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Elmer Cowper III rolls over in his Yale dorm bed at 2:50 a.m., and finally drops off to sleep, paper submitted to the professor. At 3:44 his breathing completes the switchover to requiring manual activation. He doesn't wake up. His roommate notices the smell of a slackened body letting everything in it go, when he gets up to pee at 6:15, but his initial diagnosis is bad alcohol-related decisions, which he really doesn't want to deal with. He won't realize it's a corpse till he gets back from his jog-breakfast-calc-world religions-library-lunch morning.
The rumor that if your roommate dies you get out of finals proves false.
Li Zouqing develops pyromania. She and sixteen other people who live in her factory worker housing die of smoke inhalation. The factory is cursorily investigated for its fire safety deficiencies but a bribe is cheaper than a retrofit and, unbeknownst to the relevant decisionmakers, the retrofit would not have helped in this case anyway.
Shekhar Hora drinks water. He keeps drinking water. At no point does it seem particularly odd to him or anyone else how much water he's drinking. It's a good idea to drink water when you're thirsty and it's a hot day. He drinks more water, even after the sun goes down and it cools off a bit. He keeps getting up at night to piss it all out and drink more water. On the second day his brother remarks that their water bill is going to be pretty high. Shekhar laughs. By the middle of the afternoon he's definitely under the weather. He goes and has a lie-down. He keeps drinking water, unable to lift his head for any other concern but that one. Before dinnertime arrives he has a seizure and dies.
Bei Reguo pulls onto the highway in her scooter and weaves through traffic, screaming inside her helmet, until someone hits her. Her family gets an insultingly small payout for wrongful death.
Carlos Rivera goes up to his neighbor's house and rings the doorbell and, without even saying hello, delivers a lurid confession about molesting the neighbor's three-year-old, in exacting detail about time and place and manner, until shock gives way to anger and his neighbor punches his face in. Carlos doesn't stop talking until he can't any more.
The three year old has no idea who Carlos is - was - and spent the entire period of time in question at Abuelita's, digging in the mud.
Sulastri is a field medic for dungeon victims. They don't have a lot of equipment - some days it's a stretch to have boiling water - but it's something. Today they have a Red Cross volunteer and his suitcaseful of supplies and she is very quiet, when she drinks the isopropyl alcohol.
Wang Hei hangs himself before the Gaokao, and it seems pretty normal, that someone would do that.
Raaida Jalali can't afford an ambulance. She'll bankrupt her whole family if she calls one. She can't afford the ER either, so she leaves all her documents at home to prevent them from billing her, and waits for the bus. The bus is late. After she collapses, tongue bitten and all over bruises from the falls and a few bones cracked in particularly serious spasms, it takes a while for anyone to be able to identify the body.
Lesedi Moloi provokes a brief panic about an Ebola outbreak, but they never find a trace of virus. It looks like it just happened all by itself.
Mislaine Noel makes it look like a boating accident. The people who own the boat are pretty mad about it.
Aritya Bose has just gotten away from her family and is starting her new job in the morning when she sleeps in. Her alarm clock gives up quickly enough that the neighbors don't barge in to silence it. The landlord finds her before she's technically dead, but she's been without water for days, and she gets to pass away in the hospital, never regaining consciousness.
