While working the night shift at the funeral home, I watched my sister’s corpse develop livor mortis all over again.
Blood suddenly streamed from my right eye. In my black-and-white vision, forty-nine blood-red gates appeared: a death omen from the Afterlife Inn.
The cinnabar mark on the back of my hand burned. The train to the Yellow Springs had pulled into the station.
Embroidered wedding shoes from a haunted house chased me, and when the talisman paper burned away, my sister’s birth details were sealed inside the urn of ashes.
The Gatekeeper’s yin-yang eyes could see the signs of death, but not the truth behind her willingness to tear out her own heart as an offering.
When an ancient Yin Chi gnawed through the chains of the Yellow Springs and sought to reopen hell on earth, I crushed the bloodstained scraps of the Book of Life and Death: either let ten million vengeful ghosts tear these yin-yang eyes to shreds, or forge my sister’s resentful spirit into a coffin-sealing nail with my own hands…
