Chapter 2: The Eye of the Nether Dragon

The sky had already brightened, the snow had stopped, and through the window, the world outside was draped in silver.

It seemed I’d had a nightmare. I let out a sigh of relief, though an unshakable sense of unease lingered in my heart.

“You’re just exhausted. Look at those dark circles. Go home and get some real sleep,” Zhou Renhe said, throwing on his white coat as he headed out.

My home was not far from the hospital, barely two kilometers away. It was a modest place—two bedrooms and two living rooms—left to me by my parents, who died young. Now, in the center of Linjiang City, where every inch of land was precious, it was worth several million.

I stepped into the bathroom, turned on the tap, and splashed my face with icy water, then looked up at myself in the mirror.

The face staring back was ashen, eyes lifeless, a pair of heavy black bags beneath them—a man ruined by excess. I frowned, the unease swelling inside me. With my natural constitution, I’d always felt invigorated after a night with a woman; yet after only a nightmare, how had my body deteriorated to such a state?

Remembering the final moments of that nightmare, I instinctively touched my neck.

Suddenly, my hand froze, my breath quickened. In the mirror, I saw five deep, bluish-black marks—fingerprints—on my neck.

“That wasn’t a dream. It was real. I… I really ran into a ghost…” I muttered, my body chilled to the bone. I glanced around in terror, afraid the ghostly woman would leap from some hidden corner.

I turned on the shower, and as the hot water cascaded over me, the cold finally began to ebb.

Yet as I washed, my hand paused on my chest.

Something was wrong. I’d always had a raised scar above my left breast—why was it gone?

Looking down, I felt as if my eyes were slashed with knives, a searing pain stabbing through them. Tears streamed down my face, but through them, the world seemed subtly changed.

Where the scar had been, there was now a strange, jet-black eye, smooth to the touch yet eerily alive.

I saw that from this bizarre eye, a thin thread stretched out, pulling toward the distance.

That direction—toward the hospital.

The heating was on inside the apartment. I sat on the sofa in my pajamas, idly flipping through TV channels with the remote.

After all the fear and shock, I found myself unnaturally calm.

I had never been able to remember how I’d gotten the scar on my chest. Every time I tried to recall, my head would throb as if being torn apart.

But just now, fragments of memory broke through the barrier, surfacing at last.

It was the early winter of ten years ago. I was twelve years old…

“This winter has come early,” said a middle-aged man with a thin mustache, dressed in a white coat, holding a thermos as he gazed at the first snow falling outside the clinic.

“Indeed. Why isn’t Xiao Feng back yet?” asked a beautiful woman in a nurse’s uniform, her poise striking.

“Mom, Dad, I’m home.” With my schoolbag on my back, I pushed open the clinic door, letting in a swirl of snow and cold wind.

My parents’ faces lit up with loving smiles—smiles that quickly froze, their gazes fixed behind me.

I turned to look, but saw nothing.

That night, half awake, I overheard my parents arguing and crept out of bed.

The door to their room was ajar, a thin sliver of light spilling out.

“No, absolutely not. We can’t turn back, but Xiao Feng still can. Isn’t everything we’ve done for him to live a normal life?” My mother’s voice was trembling.

“They’ve already found us. Even though we’ve… erased all traces… it won’t be more than ten years before they discover us. Rather than wait—” My father’s voice was taut, some words too muffled for me to catch.

“I won’t agree. If there’s no way out, I…”

“Don’t… I promise you, we’ll let Xiao Feng have a normal life. Even if it costs me everything.” As he spoke, my father placed a black wooden box into a hidden compartment beneath the bed.

The next day, while my parents were at the clinic, I opened the secret compartment and took out the box.

Inside was a black crystal, a black dagger, and a scroll of ancient text.

Curious, I took them out to examine, but before I could, my parents returned unexpectedly. In my panic, I tried to put everything back, but stumbled and fell—the dagger plunged into my chest.

As I slipped into unconsciousness, I heard my parents’ frantic cries.

A week later, I woke to find a scab where the dagger had pierced me. From then on, I could never remember exactly how I’d been hurt.

A year later, my parents left to purchase medicinal herbs out of town. Then came the news: their plane had crashed, nothing left behind.

I vowed to carry on their work, entering Linjiang Medical University at seventeen. Last year, I began my internship at Linjiang First People’s Hospital, and I’d been there ever since…

I jolted out of my memories, tears streaming down my face.

The bedroom remained just as it had been: an old cotton quilt on the bed, the bookshelf crammed with medical books, and on a black-lacquered cabinet, a family photo of the three of us.

“Dad, Mom, I’m sorry. You wanted me to live an ordinary life, but I don’t think I can anymore.” I picked up the frame, red-eyed, tracing their faces with my fingers, murmuring softly.

Then I lifted the bedboard, found the hidden compartment from my memory, and there it was—the black wooden box.

Opening it, I was surprised to find the black crystal and dagger missing; only the ancient scroll remained.

I picked up the scroll, unable to stop myself from sniffing at it. Whatever ink had been used, after all these years, it still exuded a faint fragrance.

“At the world’s beginning, there was yin and yang. Each has its art. Yang governs clarity and light, yin governs cold and darkness; support the yang to suppress the yin, support the yin to suppress the yang. Only when yin and yang are in harmony, and all things in balance, does the true way prevail.”

Reading the archaic script on the title page, an uncanny feeling welled up inside me.

Turning another page, the title emerged—The Grand Netherworld Arts of Yin and Yang.

I flipped through, page by page, as if stepping into a gateway to another realm.

Ghosts and demons, monstrous spirits, exotic herbs, geomantic layouts…

The book was a treasury of wonders.

Yet as I reached the section on cultivation, I sensed something missing.

After much thought, I slapped my thigh and muttered, “Support the yang to suppress the yin—that’s the yang art. But what of supporting the yin to suppress the yang—the yin art?”

The so-called yang arts supported yang and vanquished yin—cutting down monsters, exorcising demons, banishing ghosts, and the like.

Just then, the strange eye in my chest emitted a ghostly light, and the characters on The Grand Netherworld Arts of Yin and Yang floated up, twisting into unreadable symbols before shooting into my mind.

Suddenly, enlightenment flooded me, strange new knowledge pouring into my head.

After a long moment, I murmured with a complicated heart, “So this is the yin art.”

Yin art, in direct contrast to yang art, was used to help spirits sever their earthly attachments and thereby accumulate virtue in the netherworld. It encompassed many branches.

What chilled me most was that yin art was not recorded in any living script—no living person could see it. But I could, because of the eye in my chest…

It was formed from the scar on my chest, transformed by absorbing the ghost woman’s energy. That scar had been the crystal from the black box—it had a name: the Eye of the Nether Dragon.

It was the true reason I’d become such a philanderer.

It needed to absorb yin energy, and as women are aligned with yin, the first time I slept with a woman at eighteen, it awakened.

Under its influence, only by sleeping with different women could I suppress the gnawing, soul-consuming desire.

Yet in truth, what it truly wanted wasn’t the yin energy of living women, but that of female ghosts.

Did that mean, from now on, my conquests would have to be…?

I sat motionless until night fell, lost in thought, until my phone’s ringtone snapped me out of my stupor.

“Hello? Yes, Director. Yes, I’ll be right there.” Hanging up, I quickly changed and ran to the nearby hospital.

I had three consecutive night shifts; tonight was only the second.

The closer I got to the hospital, the stronger my sense of the ghostly woman’s presence grew.

From the strange eye in my chest, a black thread connected me inexorably to her.