The life of Lin Chen, an unemployed programmer, fell apart completely on a stormy night.
The day he was framed and fired by his boss, he stepped into an antiques shop on the verge of closing and put on a cracked green jade ring. In an instant, the world shattered behind a jade-colored veil of light. He could see through thirty meters of steel, smell the blood seeping from bronze artifacts, and even watch the bomb countdown ticking beneath his boss's luxury car.
Only after he saved his enemy from an explosion, and the jade ring's dark golden light burrowed into his palm, did he realize it had all been arranged long ago.
His father's archaeological notes from twenty years earlier, the coin pendant his mother had put on him before she died, the suspicious transactions in his sister's student loan account... Every clue pointed to the old man who had grinned eerily on that rainy night.
From then on, he moved between the cracks separating the present world from the hidden world:
At an underground auction in Tokyo, he made a thousand-year-old Buddha head weep through bulletproof glass.
In the Bermuda graveyard of spirit artifacts, he wielded the dragon-toothed mast of Zheng He's treasure ship to tear apart a ghost fleet.
When quantum computers began deciphering oracle bone script and the Mona Lisa at the Louvre opened a third eye, Lin Chen finally understood: what treasure appraisal truly reveals is the truth behind the cycles of civilization.
