Late summer, 2017. Deep in the Ailao Mountains of southern Yunnan.
As the geological survey team’s off-road vehicle rumbled over a red-soil road blocked by a landslide, Wu Ling gripped the copper-scaled compass passed down through his family. Its jade handle bristled with backward-pointing scales, the final warning his grandfather had carved into it before disappearing sixty years ago.
The Serpent Swamp awoke in the torrential rain.
An acid bridge built by army ants swallowed the satellite signal. A bronze Nuo-mask figure shook a wind chime made of human teeth in the poisonous miasma, while glutinous rice paste mixed with cinnabar seeped from the walls of a Nanzhao tomb seventeen meters underground. The serpent-shaped birthmark on the back of Wu Ling’s neck burned near the tomb’s ventilation shaft. It was the living key to the “Nine Dragons Bearing a Pearl” feng shui formation described in the Geomancy Manual, and the cursed totem that a group of tomb raiders had carved into the rock in blood before going mad five years ago.
When the paratrooper knife of Lao Lu, a former combat engineer, cut through an acid-ant nest, what he pulled out was no queen ant, but half a prospecting badge stamped with a Soviet expert’s serial number. It was a relic from the 1953 disappearance of a national survey team, and now it pointed toward a skeleton deep in the tomb passage, wearing Wu Ling’s grandfather’s watch.
When ground-penetrating radar revealed a second underground palace beneath the main burial chamber, Professor Chen’s scalpel pressed against Wu Ling’s throat. The archaeological expert had a honeysuckle-patterned bandage around his calf, identical to the armlet worn by Lao San, the tomb guardian. It was the inherited mark of a Nanzhao priestly family.
The copper-scaled compass came together in the blood, forming a complete star chart. The meteorite-iron dome of the tomb began to resonate with the Big Dipper. At last, Wu Ling understood the warning his grandfather had died to leave him: more dangerous than the Serpent Swamp was the snake of greed that had lain coiled in the depths of the human heart for a thousand years.
