215: Chapter 216 Even the death of someone without a profession cannot be omitted from the world's list.

When the line of text on the gray gate lit up, A-Lu's hand clenched tightly around his birth page.

[Record Database for Deaths and Disappearances of Those Without Occupations]

[Large Number of Records Unconfirmed]

[Request: When a person without an occupation dies, can their name also be left behind?]

He looked at the gate, his face pale as paper.

"My grandmother... could she be inside?"

No one could answer him.

Because no one knew what was behind the gate.

Lin Jin crouched down and smoothed out the no-occupation birth page in A-Lu's hand.

"Let's get this straight first."

"Going in to look doesn't mean she is already dead."

A-Lu looked up.

"But the gate says death."

"It also says disappearance."

Lin Jin pointed at those words.

"Death is death."

"Disappearance is disappearance."

"Unknown is unknown."

"Not being able to find someone doesn't mean they are dead."

"Even if they are dead, you can't just write 'one person without an occupation'."

A-Lu's eyes turned red, but he nodded vigorously.

The gray gate opened slowly.

There was no wind behind the gate.

No crying sounds.

Nor was there the mountain of corpses and sea of blood he had imagined.

There were only rows upon rows of even older cabinets.

The cabinets were very low, as if those responsible for registration back then had never intended for these Records to be looked at for long.

Each cabinet had a faded label stuck to it.

[Temporary Storage for Remains of Those Without Occupations]

[Report of Disappearance of Those Without Occupations]

[Paper Death Certificates Cannot Be Integrated]

[Kin Search Failed]

[Unable to Issue Pension Due to Lack of Occupation ID]

[No System Page, Not Included in Population Changes]

At the very back, there was a wall.

The wall was densely covered with names.

Some were full names.

Some only had nicknames.

Some were "Uncle Wang," "The old woman selling medicine at Donghe Bridge," or "The old man missing two fingers on his left hand."

And many more were strings of descriptions that had never been officially acknowledged.

[Woman wearing blue cloth shoes]

[Old man carrying a medicine bag]

[Mute who knows how to mend nets]

[Grandmother taking care of a child under Donghe Bridge]

A-Lu suddenly froze.

He stared at that last line, his lips trembling.

"Donghe Bridge..."

Lin Jin's hand gently pressed onto his shoulder.

"It's still just a description."

"It needs verification."

But A-Lu had already rushed over.

He stood on tiptoe to touch that piece of paper.

The paper was very thin, its edges brittle, as if it would shatter at a touch.

It read:

[Report of Disappearance of Those Without Occupations]

[Subject: Suspected female, elderly, often takes care of a young boy under Donghe Bridge]

[Last seen: Heading to the West Street medicine exchange point]

[Reporter: Hot soup stall owner]

[Processing result: No occupation ID, unable to search across districts]

[Status: Unprocessed]

A-Lu looked at the three words [Unprocessed], and he was stunned.

"What does 'unprocessed' mean?"

No one spoke.

He asked again, his voice even softer.

"Is it that... no one looked?"

Luo Wensheng lowered his head, his pen tip pausing on the paper for a moment.

Ye Guizhou gripped the chipped seal, the veins on the back of his hand bulging.

He Zhibai opened the ledger but hesitated to write.

Because this was not an error notification.

This was a long-overdue debt.

Lin Jin looked up at the wall full of Records, his voice turning cold.

"It's not that no one looked."

"Someone did look."

"The reporter looked."

"The child waited."

"But the system didn't give them a path to continue the search."

Deep inside the gray gate, the underlying system popped up processing suggestions.

[Large number of Records of deaths and disappearances of those without occupations are incomplete]

[Suggestion: Batch archive based on historical extinction]

[Advantage: Reduce unconfirmed population gap, stabilize public resource statistics]

Chen Ye punched the cabinet beside him.

"Damn it, you're still complaining that they're taking up space in the ledger?"

The cabinet vibrated from the impact, and a stack of old papers fell out.

The papers were full of similar sentences.

[Death cannot be confirmed, death certificate not issued]

[Survival cannot be confirmed, assistance quota not issued]

[Kin cannot be confirmed, search not granted]

[No occupation ID, unable to enter the system]

Being alive doesn't count as living.

Being dead doesn't count as dead.

Being missing doesn't count as missing.

They were like a group of people caught in the crack of the door by the world; they didn't even have the official qualification to disappear.

Lin Jin looked at the line [Batch Archive].

"Batch archiving means changing 'unknown' to 'death'."

The system replied:

[Historical span is too long, presumed death conforms to statistical efficiency]

"Statistical efficiency cannot collect bodies for people."

Fang Ning's voice connected from First Hospital.

She also began synchronizing the Records of deaths of those without occupations, her voice suppressing anger:

"There must be conditions for confirming death."

"Remains, witness, medical Records, scene Records, kin confirmation, long-term disappearance procedures."

"Without conditions, it can only be missing or unknown."

"You cannot write people off as dead just to save hospital beds, save food, and save on search efforts."

Ye Guizhou applied the seal.

[Unknown received]

[Death cannot be presumed]

Luo Wensheng recorded:

[Death Records, disappearance Records, and unknown Records should be listed separately and must not be substituted for one another in batches.]

He Zhibai finally put pen to paper.

[The costs of searching, announcing, verifying, reissuing certificates, pensions, and accountability arising from unconfirmed persons shall be entered into the public ledger.]

[Their right to be confirmed shall not be cancelled due to high costs.]

Golden light shimmered inside the gray gate.

[If not batch archived, it will cause a large resource gap]

Lin Jin said coldly:

"Write down the gap too."

"When they were alive, you used 'No ID' to omit them."

"Now that they are dead or missing, you want to use 'incomplete data' to omit them again?"

"Not this time."

He inserted the new tool into the definition gap beside the gray gate.

Teacher Xu Wenzhou raised 002.

That golden-gray definition line emerged.

[No occupation and long-term unregistered = historical extinction]

The six slots of the new tool lit up.

Chen Ye bore the pressure, Shen Tingxue cooled, Zhou Heng conducted energy, Luo Wensheng recorded, Ye Guizhou handled the handover, and He Zhibai verified.

Lin Jin looked up.

"Cut."

002 fell.

Crack!

The definition line snapped, and the rows of old papers in the cabinets flipped open simultaneously.

A new gray-white process emerged.

[Processing Procedure for Deaths and Disappearances of Those Without Occupations]

[1. Death confirmation: Clear evidence required; cannot be presumed solely based on no occupation ID, long-term non-registration, poverty, or loss of contact]

[2. Disappearance registration: Can be submitted by kin, neighbors, temporary caregivers, local paper Records, or materials left behind by the person]

[3. Unknown status: Must be retained, cannot be batch converted to death]

[4. Unnamed remains: Description page, location page, and item page should be established; can be claimed later]

[5. Death page: Not predicated on occupation; a pending verification page can be established even if the name is incomplete]

[6. Search and confirmation costs enter the public ledger]

Many small lights suddenly lit up deep inside the gray gate.

It was as if those names that had originally been stuffed in the cabinets had finally waited for a bit of light.

A-Lu was still staring at that [Grandmother taking care of a child under Donghe Bridge].

He asked in a low voice:

"Then what is she now?"

Lin Jin looked at the paper.

"Missing."

A-Lu's lips trembled.

"Not dead?"

"No."

"And not necessarily alive either?"

"No."

A-Lu's tears fell.

This answer was not comforting at all.

But it was real.

He finally didn't have to be forced to choose a fake answer between "she is dead" and "she will definitely come back."

Fang Ning connected to the West Street old medicine exchange point to search.

Nanling Hospital retrieved paper prescription lists.

The Hai City convoy rummaged through transportation Records from twenty years ago.

Someone in Beiyuan Mining Area said they had seen an elderly person without an occupation changing medicine for a child, who later caught a grain truck heading south.

The clues were intermittent.

Chaotic.

Incomplete.

But for the first time, it wasn't rejected by the system.

Ye Guizhou stamped that Record for A-Lu.

[A-Lu's grandmother's disappearance registration received]

[Status: Pending investigation]

[Cannot be converted to death]

[Cannot close search]

A-Lu hugged the stamped disappearance page to his chest.

He cried very softly.

It wasn't a crying of breakdown.

It was more like finally being able to hold a person back from the air, just a little bit.

The Records inside the gray gate were increasingly being categorized.

Some confirmed as dead.

Some registered as missing.

Some had death pages reissued to people without names under their tombstones.

Some had description pages for unnamed remains established.

Some were changed to [Previously erroneously presumed dead, needs re-investigation].

Various places also began sending information back.

Qinghe County found a mass grave for people without occupations; the tombstone had originally only been engraved with "Twenty-three people without pages."

Teacher Song Qing brought students to copy out the names that could be confirmed one by one.

For those that couldn't be confirmed, she wrote first:

[Unnamed Person One, buried on the north slope of Qinghe County, brass-colored clothing buttons, suspected female]

Hai City discovered a batch of shipwreck Records; back then, because the crew had no occupation badges, they were not included in the rescue statistics.

Intern Liang Yu posted on the pier wall:

[Missing does not equal illegal immigration, does not equal invalid population.]

Beiyuan Mining Area dug out old ledgers of mining disasters.

Old Miner saw a line [Three temporary workers without occupations, not counted in official casualties] and was so angry he couldn't speak for a long time.

Finally, he used mine dust to black out the two words "not counted," and added:

[Three dead, names pending investigation, mining area owes a debt.]

work order no. 002 began to become heavy.

Not the kind of heavy from a pressure gauge.

But with every additional page, people knew more clearly just how many people this world had omitted in the past.

Chen Ye's eyes turned red watching this.

"How can this debt be repaid?"

He Zhibai did not look up.

"Don't think about paying it all off yet."

"Just don't tear up the ledger again."

Just as the process for deaths and disappearances of those without occupations was gradually stabilizing, the very last cabinet deep inside the gray gate suddenly opened.

There was no paper in the cabinet.

Only an old-fashioned tape recorder.

The shell of the tape recorder was polished shiny, as if it had been repeatedly touched by many people.

The button popped up on its own.

After a rustling sound, an old woman's voice rang out.

"If anyone hears this, please help me tell A-Lu."

A-Lu looked up abruptly.

His face drained of color all at once.

In the recording, the old woman coughed for a long time.

"Grandma didn't abandon you."

"The West Street medicine exchange point closed, so I walked south, wanting to find medicine for you."

"They said without an occupation ID, I couldn't pass the checkpoint."

"So I just waited in the bridge tunnel."

"If I don't go back..."

The voice paused.

As if she was in too much pain to continue at that time.

"Don't choose an occupation you don't want just to find me."

"You grow up first."

"You eat first."

"You remember first, you are not unwanted just because you don't have an occupation page."

A-Lu stood there, motionless.

The tape recorder continued to rustle.

"My name is He Chunlian."

"I gave birth to a daughter, she left early."

"I raised a child, called A-Lu."

"I have no occupation."

"I have also been to this world."

When the last sentence fell, all the lights in the entire Record library lit up simultaneously.

The underlying system brought up a new page.

[He Chunlian]

[Occupation status: No occupation]

[Death status: Unconfirmed]

[Disappearance status: Established]

[Kin/Care relationship: A-Lu's caregiver]

[Voice left by person: Valid]

[Request: If confirmed dead, please do not write 'one old woman without an occupation']

A-Lu finally cried out loud.

He hugged that tape recorder, crying until he couldn't stand.

Lin Jin did not help him up.

Let him cry.

This was not a malfunction that needed to be fixed immediately.

This was a child finally finding a name he could call out.

The gray gate's rewrite emerged.

[Non-occupation Record pages can be established for the death, disappearance, and unknown status of those without occupations.]

[Death does not require occupation proof, disappearance does not require occupation proof, and having been to this world does not require occupation proof.]

[Unknown status cannot be batch converted to death; unnamed status cannot be invalidated; care relationships cannot be invalidated due to no occupation ID.]

[The public system shall not omit population, death, disappearance, and searching on the grounds of insufficient resources.]

Before everyone could catch their breath, the tape recorder suddenly made a rustling sound again.

This time, it was not He Chunlian's voice.

It was the noise left by many, many people without occupations.

Mixed in it was a man's extremely low warning:

"Don't just look for dead people."

"There is another batch of people who, after being judged as dead by the system, were actually sent to——"

The recording cut off abruptly.

A black transfer order popped up at the very bottom of the gray gate.

[Transfer Record of personnel presumed dead without occupations]

[Destination: No. 0 Occupation Blank Zone]

[Status: Locked]

[Note: Used to store population not suitable for inclusion in the occupation world]

Cheng Du sat up straight abruptly in the Mainframe, his face even uglier than before.

"No. 0?"

Lin Jin looked up.

Behind the gray gate, the ground slowly cracked open a new passage.

At the end of the passage came the sound of many people's rhythmic and numb breathing.

It was as if a city without occupations, without names, and without death certificates was waking up underground.