[Mystery tomb raiding, folk adventure, and battles of wits for survival]
Chen Jiuchuan, the young proprietor of a small shop in Liulichang, receives a Warring States-era blood jade bi on a late-night delivery. That very night, he sees the image of his father, who vanished twenty years ago. Hidden inside the jade bi is a dragon-bone divination board, and it leads to a shocking conspiracy surrounding the First Emperor of Qin’s secret burial of the Heirloom Seal of the Realm.
The shamanic bronze drum in Changbai Mountain’s nine-story tomb tower, the yin-yang corpse formation in the Western Xia city of Blackwater, the thousand-year-old human gu in the tomb of the Nanzhao Witch King, the sunken merfolk city in the Eastern Sea’s Guixu… Every deadly place conceals a divination sign of life or death left behind by Chen’s father. When the team enters the First Emperor’s hidden palace beneath the dragon veins of the Qinling Mountains, a river of mercury hangs upside down in the sky, and twelve golden statues stand in formation. The Heirloom Seal of the Realm is suppressing the missing final leg of the Nine Tripods of China.
[High-stakes battles of wits]
There are no supernatural powers. Every crisis stems from lost mechanical arts devised by ancient craftsmen:
• Use a bronze divination board to crack the Western Xia constellation lock
• Use Miao texts on insects to drive back the corpse-silkworm king
• Follow the River Map and Luo Writing to escape the First Emperor’s Nine Palaces death formation
[The hidden truth]
Why did Chen’s father willingly walk into a deadly trap all those years ago? Does the divination board point to a way out, or to a path of sacrifice for the tomb guardians who have kept watch for a thousand years?
Note: Everyone is sharp and capable. They break out of desperate situations without relying on cheat powers. Traditional skills clash with modern thinking to uncover the most astonishing historical truth.
