In the Shanghai Concession in 1932, antique restorer Wang Yu awakened a strange ability at the moment of death - whenever his heart stopped beating, he would go back to three days ago with his memory. While repairing a bronze mirror from the Western Zhou Dynasty, he discovered that he could hear the metal artifacts telling secret words that spanned thousands of years: mercury parasites surged in the coffins of the Warring States Period, the bronze mirror from the Tang Dynasty reflected the quantum projection of future air-raid shelters, and the coordinates of the space station in 1999 were sealed in a jade wall from the Han Dynasty.
As Japanese spies, future travelers and mechanical immortals pursue each other, Wang Yu discovers that the bronze heart beating in his chest is actually an aerospace part from 1984, and the sundial compass left behind by his father before he disappeared is engraved with the coordinates of twelve time anchor points over the past five thousand years. From Cyber Chongqing hanging upside down at the bottom of the West Lake to the Taoist priests translating Mars data in the Dunhuang Buddhist Scripture Cave, every ancient tomb contains a time capsule of future civilization. . . . In this cycle of tomb robbing where flesh and blood are intertwined with machinery, every grave excavation is an archeology of the future, and every artifact is a love letter to the past.
This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.