When the white light faded, I found myself standing in front of a workstation.
Sticky notes covered the partition. Three monitors were stacked at the edge of the desk, a packet of spicy snacks was wedged into the keyboard, and two cases of instant noodles sat in the corner. Both had expired last year.
Behind the desk sat a woman with her loose hair carelessly tucked behind her ears and dark circles from too little sleep. Feet up, she was cracking sunflower seeds. She glanced at me the way a supermarket cashier scans a product.
“Zhao Wen. Outsourced clerk for the Reincarnation Office. Just call me Zhao.”
She tossed a handful of seed shells into the bin.
“I've read your résumé, A-019. Nice clean death. Accounts neatly settled.”
“Accounts?” I looked at her. “Who's been keeping accounts on me?”
Her hand paused over the seeds. Then she resumed as though nothing had happened.
“Leave the accounting questions for now. I've seen plenty of souls like you, dead without knowing why. They all come in crying injustice, and half of them can't even explain how they died. You're different. You saw that volume before you died, didn't you?”
Without thinking, I tightened my grip on the two pieces of chain.
The number printed in the book was exactly the one she'd used. A-019.
She seemed to notice the movement. Pulling a sheet from beneath a monitor, she slid it across the desk toward me.
Numbers crowded the paper. My name sat in the middle of one row, surrounded by entries stamped “Reclaimed.” Beneath it were dozens more unfinished pages, all marked urgent.
“What are these?”
“Heroine files.”
At last, Zhao put down the seeds.
“Your death was a Luck Harvesting Bureau job. They keep planting ‘devoted male leads’ in romance novels. The men supply the devotion; the women get their luck drained dry. The worse the heroines suffer, the better those people live. Your old boyfriend, Yu Shen, was bait they trained themselves. You were his biggest catch.”
I looked at the names marked “Reclaimed” in the stack. “Can any of these women still be saved?”
Zhao didn't answer at once. She turned toward the drab gray sky outside the window. A long moment passed before she spoke.
“Some get rescued, then run off again. They escape into another book, get tracked down, and get drained all over again. The Bureau has more people than we do. Their classifications run from A to Z. A is premium quality. Z is the lowest.”
She paused, her voice dropping.
“You're A-019. The eighteen before you? Not one got out.”
I suddenly understood why she'd chosen me.
It wasn't because I was exceptional. I was the first in the A series to die completely without being reclaimed again.
So that was what she meant by hard to kill.
To my surprise, I felt perfectly calm. I only asked:
“And your underworld just watches?”
Zhao snorted. “The underworld has jurisdiction over living people. It doesn't have jurisdiction over the books they write.”
“Book worlds count as separate instances. Permanent staff can't get in, so they have to use off-staff people like us.”
She leaned back in her chair and slowed her speech.
“Which makes your arrival rather convenient. You've died. You understand how unfairly those girls are dying.”
I looked down through the files again. My finger stopped on one page.
A girl named Su Nian. Her husband's family business had swallowed her grandfather's company. Her mother was ill, with no money for treatment. She was pregnant, and someone was forcing her to sign an agreement relinquishing custody.
A line in red read: [Critical. Seven-day response window.]
I looked up. “How do you plan to save her?”
“You save her.”
Zhao met my eyes. “You enter her body, hold the line for her, and help her stand on her own feet. We don't keep idle souls.”
She counted the rules on her fingers. “Only three. First, you become the original heroine, but your mind stays your own.”
“Second, you don't get to make her decisions for her. She has to take the final step herself. Your Redemption Score depends on how far she wakes up. Dragging her out by force doesn't count.”
“Third, you can't personally kill those jinxes. The backlash will hit you. All you can do is let them walk themselves into a dead end.”
I took that in and nodded, but I still had a question.
“What if the girl doesn't want to wake up? I can't hold a knife to her throat and order her to stay alive.”
Zhao grew serious. “Then it's up to her. We give a hand to the ones we can save. If someone won't come with us, we can't live her life for her.”
She sighed deeply. There seemed to be too many stories in her dark eyes.
“Remember this, Ruan Ying. The hardest person in the world to save is someone who won't reach out. You go in to offer her your hand. Whether she takes it is her choice.”
That left me speechless.
I looked down at the broken chain and suddenly remembered the year my mother fell ill. I'd desperately wished for someone to reach out to me, too. In the end, the man who offered his hand was the one who pushed me off a rooftop.
“What do I get?” I asked bluntly.
Zhao studied me for two seconds, then spoke slowly.
“Get your Redemption Score to seventy percent, and the passage back to the living opens. You get another life. Don't you want to know who kept those accounts on you? Then you need to be alive. Dead souls aren't authorized to investigate old affairs in the living world.”
“And if I don't reach seventy percent?” Nothing came that easily.
Zhao raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Then you remain an off-staff soul, taking jobs wherever you can. If you die inside a book, you're dead for real. Nobody will offer you a second contract.”
She said it lightly. I felt its weight.
The first time I died, someone had schemed against me.
If I died this time, it would be my choice. I couldn't blame anyone else.
Holding those two lengths of broken chain, I suddenly understood.
I'd already died once. How much worse could it get?
The girls in those files were like the woman I'd been: cherished, drained dry, then casually thrown away. They hadn't even received an apology.
Saving them had very little to do with whether I came back to life. I simply couldn't swallow the injustice.
“All right. I'll take it.” I decisively stuffed the chain into my pocket.
“Can I keep this?”
Zhao opened her mouth, then swallowed whatever she'd been about to say. At last, she waved a hand.
“Keep it, keep it. Personal effects go on the register. We'll settle the other accounts after you make it back alive.”
She had barely finished when the desk phone rang.
She snatched up the receiver. Her languid expression became a professional smile, and her voice turned syrupy.
“Oh, Director! I'm on it, I'm on it. I've got A-019's file in hand. I won't hold up the work.”
Whatever the person on the other end said gradually wiped the smile from her face. When the call ended, she slammed the receiver into its cradle.
“Another performance deduction. Apparently, this quarter's reclamation rate missed the target, so they're cutting our outsourcing fees.”
I raised an eyebrow. “By how much?”
“Six months' worth of sunflower seeds.”
She dropped the bag onto the desk, looking wilted, then mustered enough energy for a warning.
“So don't go dying on me right away. Every time you die, that's six months of my work for nothing.”
I watched her for a couple of seconds, then pressed on.
“Who handles the Luck Harvesting Bureau's accounts?”
Crunch. Zhao bit straight through a sunflower seed. After a moment, she spat out the shell as though nothing had happened.
“You're a contractor. Why are you asking about the bosses? Finish your first job. Worry about the rest after you survive.”
The harder she dodged the question, the deeper the waters seemed.
I was about to speak again when the most decrepit monitor on her desk lit up. A blood-red work order flashed over the screensaver.
Its heading stood out in bold:
[The Billionaire CEO Insists on Spoiling Me]
Lines scrolled down the notification panel beneath it.
[Host: Su Nian. Pregnant and on the run. Online manhunt in progress. Response window: seven days.]
Before I could ask whether this was the Su Nian from the file, the whole monitor lunged toward my face. White light engulfed me from head to toe. Zhao's voice drifted from far away, tinged with an infuriating touch of amusement.
“Off to fieldwork with you. Remember to come back alive, contractor. This job goes on your performance review, too.”
I wanted to curse her, but wind was already pouring down my throat.
The fierce white light made my eyes ache. A boom sounded in my ears, followed by a man's cold voice.
“Miss Su. Mr. Fu says you must sign this agreement today.”