In the seventh year of the Republic of China, the Yellow River changed its course and a bronze coffin emerged from the mud. There are nine chi dragons carved on the coffin, and the holes for eighteen dragon eyes are empty. My grandfather was a river worker. He secretly hid a dragon's eye. From then on, the Li family had to bear a debt - on every first and fifteenth day of the lunar month, a live chicken must be thrown into the Yellow River. If one was missing, the river god would come and collect it.
This rule has been passed down for three generations. My father passed it on to me. When I was eighteen years old, my grandfather grabbed my hand before he died and said, "It's your turn."
But it was only after I threw the first chicken that I realized that the dragon eye my grandpa had hidden back then was fake. The real one, he said, was on me. I couldn't find it or touch it, but the woman in red robe at the bottom of the river had been waiting for me for eighteen years.
A shadowless old man handed me a willow stick and said that I could find the answer by jumping into the Yellow River. Her eyes were still at the bottom of the river, and also the things that my grandfather had hidden all his life were still there.
I jumped.
The water in the Yellow River is murky, and things underneath are even more chaotic than in the world of the underworld.
