My Last Ninety-One Days

The day I transmigrated, a number appeared before my eyes: ninety-one. No one else could see it. It didn't glow, make a sound, or respond to touch—it just hovered a foot in front of me. I spent a night figuring out what it was—I can see the outcome of every choice, a three-second silent vision. The cost is that each time I look, that number decreases by one day. It's my remaining lifespan. So the place I'm in isn't called the cultivation world; it's called a ledger. Take this path, lose a day; take that one, lose three days; hesitate and do nothing, and you might die that very day. The steward ordered me to dump slag in the back mountain at midnight tonight. The ninth sect rule states: menial workers are not allowed within three li of the back mountain's medicinal garden, violators will have their legs broken. I'm a furnace washer; I know what's in that barrel of slag, and I know five people have died doing this job in three years. I looked at two paths. One was a single shoe left in the mud. The other was hanging from the archway, a wooden plaque on the chest with two words: Stealing Pills. I took neither. That year I was eighteen, full of illness and full of debts. That night I hid half a barrel of slag at the base of the wall, wrote the time and weight on the back of a small notebook, and went back to sleep. The next day I was alive. The number became eighty-eight. Only later did I realize that ledger wasn't mine. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: My Last Ninety-One Days — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠