The Tenth Bone

If someone erases your name from a book, you disappear from this world.

Not die. No one remembers you ever lived: your family forgets you, your enemies forget you, and even every trace of your existence vanishes. The book is called the Register, and the Bone Sect controls it.

Shen Yansheng was born with an unusually good memory. To others, it's a sickness: he remembers those who "should have been forgotten long ago": nameless soldiers left on battlefields, unknown travelers who starved in alleyways, and victims of old cases erased with a single stroke. He was born into a family tasked with guarding the Register, and his ancestors' work was simple, yet most taboo: to remember, one by one, those who had been erased.

To remember someone, he must sink a segment of bone into his own body. Once all ten segments are sunk, he becomes the Tenth Bone. Everyone who has reached that point has become a name in the Register, and even they no longer remember themselves. Shen Yansheng has already sunk nine segments. With one last space left, he recites the names of the nameless across the land and returns their bones to rest.

The Bone Sect wants everyone to be obediently forgotten. He wants every name belonging to the dead, the erased, and those who should not be forgotten to still be spoken aloud.

He doesn't make grand speeches or write stirring words. On a snowy night journey, he remembers frostbite and half a flatbread; when gathering bodies from a battlefield, he counts the corpses and recites their names. A rustle of a broom, piles of pages, and a segment of bone sinking into place: those are all he owns.

As the last name in the Register is about to be erased, he must decide one thing: if the whole world forgets, should he write his own name into that book too?