I Came Back Alive, but My Daughter Is Mourning Me

Forty-one days after the shipwreck, Xu Qiutang dragged her injured leg back home, only to find her memorial tablet set up in the main hall.

Her five-year-old daughter was dressed in mourning. Her husband had personally identified her body, the authorities had registered her as dead, and the Song family had even collected eight taels in compensation.

Worse still, the whole city was saying she had abandoned her fellow passengers and fled alone to save her own life.

Xu Qiutang refused to accept it.

She was a cargo clerk for a shipping company. Her greatest skill was not pleading her innocence, but checking the books.

The hairpin used to identify the body was wrong. There were two receipts for the same compensation payment. And at the end of the original cargo ledger, six names were hidden, belonging to people no one admitted had ever boarded the ship.

At first, she only wanted her name back, so her daughter could call her Mother again.

But the deeper she investigated, the more she found that her husband's fingerprints, the shipping company's ledgers, and the documents signed that night by ship inspector Wen Jibai all pointed to a shipwreck that should never have happened.

She had returned alive.

So who was the woman buried in her coffin? And where had the six people without memorial tablets gone?