In every occult sect of the sunless hell, an unwritten rule prevails: the prophet who divines fate must first be blinded, and the physician who heals must first be driven mad.

  Mortals cannot see their own destinies, so a blind seer must peer for them; likewise, mortals cannot cure their own ailments, so a lunatic must wield the scalpel.

  Thus, within the occult sect devoted to the Thirteen, there is always a blind prophet who divines fate and a deranged doctor who heals. The blind is called seer, and, the lunatic is called doctor. Mad doctors are not a single soul but a breed apart, and Orange Cheng is one such mad doctor.

  Orange serves at Shanghai People's First Hospital, a mad doctor devoted to the God of Feasts and Spices, a hellish deity named Boilord.

  Once, Orange worked at the Beijing Hotel, surrounded by colleagues. But after madness claimed him, those colleagues drifted away, their warmth replaced by wary glances.

  Orange found the chill of Beijing unbearable. “What’s the point of lingering where I’m shunned?” he thought. So he moved to Shanghai to live a new life. Few knew him there, but at least he’d face no scorn.

  A lunatic’s mind is like the starry night sky—visible to all, comprehensible to few. Orange settled into a nine-to-five routine. Beyond his role as a mad doctor of the occult sect, he held another title: Director of General Surgery at Shanghai First People’s Hospital.

  Ordinarily, those with dual identities are unreliable. But Orange was mad: madmen aren’t ordinary. Thus Orange was exceptionally dependable.

  So dependable, in fact, that his office overflowed with commendation banners made by red velvet. Usually these banner should be kept on the wall, but Orange is unusual, he recieved countless banners. When the walls could hold no more, he spread them across the floor like carpets, layering the tiles until they spilled into corners. Where other doctors kept bookshelves, Orange stacked banners. His office blazed with crimson velvet, so thick that patients dreaded lingering—stay too long, and you risked a respiratory infection from the velvet scraps.

  That day, Orange sat behind his desk, one hand propping his cheek, the other clutching a CT scan. He studied it with rapture, eyes tracing the stark fracture line.

  “Neat… utterly neat,” he murmured, captivated by the bone’s clean break. “This fracture—pure art…”

  As Orange pored over the scan, a malevolent surge of qi—a primal, otherworldly energy—slithered through the crack beneath his office door, hissing like a serpent.

  Ordinary devotees of the occult sect would have recoiled in terror. But again, Orange was no ordinary man, he was mad. So enthralled was he by the CT scan that when the qi’s master stormed toward his door, he didn’t aware.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  With a thunderous crash, the office’s white door exploded inward. Splinters of plywood danced through the air, stirring a storm of crimson velvet and yellowed wood dust. Only then did Orange snap from his trance. He fumbled to shove the CT scan into a drawer, as if it were some illicit secret.

  The intruder was a slender nurse who had kicked the door to oblivion. She wasn’t one of Orange Cheng’s colleagues, but he knew her: Lewis, one of his past patients.

  Before Orange could speak, Lewis blurted, “Dr. Cheng, help us!”

  Without waiting for a response, she darted out, only to return moments later, dragging two other patients.

  Orange’s nose twitched. He could smell it: at least one of these patients was a HP.

  HP refers to High Priestess or High Priest, the most powerful entity in an occult sect—dangerous, all-powerful, and nearly impossible to kill.

  Lewis’s right arm steadied a woman whose eyes wept streams of blood, gold purple blood, dripping down her cheeks and staining the banner-strewn floor. The blood’s hue outshone even the banners’ scarlet.

  Her left arm propped a man whose skin was an unnatural blue, trembling as ice shards cascaded from his body in a brittle clatter.

  The bleeding woman was eerily calm. She wiped her face, smearing the blood into a gruesome mask, and said, “I fell fine. Save him first. ”

  At her command, Lewis released her and pushed the shivering man forward.

  “It’s alright now,” Lewis soothed. “Eveything will be fine. You will be fine.”

  The blue-skinned man, Sun, clutched his head and shuffled to Orange’s desk. He set his head—quite literally—on the tabletop and sat down.

  “Doc,” Sun said, pointing to his own head with barely hope in his eyes, “can you patch me up?”

  Orange snapped into professional mode. He plucked a marker from the desk and tucked it behind his left ear.

  “Easy now, dude,” he said. “Describe what you’re feeling.”

  “I… I’m a bit cold.”

  “Are you feeling a bit... losing your mind?”

  Sun tried to nod but couldn’t quite make it work. He settled for a twitch of his neck.

  “No rush,” Orange Cheng said. “As long as you’re still breathing, I’ll pull you through.”

  “But, Doc,” Sun replied, gesturing to his exposed throat, where frost-white vapor swirled without a hint of breath, “I’m not breathing anymore.”

  Orange’s expression turned grave. This was no easy case. In all his years as a physician, he’d seen countless severed limbs, but severed heads? Only three before Sun. This made it to four.

  To project utmost professionalism, Orange grabbed another marker, tucking it behind his right ear. He propped his chin in both hands and said, “Alright, dude, tell me exactly how you ended up like this.”

  “Where do I start?” Sun hesitated.

  “From the head.”

  Orange meant Sun’s literal head, but Sun misunderstood.

  “From the beginning?” Sun sighed. “That’s a long story…”

  And so, the headless Five-Good Youth (Five-good youth is an honorary title, meaning a young person who is excellent in all five aspects: moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic and labor) , Sun, began to recount his tale.