The county magistrate has been dead for seventeen years, yet today he's come to claim his lifespan again.
The claim is for 3,650 days. In the source column is the name of a fourteen-year-old girl. The person who wrote it down was her own brother.
He spent three years copying names in the accounts office, recording 137 households. He knows that behind every lifespan claim, someone is losing years of their own life to keep a dead person alive. But this time, he personally wrote his sister into the death ledger.
To save her, he stakes his last ninety days of life in exchange for three days to audit the accounts. In those three days, he must investigate the old records of 300 households, uncover the account his mother left unsettled three years ago, and face a county magistrate who died seventeen years ago but still claims his lifespan year after year.
He can't create lifespan or steal someone else's life. All he can do is return the stolen years, one entry at a time. But every household he repays costs his sister a day.
The more he returns, the closer his sister comes to death.
Stranger still, his mother's grave contains no remains, only an empty coffin. On the first line of the last page of the old accounts isn't his sister's name, but his own.
Come on Xu Yan, keep checking!
Sometimes things you do out of good intentions may have to be reckoned with
While writing this chapter, I have been thinking about a very common question: if you knew that saving one person would shorten another person's life by one day, would you still save him or her? Xu Yan did not choose a beautiful answer, he only chose to start with the most dangerous person first.