Winter, 1994. Heilongjiang, thirty degrees below zero.
Li Laoba was crouching on the kang, warming himself by the fire, when the door was kicked open. Zhao Dabiao, an old comrade of his father’s, pulled a gold ingot from his coat and asked if he had the guts to take on a job.
Li Laoba’s father was called Li Laoqi. He died of cancer three years ago. He’d left no instructions before he died, and only afterward did Li Laoba learn from Zhao Dabiao that seven men had entered the Zhangguangcai Mountains back then, and four had made it out alive. His father was one of them. None of the four ever said a word about what lay below.
Now Zhao Dabiao wanted to take him back there. To the very same place.
The moment they pried open the stone door, a sweet smell wafted up from below. Siyan said it was cinnabar, something the ancients used to make pills. But this kind was toxic, and breathing it in could damage your brain.
A corpse that had been dead for 270 years lay below, its fingernails snow-white.
But the words carved into the dagger beside it were 4,700 years old.
The final line his father had chiseled away all those years ago concealed something that must never be spoken of, even in death. Li Laoba would have to go down and find it himself.
Good-looking, very good-looking