During the Chenghua era of the Ming dynasty, corpse burner Zhao Jiuyang discovers half a scroll of the Map of Yu's Ruins, engraved in oracle bone script, inside the abdomen of an unidentified female corpse. This mysterious map, said to reveal the whereabouts of the Nine Tripods of the Xia dynasty, leads to the secrets of nine ancient forbidden sites, including the Demon-Sealing Bureau of the Twenty-Eight Lunar Mansions, the Miaojiang Gu Tomb, and the Yellow River Corpse Puppet Formation. Together with Liu Qingluan, a spirit-medium witch, Zhao Jiuyang investigates and discovers that every forbidden site is a seal holding one of the strange beasts from The Classic of Mountains and Seas. He also learns that he is descended from the tomb guardians of the Zhou dynasty. But when the underground palace of the final site, Kunlun Ruins, is opened, they find a shocking conspiracy that will overturn everything they know about the origins of Chinese civilization…
I have never read a novel like this before. The details, the emotional shifts, and the character descriptions are incredibly realistic. The world in this book feels real, and everyone seems real (like Sherlock Holmes). The author possesses extraordinary writing skills and intellectual prowess.