In the late summer of 2017, in the hinterland of Ailao Mountain in southern Yunnan.
When the off-road vehicle of the geological survey team ran over the collapsed red soil road, Wu Ling tightened his grip on the ancestral copper scale compass - the scales on the sapphire handle stood upright. This was the last warning carved by his grandfather before he disappeared sixty years ago.
Snake Swamp wakes up in the rainstorm.
The acid pontoon built by the marching ant colony swallowed up the satellite signals, the bronze Nuo-faced man rang the human tooth wind chimes in the poisonous miasma, and the walls of the Nanzhao tomb seventeen meters underground were leaking glutinous rice syrup mixed with cinnabar. The snake-shaped birthmark on the back of Wu Ling's neck burned hot at the vent of the ancient tomb. It was the living code of the "Nine Dragons Holding Pearls" Feng Shui bureau in "The Kanyu Notes", and it was also the curse totem carved with blood on the rock wall by the group of tomb robbers five years ago before they went crazy.
When veteran engineer Lao Lu cut open the nest of acid ants with his paratrooper knife, what he brought out was not the queen ant, but half a prospecting badge with a Soviet expert number printed on it - a relic from the disappearance of the national exploration team in 1953. At this moment, it was pointing at the white skeleton wearing his grandfather's watch deep in the tomb passage.
When the ground-penetrating radar showed that there was a second underground palace beneath the main tomb, Professor Chen's scalpel was pressed against Wu Ling's throat. The archaeological expert's calf straps reveal the same honeysuckle pattern as the tombkeeper Dao Laosan's armband - it is the inheritance mark of the Nanzhao Kingdom's priest family.
The copper scale compass pieced together a complete star map in the blood, and the meteorite dome on the top of the tomb began to resonate with the Big Dipper. Wu Ling finally understood the warning that his grandfather had paid for with his life: What is more sinister than the snake swamp is the greedy snake that has been entrenched in the heart for thousands of years.
