[A Bronze Compass Appears, Nine Eerie Tombs Form a Deadly Game]
In 1938, Qi Jiugge, the young master of Beiping's Bogu Zhai antique shop, was left orphaned when his family was massacred over a Western Zhou bronze compass passed down through generations.
The bloody words his father carved into the wall of a secret chamber before disappearing pointed to the long-lost “Nine Stars in a Row” from the Book of Burial, a legendary alignment connecting nine great tombs that could alter the fate of an entire nation.
To uncover the truth, he was forced to assemble a team:
► The heiress to western Hunan's corpse-driving tradition, armed with a corpse-binding rope and a life-bound venomous gu worm that could kill with a single drop of blood;
► A descendant of the Mountain-Splitting Strongmen, carrying a mountain-splitting claw and able to tear through thousand-year-old rammed-earth walls with his bare hands;
► A limping old man whose fake leg, made from a Luoyang shovel, concealed a secret map of the Qing imperial tombs;
► And a feng shui master who was always coughing blood in the tombs, with half a scroll of the Dragon-Shaking Classic in his arms, covered in the names of the dead.
A true record of terrifying tomb expeditions:
■ A Western Zhou blood-corpse tomb in Shaanxi, where living corpses poisoned by mercury crawled out of sacrificial pits and murals foretold how five people would die;
■ A gu-infestation city in Yunnan and Guizhou, where human-faced spiders and pregnant-woman effigies crafted through Miao witchcraft concealed transparent corpse silkworms in their bellies;
■ A Xiongnu golden-tent tomb beyond the northern frontier, where a shaman's throat bone concealed a bronze reed, and thousand-year-old frozen corpses sang “The Song of Chile”;
■ A sea serpent god's palace beneath the waters of Minyue, where the nine-eyed dzi bead Zheng He had once sealed away revealed snake scales in the shadows of the team's companions...
When the bronze compass was fitted with the final jade tablet, the truth behind the Nine Stars in a Row sent chills down everyone's spine.
The incomplete star charts in each tomb, when pieced together, formed a map of China in 1943. And the words “White Eagle Project” in his father's notebook were marked with a Japanese military secret-file number...
