The Bronze Code: Strange Patterns of the Qinling Mountains

Some things aren't waiting for you to find them. They're waiting for you. My name is Zhou Ye, a freelance photographer who makes a living taking pictures for National Geographic. Then I fell into a thieves' pit deep in the Qinling Mountains. When I clawed my way out through a crack in the rocks, I had a bronze fragment covered in runes in my hand. Three days later, a folklorist who never told the truth, a black-market guide who'd do anything for money, and a woman who called herself a “forest ranger” but knew her way around C4 had somehow become my treasure-hunting crew. From man-eating caves in Shennongjia to a ghost shipwreck in the South China Sea, from a secret chamber behind the murals in Dunhuang to hanging coffins in Motuo, every artifact we found was like a puzzle piece pointing to a deliberately erased gap in history. And the damn thing was, there was always a gang of gas-mask-wearing lunatics one step ahead of us…