The days crawled by in a state of "uncomfortable peace" for about two weeks.

  Every now and then, a phantom chill would bleed from the living room corners, as if someone had vacuum-sealed the freezing air from the Pavilion of Regret and stuffed it into my AC vents. Lady Ma—the schoolgirl-clad Horse-Face—didn't actually treat my emotions like a buffet as I’d feared. Most of the time, she just sat there in a corner, or on my sofa, staring with those deep gray eyes into some void I couldn't see. It created an ambiance somewhere between "having a long-term houseguest" and "living in a haunted house."

  Then came the day she looked at me while I was lacing up my boots for work.

  "We need an office desk," she said, her voice flat.

  I looked up at that wax-pale face. "You mean... an altar?"

  She didn't answer. She just stared at me, unblinking, until I felt like my spine was being flash-frozen. I swallowed my stupid question and gave her a sharp nod.

  The next day, like a good little debt-slave, I hauled a solid wood altar from the local religious supply store. The weight of the thing made me suspect the wood had been cut from a five-hundred-year-old camphor tree. My knees nearly buckled twice on the stairs. With a measly "Eight Taels and Seven Mace" soul-rating, I was seriously worried I’d be flattened into a meat-pancake before I even got to use my "capital."

  I shoved the desk into a corner of the living room, panting as I sat on the floor.

  Lady Ma produced a wooden memorial tablet out of nowhere and set it dead-center on the surface. Without a word, she lit two large red candles. The dark red flickers danced across the walls, making it look like the room was slowly hemorrhaging. As the shadows swayed on the ceiling, I hugged my knees and realized something:

  This scene, by any textbook definition, was the ultimate "shrine for the dead" setup.

  I leaned in for a closer look. Carved faintly into the wood were three characters:

  【 Spirit of Ma Yi-chun 】

  "Ma Yi-chun?" I muttered the name out loud.

  "My true name," she said, turning her head. The red candlelight danced in her pupils, reflecting a light that was either holy or predatory—I couldn't tell. "Consider it a gesture of good faith in our partnership."

  She flicked the wick of a candle. The flame swayed near her fingertips, but the heat didn't touch her.

  "True names are not to be leaked. Like your birth details, if the wrong person gets a hold of them, things get... messy. Outside of this room, you call me Horse-Face. Or Lady Ma."

  Her voice, usually ice-cold, held a trace of ancient weariness under the candlelight—like a vessel that had been overfilled for too long, finally showing a hairline fracture. I didn't ask where that weariness came from.

  When it comes to landmarks in my neighborhood, nothing beats the Xingtian Temple.

  But at one in the morning, Lady Ma led me to the office building right behind it—the local Household Registration Office. During the day, it’s a chaotic mess of people moving their residency around. At night, with the doors locked tight, it radiated a leaden, graveyard silence. Even the streetlights looked sickly.

  "Whoa—is there a festival at the temple tonight? Why’s it so loud?"

  I looked toward the temple. It was blazing with light. The sounds of gongs, drums, and rhythmic chanting drifted over, loud enough to rival a midday market.

  Lady Ma shot me an annoyed look, her sailor uniform scarf snapping in the night wind. "Are you an idiot? It’s one A.M. Who holds a temple fair now?" She paused. "That’s the 'Upstairs' open for business."

  She emphasized the word "Upstairs" in a way that made me shiver. In this context, she definitely didn't mean the second floor.

  "Enough talk. Get in."

  She reached out and grabbed me by the collar like a hawk snatching a chick. Before I could react, she dragged me right through the locked iron shutter.

  The sensation was hard to describe—like passing through a layer of freezing jelly. For a fraction of a second, all the heat was sucked out of my body. A faint electric numbness crawled under my skin, and then I was standing inside. The shutter was perfectly intact behind me.

  I looked down at my hands. Still there. Whole.

  "Stop checking the merchandise," Lady Ma called out as she walked ahead. "Keep up."

  The interior was pitch black, save for the ghostly green glow of the emergency exit signs illuminating the empty service counters. The rows of numbered ticket machines, the bulletin boards covered in forms, the neatly arranged plastic chairs—all the daytime order was still there. But in the dead of night, that tidiness felt sinister, like a stage set abandoned long after the audience had gone home.

  Lady Ma stopped in the center of the hall and brought her foot down in a heavy, singular stomp.

  It wasn't a loud sound, but the pressure—that sudden weight that tells the surrounding space Something is here—erupted from her petite frame, making the very air sag.

  "Where is the Garrison?" she demanded.

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  The moment the words left her lips, a crisp metallic clang echoed through the air, like weapons manifesting out of thin air. A squad of soldiers in rusted armor rose from the marble floor, smoke coalescing into human shapes. Each carried an aura of freezing decay; their armor was from an era I couldn't name, but the wear and tear suggested they’d been standing watch for an eternity.

  The lead soldier dropped to one knee, the rasp of his plate mail echoing in the cavernous lobby.

  "Lin Zai-he, Captain of the 16th Garrison Detachment of the Fengdu Inner Gate, at your service, General Ma!"

  Then, his gaze drifted toward me.

  It flickered, lingered for a second, and then instantly curdled into fury. He slammed his spear against the floor—a resonant clang that made my heart skip a beat.

  "Who goes there! A living thing of the Yang realm, daring to tread here without a permit? The boundary is set—begone at once!"

  With a synchronized shink, a dozen spears leveled at my throat. The stench of rusted iron and deathly cold lunged at me. I didn't dare breathe; I was terrified that even swallowing would push my throat against those jagged tips.

  Lady Ma rolled her eyes in annoyance. She reached into her sailor suit sleeve and pulled a scroll of yellowed silk from some pocket dimension, tossing it over.

  "Orders from Upstairs," she said flatly.

  Lin Zai-he caught the scroll with suspicion, unrolling it to read.

  As he scanned the first few lines, his bruised-purple face contorted into an expression I’d never seen—not anger, not defiance, but genuine, bone-deep shock at something that shouldn't exist. He looked back at me, his eyes filled with a mix of absurdity, confusion, and raw disbelief.

  "This... this isn't some joke at my expense, is it?" His voice dropped an octave, as if he didn't want the others to overhear. "Assigning this living soul as a candidate for the Underworld Inspectorate? This is preposterous—"

  "Huh?"

  My mouth moved before my brain did.

  I’d been to this Household Registration Office before.

  It was over a year ago, when I came to process my mother’s death certificate. I’d sat at Window 3 for nearly an hour, listening to the electronic chirp of the ticket machine, filling out a form I barely understood. In one of the blank boxes, I’d written the word: "DECEASED."

  I remembered it clearly. The elevators here only went up.

  That day, after I wrote "Deceased," I stood up, pushed my chair back, and walked out. No one asked if I was okay.

  But now, I was in this same elevator, and we’d been descending for a full ten minutes. The floor numbers on the display had vanished, replaced by a flickering stream of red Sanskrit characters like corrupted code. Every few seconds, the characters shifted, and the fluorescent lights on the elevator walls hummed and flickered like a dying breath.

  "This... we’re literally taking the elevator to Hell, aren't we?"

  I looked at my reflection in the mirror—pale as a ghost, nearly matching the girl standing next to me.

  She stood beside me, her lips curling into a smile I could only describe as "predatory." Those inorganic gray pupils tracked the flickering red Sanskrit characters with the chilling calm of a trapper watching a rat step into a snap-trap.

  "You guessed right," she said.

  The Underworld.

  She dropped those two words as casually as if she were announcing the next subway stop.

  I made a face that actually forced her into a three-second silence.

  Apparently deciding that watching me twitch wasn't providing any further tactical advantage, she dropped the theater and adopted the tone of a drill sergeant dealing with a particularly dim-witted recruit.

  "I’ll give you the rundown," she said, her patience clearly on a hair-trigger. "Save me the trouble of looking at your miserable face all day. It’s killing my appetite."

  She turned, crossing her arms against the mirrored wall. "You know how the realms of the Living and the Dead are separated?"

  I shook my head like a bobblehead on a bumpy road.

  "In terms you humans prefer—they’re parallel worlds in different dimensions. The gap between them? We call that the 'Pipe'." She paused. "Remember what you saw after you rode through that tunnel?"

  I remembered. I’d never forget it—the white gravel, the faceless pedestrians, the oversaturated red of blood hitting the pavement, and that rider’s hollow stare.

  "Everything you saw that day, aside from the Golden Rooster Mountain and the Pavilion of Regret—all that twisted crap belongs to the interior of the Pipe." Lady Ma’s voice was flat, like she was reciting a report she’d memorized a thousand times. "But technically, the Pipe is still part of the Living Realm's domain. Reapers usually don't go there."

  "No way," I blurted out. "That place... you call that the Living Realm?"

  "That’s why it’s a System Bug." Her gaze lingered on my face, carrying a trace of pity she probably didn't even realize was there. "Because of spatial overlap, the skin of your world peeled back, exposing the Pipe structure underneath. That mess has always been rig