Beijing's holy hell

Law beyond life

As you'd expect from hell, most of the paperwork and procedures administrate what follows morality's inevitable conclusion.

The particularly unfortunate must deal with the Department of Implementing 15 Kinds of Violent Death - which include, but are not limited to, starvation; clubbing; dying in battle; animal attacks, floods; insanity; "falling into an abyss"; "tricks by evil people or ghosts"; disease; and suicide.

Essentially, mortality and its consequences are conceptualized as a series of legalistic formalities.

First, an office determines that the death that has occurred has in fact occurred. Another initially reviews their deeds.

These are evaluated by the Department of Measurements, which standardizes the quantification of good and evil acts, and rewards and punishments. (It also functions to remind living merchants not to rig their measurements to deceive buyers, lest they be subject to the aforementioned criteria after death or by penalty in the mortal realm.)

If the individual lived improperly, an indictment is filed, followed by a warrant, in which case law enforcement detains the soul for court.

Depending on how they're judged, the deceased are then assigned to damnation or reincarnation through the departments of Insect Birth, Water Birth (aquatic animals), Egg Birth (birds and reptiles) or Mammal Birth.

The most virtuous become either human in the next life or - if particularly righteous - officials in, and of, the afterlife.

Whichever way, it's a long and byzantine series of proceedings between dying and whatever follows.

Also, those who are deemed to have perished before their time due to suicide or accidents become poltergeists until processed by the Department of Unjust Death, which transfers them to the Department of Resurrection, which returns their souls to mortal bodies.

And, as if to put an exclamation point on hell's meta-bureaucratic configuration, hell has a Department of Hell inside it.