Wang Mang had spent over a decade working funerals. Suona music, wailing, sending the dead on their way. He never took weddings, only funerals. When there was no work, he delivered takeout.
That night, the System sent him an order: Wutong Gardens, Building B, Floor 18, Unit 04. He knew Wutong Gardens well. Building B had only seventeen floors. But the address on the order was Floor Negative Eighteen. The last four digits of the phone number were all fours. He pushed his cart into a building that shouldn’t exist and stepped into the elevator. The buttons ran from -1 to -18, all negative.
The elevator descended. The floor indicator never changed.
The doors opened onto a funeral hall, already set up. The wreaths faced the wrong way, the incense had never been lit, and there was no seat for the chief mourner. The shoes at the entrance were lined up neatly, toes pointing outward.
He ran seventeen deliveries in that building. Not one was for the living. Every floor took something from him: his voice, his hearing, the features of his face. And the white mark on his wrist crept upward, one segment at a time. Seventeen segments.
His father died at a construction site ten years ago. Wang Mang had burned his father’s photo with his own hands. Now the photo had returned, with a message written on the back: Don’t take the seventeenth delivery.
Everyone in that building was someone who had never been sent on their way. His master once told him, “When the suona sounds, whoever plays it takes the job.”
He wasn’t there to deliver takeout. He was there to send them off.
