The Anomaly Bureau Files

The Office of Strange Affairs is a unit that appears on no official roster. It has no signboard or official seal, only an office where the curtains stay drawn year-round.

My name is... Never mind, names don't matter. All you need to know is that my colleagues include Ma Sanjin, a fat man obsessed with money who can't keep his mouth shut; "White-Haired Xie," with the face of a thirty-year-old, the temper of an eighty-year-old, and a finger strong enough to punch through an iron door; Old Zhou, a madman who would burn down the archives for one woman; Xiao Gu, who kept watch in the morgue for three days and nights just to honor a verbal promise; and our director, who sits forever in his office drinking tea and reading the paper, knows everything, and says nothing.

The cases we handle never make any sense: after a coal mine explosion, a miner who doesn't exist in any records appears underground, a polished white human bone stuck in his chest as he sits upright in a tunnel, waiting for the shuttle bus. The dead man wears a smile, his fingerprints match no living person, and the mine's old personnel clerk sees "him" standing beside his bed in the middle of the night. He only dares to change his story after daybreak.

Every pit is a world, every shovel a cause and effect. A story set in the cracks of reality begins here.