The Lamp Blower

Deep in a ravine on the Loess Plateau lie the secrets of a dynasty, sealed away when Cao Cao established the Gold-Touching Captains. Sixteen-year-old Qin Xiao accidentally awakens the yin-yang eyes inherited through the Qin bloodline when he touches a bronze compass in a collapsed Dragon King Temple. Those gray-white eyes can pierce the earth and glimpse the flow of qi meridians, revealing the ancient tomb complex known as the “Nine-Bend Linked Citadels,” formed when the Yellow River changed course.

His grandfather, a tomb guardian, teaches him to identify water veins by pouring water into a pottery jar, and demonstrates how the soul-suspending staircase works with a spinning-wheel mechanism. Yet on the night of the full moon, he stares gravely at the blood-red markings that have risen on their ancestral Gold-Touching Talisman. When a qi-field tremor like an underground rumble comes from the old course of the Yellow River, the kerosene lamp in their mock tomb chamber suddenly goes out. In the darkness, Qin Xiao feels bronze rust seeping from the stone wall. It is the very blood-bronze said in the county records to have been buried with the last king of Western Xia. Neither grandfather nor grandson knows that on the night the yin-yang eyes awakened, the fingers of a hand wrapped in cursed silk had already torn open the first crack in a purple-gold coffin where someone had slept for a thousand years.

Now the boy clutches the scorching Gold-Touching Talisman, the intersecting currents of qi beneath the earth reflected in his pupils. The roar of the Yellow River’s diverted waters and the grinding of ancient tomb mechanisms overlap in his ears. A fate that began in the Cao Wei era will at last reveal the truth of life and death through the yin-yang eyes.