After a high fever at fifteen, my right eye became a “yin-yang mirror.” In hospital corridors, I saw a blood-soaked man searching for his child. In an old alley, I met a woman in a Republican-era qipao counting six fingers. Then, at a haunted house, the qipao-clad ghost Su Wan rushed over and hid behind me, saying the underworld officials were coming to drag her off to hell to have her soul refined. When I used a peachwood sword to block the giant axes of Ox-Head and Horse-Face, my right eye suddenly throbbed. A secret of the underworld appeared in my vision: the Judge was tampering with the Book of Life and Death, and the King of Hell was turning a blind eye to corruption. And these eyes of mine were actually the Eyes of the King of Hell, capable of judging the underworld. Now I have to take her across the Bridge of Helplessness and fight the Black Impermanence King. But just as victory seems within reach, she asks with red-rimmed eyes, “A Chen, what if I don’t reincarnate? Can I stay by your side as your guardian spirit?”
