“He burns it in front of them and adds the attempt to the file.”
A Ink immortal of Diyu
3 known connections · an open question
Judge Cui, the underworld's chief magistrate: brush, ledger, and a memory for every soul's file. In life he was a Tang official famous for never sleeping; in death Yanluo hired him for exactly that reason. Souls try to bribe him with paper money. He burns it in front of them and adds the attempt to the file.
He is awake right now — he is always awake — reading a file by lamplight while the Fifth Court sleeps. The file is thick. The verdict is already written. He is reading it anyway, because that is the job.
When the last file is closed and the last verdict entered, Judge Cui will finally sleep — the first sleep since the Tang dynasty — and the underworld will hold its breath so as not to wake him. He has earned it. The files say so. He wrote that part himself.
“Judge Cui was auditing the ledgers of the Fifth Court when he found it: a page torn clean out, the stub yellowed darker than the pages around it — older than the binding, older than the court. The file it belonged to is complete without it. That is what troubles him. A ledger does not tear out a page it never needed.”
The chief magistrate found a page torn out — and the stub is older than the book.
“Every soul's file begins at the First Court, and every file but one begins with a name. The registry's first page — the one before the first name, the one the clerks turn past without looking — is blank the way a tablet is blank when the name was never carved. King Qinguang reads it every century, just to be sure. It is still blank. He reads it anyway.”
The registry's first page is blank. Not empty — blank.
“He drinks with scholars — it's tradition, it's in the job description. Last Ghost Festival he was seen at a wine shop, deep in conversation, toasting and laughing, across the table from an empty stool. Asked about it later, he said the scholar made excellent points. Judge Cui checked the registers. No scholar died that night. Zhong Kui has not explained. He has not stopped going to the wine shop.”
Zhong Kui drank with a scholar who wasn't there.
The ten Yama kings, the Black and White Impermanence, Judge Cui with his brush, Meng Po with her soup of forgetting. Justice here is thorough, the paperwork is eternal, and the bridge out is narrower than you remember.
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