They call it progress, but I think it's just a different kind of haunting. Used to be, death meant silence. A cut cord. Now? It's a job title. A status. A service. The city hums with containment fields and breathes through frōs-clogged vents, it’s just life. Ghosts don’t float through walls whispering secrets. They clock in. They manage data, operate mech frames, whisper court testimonies through licensed mediums. Spirits run our power grids and clean our streets, all under contract. Death has become predictable, paperwork-laden, and privatized. You can buy a haunting now. Lease your body if you're tired of living in it. Get possessed for an hour if you're lonely—or for years if you’re desperate. The veil’s not thin anymore. It’s scheduled. What unsettles me most isn’t the dead—it’s how we’ve normalized them. Ghosts used to be memory, mystery. Now they’re relatives with opinions on your dating life, grandparents living rent-free in your bloodstream. Ancestral necromancy is just another inheritance strategy. You think you're the head of the household? Think again. There's a great-aunt three generations back whispering decisions into your sleep. The laws pretend to protect us—Phantom Scores, vessel compliance forms, consent clauses—but regulation only goes as far as it profits. There are spirits classified as “unstable” just for grieving too loud. And then there’s the NUN, the Necromacy Union Network—part regulator, part peacekeeper, part priesthood with guns. They say they’re here to protect the balance, but half of us think they’re just making sure no ghost gets too free, and no living person gets too curious. And still, people Step. They Step early, leaving their bodies behind while still healthy. Some say it’s for family reunion—more cousins dead than living, after all. Others do it for opportunity. The afterlife's got job openings and a lower cost of living. But there’s unrest beneath it all. A quiet, spectral resistance. I’ve seen it in the Cradle fights, in the pirated hauntcasts, in the daemons that merge spirit and flesh with no permission slips. There's a question hanging in the ectoplasmic air: If death is no longer the end, then what are we evolving toward? Maybe something’s waking up beneath all this containment and contract law. Maybe something’s tired of being harvested. Or maybe it’s just us—realizing that to be truly alive in a world this haunted, you have to fight for your breath, even if it's borrowed.