My name is Lin Qi. I’m the “Medicine Yama” of the Lin family, one of the “Eastern Ancient Bloodlines,” and the most rebellious assassin of my generation. While my peers still relied on ancient recipes and the proper timing and flow of energy to kill without a trace, I used sniper scopes, daggers, and all kinds of modern electronic equipment.
Then one day, the Southern, Western, and Northern families all sent me bizarre “invitations” at the same time: three finger bones preserved in formalin. The patterns carved into them were shockingly similar to the “Blood Pact” totem that my Lin family had borne for generations. The DNA test results pointed coldly to my grandfather, Lin Huaishan, who had disappeared eighteen years ago.
The family admonition rang in my ears: “When the pattern appears, the ‘treatment’ begins.” The last place my grandfather disappeared was the Sacred Heart Psychiatric Sanatorium, a place that had long since been erased from the map. I knew there was no escaping it.
I brought along Fatty, our logistics man and an expert in modern technology. The family also sent Old Dao, a traditional master who spoke in underworld slang and used strange techniques. At midnight, we entered the ruins of the abandoned sanatorium. Space defied the blueprints, time flowed strangely, and medical instruments displayed impossible readings.
All my technological equipment failed one piece after another. We weren’t on an assassination mission. We had been dragged into a living “lesion” made of flesh and contracts, forced to undergo a “treatment” that had been going on for half a century.
“We aren’t killing anyone. We’re paying off the debt our family bloodline owes to an ancient being.”
This story is entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental.
