The Netherworld Iron Writ: A Republican-Era Tomb Raider's Tale

In the seventeenth year of the Republic, Sun Dianying blew open the Eastern Qing Tombs. The night pearl in Cixi’s coffin suddenly blazed to life, and strange blood patterns appeared on her corpse, a sign that the ancient treasure known as the Netherworld Iron Writ had surfaced. Legend says the writ is split into yin and yang halves. Together, they can open the Tomb of Immortality, granting whoever possesses them control over life and death and the power to command undead soldiers. Zhang Jiuyue, a former commander of the Qing dynasty’s Divine Machine Battalion, is hunted after becoming embroiled in the tomb robbery at the Eastern Qing Tombs. After going into hiding under an assumed name, he joins forces with Ye Hongzhuang, an heir to the Xiangxi corpse-driving tradition, and Zhao Shouyi, a former Whampoa cadet turned demolition expert. Together, they search for the writ in places including the ghost market in Beiping, the royal tombs of Yinxu, and the Sanxingdui ruins.

Meanwhile, Colonel Inukai Jiro of Japan’s Oriental Culture Research Institute leads a team in looting ancient tombs across North China, hoping to use the writ to resurrect the dead of the Kwantung Army. Warlord Sun Dianying will stop at nothing to prolong his life, while the mysterious feng shui master known as Ghost Diviner manipulates corpse-transcendents to commit bloody atrocities. Amid the chaos of the age, rival forces unleash a storm of bloodshed. The hallucinatory maze surrounding the bronze sacred tree, the ghostly loop curse on the Soul-Hanging Staircase, the secrets of corpse-driving in a village plagued by reanimated dead in Xiangxi... Each time the protagonists conquer an ancient tomb, they uncover another bloody tale of the quest for immortality.

As the two halves of the writ are about to be reunited, the Tomb of Immortality emerges beneath Tianchi Lake on Changbai Mountain, and the ancient evil god Zhujun emerges from his coffin. The undead soldiers crossing the land collide head-on with the Japanese army’s biological warfare troops in a battle in Xiangxi. Armed with a Kwantung Army saber, Zhang Jiuyue storms into the tomb. Ye Hongzhuang uses corpse-driving arts to command a million vengeful spirits, while Zhao Shouyi straps on a pack of explosives and steps onto the Soul-Hanging Staircase. In an era of warlords and Japanese invaders, they are both martial-world adventurers seeking treasure and solitary heroes defending their homeland in the space between the underworld and the living world.