My name is Lin Xiaokui. I am a twenty-three-year-old, bottom-tier human-interest reporter pulling the night shifts in the deepest pockets of this concrete jungle. Obsessed with securing a son, my traditional, heavily patriarchal parents blundered their way through blind superstition, slapping the character "Kui"—from Zhong Kui, the ultimate demon queller between heaven and earth—flat onto a fragile little girl's destiny to usher in a brother and ward off evil. Because of this name, I was born cursed to hear the agonizing resentments and bitter cries of those who met a violent, sudden death. The software engineer who dropped dead in his cubicle at midnight; the dirt-poor student forced into a fatal crash by a relentless delivery platform algorithm; the solitary old grandmother who froze to death under heavy quilts, only for a pack of toxic relatives to scavenge over her five-million fortune once her body turned to bone; the older brother in a garment sweatshop pushed off a ledge by exorbitant dowries and an emotionally abusive family... The headlines of the living world have their limits, wiping away every trace of their existence. The corporate PR machines use hefty settlements to wash clean the bloodstains left behind. My chief editor told me: "Lin Xiaokui, journalism only cares about the cause of death, not who they were when they breathed. The regrets you write about? That's not news." If the living world refuses to let me write it, then I will carve it for the dead to see. At the very dead end of the darkest alleyway on Huai Shu Street, a dim, yellow emergency floodlight sways in the wind, illuminating a late-night noodle stand run by a silver-haired, comforting old woman. There, the tragic souls of the violently deceased gather to receive their absolute final meal on this earth. Grandma’s warm bowl of hand-rolled noodles serves to guide them home, washing away the terror and murderous rage clinging to their spirits. Meanwhile, the fountain pen in my hand serves to carve their headstones, etching every single shred of their dignity into the Guide’s Notebook dedicated strictly to the deceased, word by word. We are all the most ordinary of mortals, our power limited. Facing the freezing clauses of the Civil Code, the ironclad blind protocols of medical science, and the merciless fury of natural disasters, I cannot alter the raw heartbreaks of separation and death, nor can I stop the brutal, unfixable vacuums left behind by legal scripts. But my name is Lin Xiaokui. As long as I haven't collapsed, and as long as the pen in my hand hasn't snapped— The five-year supply of blood pressure medication you traded your life to buy? I will ride into the mountains and deliver it securely to your village. The entire ocean of sunflower sketches you poured your soul into, trampled underneath their boots at the bottom of a dumpster? I will tear it straight back from their filthy hands. The three secret chest-thumping heartbeat pings marking your unregretted final guard shift? I will thump them hard, directly against your mother's frozen, grieving heart! No one is perfect, and the aftermath of life is always caked in unyielding regret. But we are ordinary mortals, our power limited, and we try our damn best. Dawn has broken, and it is time for me to go run today's news. May this world of a thousand lanterns hold a little less winter frost, and a whole lot more hot broth.