In 2035, quantum etchings appear on a bronze artifact unearthed at Sanxingdui, pointing to a “living tomb” deep in the mountains of Yunnan. Archaeology professor Chen Mo receives a keepsake from his late mentor: a blood-seeping Nanzhao jade pendant. But an X-ray reveals that his heart has already been replaced by a bronze engine, while a 72-hour countdown to death burns across his retina.
A bizarre expedition team is forced to assemble:
Lin Yue, an agent from Bureau 749 who can translate oracle-bone script, is watching her left arm disappear as it turns quantum
Wang Pangzi's ancestral Gold-Seeking Talisman has melted into liquid gold, and the blood he vomits forms trigrams foretelling the future
And encoded in Chen Mo's DNA are memories of thirty-nine generations of observers sacrificing civilizations
Deep inside the thousand-year-old tomb, the wreckage of a bronze star raft is breathing.
Corpse beetles beat their wings to the trigrams of the Book of Changes. A phone in the sacrificial pit plays news from 2035. The lifelike Nanzhao princess in her coffin clutches an iPhone, dark matter trickling from the corners of her smiling mouth. When Chen Mo inserts the bronze key into his chest, the entire Jiuyi Mountain suddenly floats into the air. As the clouds split open, he sees Earth suspended in the palm of a bronze giant, the ruins of every human civilization reshaping within its palm lines into a tombstone in the form of a Mobius strip.
Seventy-one hours remain. The Observer Protocol is about to complete its final harvest of civilization.
And the deepest despair comes when Chen Mo discovers that the last phone call his mother made before she disappeared came from the corpse in the tomb wearing a modern protective suit…
