Underworld Taoist

My name is Lin Xuanming. I was born on the Ghost Festival, and I was cursed with Yin-Yang Eyes from birth.

To give me a chance at a normal life, my parents begged my second uncle, a Taoist priest who had returned to secular life, to seal my eyes using a forbidden art. For twenty years, I believed I was just an ordinary young man hauling bricks at construction sites.

That all changed the day I headed to the city with everything I owned. A hundred-yuan note turned into ghost money meant to claim my life at midnight. A female ghost with only half a face cried in my dreams night after night, demanding to know why I had taken her money.

Terrified out of my wits, I desperately sought help wherever I could, only to be swindled out of a hundred yuan in passage money by a fortune-teller under a bridge, who gave me a useless paper talisman in return. With the ghost about to drag me into an endless abyss, I had no choice but to call my second uncle, whom I hadn't spoken to in a year. He reeked of booze, as usual.

“Uncle, save me! A ghost is trying to kill me!”

On the other end, my utterly unreliable uncle merely sighed. “You little brat. You never make things easy.”

From then on, I became a half-baked Taoist priest. By day, I rode along with delivery trucks at the freight depot. By night, I carried the peachwood sword my uncle had given me and was forced to enter a bizarre world of demons and ghosts I had never known existed.