The Nine-Day Corridor

When Shen Yu woke up, his name was no longer on him. The Nine-Day Corridor, twenty-six people who have lost their names, one candle flame each. While the flame burns, the person lives; when the flame goes out, the name is struck, and the person is considered gone. When the sundial completes nine marks, one round of the corridor ends; for those who cannot reach the end, their names are struck from the register first. There is no system here, no rebirth, no one born with an extra life. The rules are written on the wall, the accounts recorded in the register: every deposit, every debt, every transaction—someone records it, there is evidence to check, and one wrong entry means a batch of deaths. The auditors do not rely on luck. Time point against time point, entry against entry, handler against handler—if all three match, the rules must be acknowledged; if even one does not match, someone has tampered with the accounts. And auditing is not free: every question asked, every entry retrieved, comes at a price. Others enter the corridor relying on sheer luck; Shen Yu's team relies on auditing. Page by page they flip through old registers, entry by entry they verify name accounts, correcting wrong entries on the spot—questions asked must have answers, and debts owed must be paid by someone. Four volumes of the corridor, one master ledger. Except for one entry Shen Yu can never reconcile: his name—who, on what day, through whose hands, deposited it into this ledger? In the handler column of that page, there is only a mark. The name column is blank. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: The Nine-Day Corridor — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠