Letters From Myself, Getting Angrier

Synopsis

At the Goldmoss Post-house on the imperial Salt Road, letters move by magic-stamped relay, and a ghost-stamped envelope can arrive before it was sent. Pae Soyeon, a broke backwater clerk supporting her siblings, knows the relay clauses better than anyone: she cannot refuse ghost-mail, she cannot answer it, and if she leaves her post her brother's debt-bond is forfeit. Then a letter arrives in her own handwriting, dated four months in the future: Stop reading the magistrate's mail. Each week, future-Soyeon writes again, angrier and more specific, naming crimes present-Soyeon has not yet committed, men she has not yet met, and children who have not yet died. As Soyeon investigates the magistrate's son, the courteous watch captain, and her own forged stamps on a caravan manifest, she realizes someone has been using her clerkship to launder atrocities through the relay. But the woman who already solved the mystery has chosen a simpler fix: come back on the new moon and kill herself before she becomes herself.

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