The first time I sensed the will of death, I was seven years old.
It wasn't my own. It belonged to A Yuan, the old fisherman next door. He was crouched on a reef, mending a fishing net. The hemp rope had worn his fingers raw in several places, and blood seeped into the salt water, but he didn't seem to notice. I stood five meters away. The world looked different through my left and right eyes. My right eye saw a hunched old man. My left saw a mass of dark red light, heavy as a stone resting on the ocean floor, utterly still.
It was the will to accept one's fate. Heavier than sorrow, deeper than despair.
I didn't tell him what I saw. Everyone on the island said my left eye was cursed, that its strange color from birth let me see things I shouldn't. The year my mother died, the island chief drove my father away, saying he had brought bad luck. Later, my father disappeared too, leaving me alone in the run-down house he had left behind, living on the dried fish A Yuan occasionally brought me.
Lockchain Island was small. You could walk around the whole island in half an hour. The sea surrounded it on all sides, yet no ship was allowed to travel more than three nautical miles from shore. The World Government had erected a stone monument in the north of the island, engraved with the words: “Lockdown Order No. 713. This island is a controlled area. No one may enter or leave without permission.”
The monument had stood here for as many years as I had been alive.
That was how things remained until the day the white ship arrived.
I stood on the cliff, watching it slowly enter the harbor. The people on deck wore white robes and bubble helmets. As they walked, their toes pointed slightly upward, as if they didn't want to set foot on this land. In that instant, my left eye saw a kind of will I had never seen before
