The Eyes of the Unborn

The Fetal Eye

Thirty-seven-year-old Hong Liu lies in a hospital bed, her body reduced to just thirty-one kilograms, like a sheet of paper torn apart by the wind. A black tumor the size of a fist bulges from her navel. The doctors say it is an unprecedented illness and tell her to prepare for the end.

Her life has long been a wretched play. She was abandoned in a hospital restroom at birth, and a janitor who cleaned the toilets took her home. Just as she started middle school, she lost the only person she could rely on. From that day on, she would always see the student who had hanged himself years ago swaying beneath a parasol tree on stormy days. At night, she heard the footsteps of a boy who had killed himself in the dormitory building. During a flag-raising ceremony, she watched a falling flagpole crush a classmate. Even the moment her chemistry teacher jumped from a building became a nightmare that haunted only her. At fifteen, a motorcycle sent her flying. At eighteen, she broke her leg in a fall. It was as if misfortune had seeped into her very bones.

Only when the lights in her hospital room begin flickering all night, her adoptive mother’s familiar voice calls from outside the door, and the tumor in her navel suddenly grows hot does she realize that what she saw all those years was no illusion. The “tumor” that will take her life is actually an eye hidden in the womb. And the hospital that has pronounced her sentence is crawling with supernatural horrors deeper and darker than anything she has ever seen…