Ma Qianle awoke gradually, as if from a normal night of normal sleep. There was no pounding headache, no tightness in his chest to hint at his sudden dizziness and fall into the water. He found himself in a room that was...also surprisingly normal. A simple bed, a small table holding a lamp, a glass of water by the bedside... It just wasn't the hospital room he expected to wake up in.
He rose from the bed and tried moving around a bit. Still no change, all systems normal. Examining himself, he found that he was still wearing the simple jeans, graphic tee, and sandals he had been wearing when he passed out, but his phone and everything else he'd had in his pockets was missing. Suspicious of the pure lack of anything to be suspicious about, he moved to the door of the small room and tried the doorknob experimentally. It moved easily, clearly not locked, and the door opened with a slight creak.
If the room he woke up in had been so averagely bland it was remarkable in and of itself, the room outside the door more than made up for it in strangeness. It looked like some sort of waiting room, if you took a waiting room and an ancient palace and mixed them up in a cocktail shaker. The structure of the room itself was clearly an old fashioned building, with carved panels and paper in the windows, but there was also a drop-tile ceiling overhead. A mix of uncomfortable barely-cushioned metal frame chairs and handsome wooden couches with jade insets lined the walls, and a pile of thumbed-through magazines written in traditional characters sat on a low table that was covered with a fine brocade cloth. There were several more doors like the one he had come out of, and at one end of the room was a desk atop which sat a brush and inkstone, a computer, and a name plate reading Lei Guanting. Behind the desk sat an average looking man dressed like a shop clerk from an ancient tv drama.
At the sound of the door opening, the man looked up and smiled in a friendly but perfunctory manner. "Mr Ma, you're awake, please have a seat," he said, indicating a chair placed in front of his desk.
Ma Qianle hesitated, but seeing that the man — Lei Guanting, he supposed — didn't seem to be particularly threatening, he sat down warily. At least the chair seemed to be one of the more comfortable, if formal, ones in the room. "Mr Lei, how did you know my name?" he asked, still somewhat suspicious and, if he was being honest, a bit disoriented by the whole situation.
Lei Guanting's superficial smile turned a bit more genuine. "Oh-ho, one of the interesting questions! Usually people ask the boring ones first — where am I, who are you, how did I get here…"
"That doesn't answer my question," Ma Qianle said a bit tersely. "...although it does raise several more I'd also like to know the answer to."
"All in due time, Mr Ma," the man across the desk replied. "We're currently in one of the offices of Diyu, the Mortal Realm Liaison Office to be precise. My name is Lei Guanting, I'm currently in charge of the office. As for your name, we have it in our records. Everyone's is, actually." 'As if that doesn't sound ominous at all,' Ma Qianle thought.
'Wait, did he say Diyu?' Ma Qianle felt his heart speed up and the bottom drop out of his stomach. Diyu. The underworld. Hell. His mind jumped quickly from one word to the next, and making a conclusion, he spoke. "So, if I'm here, I'm dead then?"
Lei Guanting shook his head. "No. Well, yes. Sort of? You're certainly not dead, but you're not precisely fully alive anymore either." Seeing Ma Qianle's half panicked, half baffled expression, he stood slightly and patted the back of one of the hands resting on the arm of the chair comfortingly. "Look, the important thing is that your friends pulled you out of the lake not long after you fell in. You'll be in the hospital for a few days, but that's all. No lasting harm done."
Ma Qianle wasn't really comforted by this, but he appreciated the effort. As steady as his hands and voice may have been, inside he was feeling completely untethered. "So if I'm not actually dead, what am I doing in the underworld? And where's all the other stuff people talk about? The river, the bridge, the lady with the soup?"
"Those are in a different area. Souls only appear there once they die fully and enter the cycle of reincarnation. You may see them a few times later on in the course of your work but for now there's no need," Lei Guanting replied without batting an eyelash, as if these were questions he answered every day. For all Ma Qianle knew, they were. "You're here because Dongqiu City is in need of a new mortal agent. The Keeper felt that your temperament was well suited to the position, so we pulled you into the office to take care of the formalities."
Qianhe felt like every question he asked just raised three more instead of answering anything. "The Keeper? And what the hell is a 'mortal agent'?"
"Keepers are a sort of guardian spirit of the land. The Heavenly Court appoints one for each district. They don't usually have much to do with our department, but we work with them in some special circumstances like this one. Mortal agents act as a link between the mortal realm and the realm of the dead. Most situations we can handle just fine on our own, but occasionally we need a mortal contact to assist in dealing with one situation or another. The last mortal agent for Dongqiu City recently entered the cycle of reincarnation, so the Keeper, that is, Ruan Ye, was on the lookout for a new one."
'Ruan Ye! That asshole, first he tosses me in the lake and then he saddles me with a job I didn't ask for!' Ma Qianle thought. At the same time, alarm bells rang in his mind. If his predecessor was dead, did it have anything to do with their position? Half dreading the answer, he asked, "That last mortal agent, how did they die?"
Lei Guanting looked over to the computer monitor and tapped a query on his keyboard. "Looks like...kidney failure. Age of 96. Why, is that important?"
'Of course it's important!' Ma Qianle sighed and rubbed his temples with one hand, beginning to reassess that "headache" situation from earlier. "I feel like I don't really have much choice in this matter, do I?"
This earned him a sympathetic smile. "No, unfortunately. I must say though, you're taking this remarkably calmly compared to many. Keeper Ruan has good judgement." Ma Qianle grimaced hearing that name again, and Lei Guanting continued. "If it makes you feel any better, some mortal agents go their entire lives without needing to intervene. There are perks to the position, as well. You'll be more resilient, especially against yin and demonic energies, and you'll get some preferential treatment once you reach the end of this lifetime. We simply feel that it's better to bring our new associates here to explain everything rather than surprise them when they're needed in the mortal realm."
"I...see," Ma Qianle replied. He had a thousand more questions echoing in his head, but he felt overwhelmed enough as it was with the current situation, so he decided not to voice them for the time being. "Was there anything else I needed to do?"
Lei Guanting pulled a small but delicately carved wooden tablet and a dish of seal paste from a drawer and, taking up his brush, wrote something on the tablet in an elegant but completely illegible cursive script. He offered the tablet and the seal paste to Ma Qianle, and said, "Mark your thumbprint here, please," indicating the open space below the writing. Ma Qianle resignedly did as asked and returned the tablet to the man seated across from him. Lei Guanting printed a seal over the thumbprint and, though it wasn't inked, it left a black mark as if burned in. At the same time, Ma Qianle felt a wave of intense heat fly over his skin and vanish just as quickly, originating from the thumb he had used.
"That's all we need from you today, I know this is all a lot to take in. One of our people will contact you for training once you've settled back in the mortal realm." Lei Guanting handed the tablet to Ma Qianle. "Think of this as an ID card. It's bound to you, so you shouldn't need to worry about losing or breaking it. You can leave directly through the front door if you like, but most find it more comfortable to return to their rooms the first time they come here."
"Uhh...ok," Ma Qianle said, taking the tablet and slipping it into his pocket. "I'll go back then." He stood, gave a polite farewell, and returned to the room he initially woke up in.
What had previously seemed bland and utterly mundane was now comfortingly normal in the wake of the bizarre conversation he had just had. He took the glass of water from the bedside and chugged it, then slammed it back down on the table and sat heavily on the bed. 'What. The. FUCK!' he thought, head in hands, then yawned as a wave of sleepiness passed through him. "Forget it. I'm so exhausted right now, I can't think clearly. I'll deal with it when I wake up.' With this, he lay back down on the bed and, for the second time in a short while, swiftly fell into a deep unconsciousness.
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