, all the way up to heaven. When the ledger finally closes, every immortal and deity in the heavens will hear a reckoning ten thousand years overdue: Let’s balance the books.