Eyes

## Book 1: Eyes

### Sypnosis:

*Spirited Away* meets *Coraline* in the Suburbs of Hanoi, Vietnam with a twist to the genre. A heart-pounding journey of betrayal and bond, strength and perseverance, with the looming threat of ghosts, demons, and black magic… told from the perspective of a comedic protagonist!

An eerie children’s nursery rhyme lures Thanh – an intelligent college girl with an unnatural level of trust issues – into an adventure of her lifetime.

On this journey, she meets Điền Mục, a young ghost catcher who can’t see ghosts but was raised by a 500-year-old spirit and has about zero experience in human interactions.

The fates of two unlikely companions intertwine on the spider web of a criminal mastermind who has been evading arrest for the past 40 years.

Their lives are on the line; the trap has been set! Meanwhile, Thanh still hasn’t trusted Mục yet… But can you honestly blame her for not choosing a total stranger, and a weirdo no less, over people she’d known her whole life?

### Story summary:

#### *The ghost bus*

Thanh got onto a late night bus, both to safe cost and to avoid the crowd. (To Vietnamese, Tết was as important as Christmas to Christian.) She was greeted with a young lad her age who fake a ghost face and startled her. That guy was Điền Mục; who had the most random questions and weirdest sense of humor, if one can call it like that, she had ever met. After a while, her fascination turned into annoyance, so Thanh just ignored the young man and slept like a log through the journey.

When she woke up, she was already off the bus, Điền Mục was standing beside her. The bag of fruit she bought as gifts was already stolen, and the young man urged her to go back to the city at that very moment. *He must be a conman,* so she thought, and ran as fast as she could to cut him off.

*Home?*

Thanh was very please with the stage of her village. The villagers were still closed and friendly just like in her memory, it was as if the changes brought forth by the industrial park never actually happened. Her reunion with mrs Mai, who to her was like a grand mother figure was the icing on the cake. But her parent weren't home. The neighbor woman said they left to for the town to ship one last truck worth of Tết's goods to sell. They gave mrs Mai the key and asked her to wait for Thanh's return.

After dinner, Mrs Mai told her to take a nutricional pill her parent left her, but she was too tired to even bother. That night, exhausted from the bumpy ride home, Thanh slept like a log.

Điền Mục had a much rougher day than her.

Whenever he tried to set foot in the village, a swirl of fog would appear and mislead him back to the entrance. He was stuck in a vicious circle for an entire day. At night, around 10pm, a strange singing voice could be heard. It was that song that helped Điền Mục get into the Maize Village. What greeted him was a rice field full of farmer, greeting him in a similar manner as they had with Thanh earlier. Mục waited for a while, and they were still repeating that warm smile and greeting like robots.

This village was a dead trap.

The next day, Mrs Mai told her there was a storm yesterday, and she was worried sick seeing the windows of her bed room all opened early in the morning. A lightning had struck down the phone signal pole, making it collapsed across the road that connect the nearby town with Maize Village. Seeing her connections, both physical and digital, were cut off, Thanh started to have a tint of suspicion in her, but she didn't have much time to think more about this matter. Her old friends had all returned and wanted to see her at the Communal House.

End of spoilers free summary.