Notes on the Northern School of Tomb Raiders

[Tomb Raiding + Suspense + Antiquities Appraisal + Jianghu] [First Person]

My name is Wang San...

I'm a tomb raider who survives on my grandmaster's notes and a compass.

Everyone making a living in Panjiayuan knows that a jade cicada in a dead man's mouth is worth five hundred thousand, while the schemes hidden in a living person's heart can cost three lives.

There's me and Ma Yuliang.

One of us roams the jianghu relying on our grandmaster's notes; the other draws on his Danmin bloodline to breathe underwater. We steal funerary treasures from beneath a thousand years of loess, and repay the Yama's debts of the present-day jianghu.

You ask what kind of trade tomb raiding is?

It's a craft.

When the Luoyang shovel goes three zhang down, what it brings up isn't rammed earth, but the age-old dreams of Qin Shi Huang and Emperor Wu of Han. The whirlwind shovel doesn't open a mere tunnel for tomb robbers; it breaks into the unawakened dreams of the Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties.

That day in the tomb, as the dynamite blew apart the last layer of packed earth, Ma Yuliang suddenly said, "Third Brother, don't you think we're like the tomb guardians in here? We keep other people's greed at bay while swallowing our own sins."

Ma Yuliang says he'll quit once he's made thirty million, but can the greed in a person's heart really be satisfied with that?

The deepest thing in this trade isn't the ancient tombs, or even the human heart... It's when you finally decipher the inscription on the coffin and realize that you, too, are just a speck of dust caught in the folds of history.

Tomb raiders have never dug up the dead. They dig up the greed of the living.

There's no golden basin in this jianghu, only water that grows murkier the more you try to wash in it.

Now you ask why I'm still at it?

Because every ancient tomb is a mirror that reveals the truth. The one lying inside isn't the tomb's owner, but us, the respectable-looking people outside the mirror. The moment my Luoyang shovel sinks into the packed earth, I can hear a heartbeat deep in the earth's veins

(This book doesn't smell of grave soil; it carries the rusty tang of the jianghu, deep in its people's bones.)