I’m a Grown Man, So How Did I Become a Midwife?

“You little pervert!”

Every time I peeked through a tear in the white curtain, the whole village cursed me!

Outside a rural delivery room in the 1960s, I huddled in a corner, fingertips trembling. The laboring woman's bloodcurdling screams pierced my ears, yet I had to keep my eyes fixed on the very instant the newborn arrived!

I wasn't a pervert. I was trying to stay alive!

I was born without crying, the murky breath in the womb blocking my heart meridians. Granny declared that without the innate pure breath released when a newborn entered the world, I wouldn't live to see twenty!

My only chance to survive was to seize that breath of life the moment a baby was born!

I was a voyeur by necessity, and the heir to a fated legacy!

My granny was a Yin midwife who walked between the worlds of the living and the dead:

She delivered the living, guided wandering spirits, guarded the earth's veins, and pacified mountain spirits!

And somehow I, a grown man, became her sole heir, wielding the Darksteel Shears that could slay demons and banish evil!

From then on:

In my left hand, the midwife's shears, preserving life's breath;

In my right, the Darksteel Blade, cutting down evil spirits between the worlds!

By day, I was the village's despised peeping tom. By night, I was a male midwife roaming between the living and the dead!

That life-sustaining breath was both a spark of life and a shackle, pinning me fast to a blood-red birthing bed at the boundary between worlds!