My name is Chen Xiaogu. I’m a storyteller at a teahouse in Shanghai, blessed with the family-inherited “Yin-Yang Eyes,” which let me see through people’s hearts. The day the Japanese occupied the foreign concession, I told an anti-Japanese joke at the teahouse, and a traitor in the audience fixed me with murderous eyes. That night, while collecting bodies in an alley, I noticed that the tongue of a starved corpse had turned blue. Cyanide had killed him; this was no ordinary death by starvation. I rescued a mysterious woman named Liu Hanzhi, wounded by a bullet. She told me, “The poisonings are only the beginning of the Japanese devils’ ‘Underworld Plan.’ They intend to cut open a hundred thousand hearts and forge an evil artifact.” From then on, I passed information for her, hiding warnings in the rhymes of my storytelling: “When the moon is full over the Huangpu, ghostly fires chill the night; cut open the human heart, and calamity will follow...” The Japanese secret police pursued me like vengeful spirits, but my Yin-Yang Eyes saw through the lies and traps of Yingzuo Xiaohong. When a celebrated Shanghai performer suddenly blew herself up onstage, putting a hundred thousand spectators’ lives in peril, my eyes finally pierced the truth behind the ultimate evil art.
