The Strange Tomb Ledger

“Coffin opening in western Sichuan, corpse driving in western Hunan, geomancers in western Shanxi.” Among the practitioners of the occult, geomancers are actually known as land readers. Those few who are believed to be able to alter a nation's fate above and determine an individual's life and death below are called Imperial-Robed Land Readers. At the beginning of the twentieth century, China's last feudal dynasty fell and the Republic of China was established. Yet China did not achieve true strength or independence, and the country descended into warlord conflict. During this time, influenced by Europe's spiritualist culture, a group of so-called civilized people began chanting the slogan, “Save the nation through the occult.” From then on, “occult culture,” once widely dismissed, gradually found its way into the upper echelons of society. Warlords across the country competed to recruit and bribe land readers, hoping to defy fate and rewrite life and death. The rise of occult practitioners finally brought those mysterious figures out of the dust of history and into the light. Their goal was to exploit the turmoil of the age to find the Heavenly Book, The Mausoleum Slips.