The White Affairs Officer's Notebook

Shen Bai, twenty-two years old, from Shen Family Village in Huaishui County, is the seventh generation of White Affairs Officers. The profession of White Affairs Officer is not part of the official system, not registered in the household records; it deals with matters in the village that cannot be brought to light: when someone calls your name at midnight, you must not answer; old wells and ancient wells must not be descended; locust trees where someone has hanged themselves must not be cut; the birth dates collected by the spirit medium must not be lost. The night his grandfather passed away, he pressed into his hand a thread-bound notebook. On the first page was written: If someone calls your full name at midnight, you must not answer. If you answer, your soul departs, and you die. Just after the first seventh day, the first person in the village to break the taboo went mad. Later, yellow paper appeared on the well platform at midnight, the spirit medium collected the eight characters of the villagers' birth dates for five yuan each, someone cried every night under the old locust tree, and paper-made white flowers appeared on the windowsill the next day. Shen Bai alone upholds the rules passed down through seven generations, taking on one case after another: whose family should hold a funeral, whose family should exorcise spirits, whose child was called by name at night, whose ancestral grave had its soil moved. But he gradually discovered that beneath these cases all runs the same thread: the missing corner of the character "Tang" in the notebook, the character "Tang" on the back of a copper coin, Zhu Zi who twenty years ago vanished without a trace, and the night when his grandfather sat alone by the well until dawn and came back to take up this profession. The rules protect people. But as they protect, those who keep the rules themselves become part of the rules. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: The White Affairs Officer's Notebook — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠