The Nightmare's Hand

When he was eight, he got lost in a banana plantation for three days.

Everyone thought he had simply wandered off.

Only he knew that deep within those dense green walls, he had seen something he was never meant to see: scarecrows dressed in modern clothes, faceless and screaming in silence.

One of the blue baseball caps belonged to him.

Now, at twenty-three, Xin Ning is a novice soul exorcist. He came to deal with the evil spirit in a dead man’s tattoo, but accidentally uncovered a secret three hundred years in the making: an ancient door forged from flesh and bone, a “Gatekeeper” trapped behind it and yearning for freedom, and a shocking lie about his own origins.

There are two souls inside him: his own and that of his twin brother, who died before they were born.

He was not born with two souls. He was “made” by his own flesh and blood to be a key that could choose for itself.

Open the door, and the world will fall into darkness. Close it, and he must sacrifice his entire soul.

And countless people before him have already made their choices: his senior sister betrayed their sect and became part of the door in a bid to revive her lover; his master, seeking atonement, forged his own remains into a blade capable of killing the Gatekeeper; and the thousands of sleepers trapped in their cocoons, whose bodies are long dead, became the bolts that hold shut the door that must never be opened.

From the swamp monster in the old cemetery south of the city to the Door of Memories at the bottom of Shangri-La Lake; from the illusion of “Thought” at White Stone Cliff to the withered tree covered in human cocoons in Guixu, Xin Ning steps deeper into the abyss, and with every step, he forces...