Mountain Guardian: Blood Oath at the Imperial Mausoleum

Deep in the Greater Khingan Mountains lies a century-old blood oath: anyone who sets foot in the Taiqing Imperial Mausoleum becomes a living sacrifice to the mountain keepers.

On the first day university student Liu Tianqing took over as a mountain keeper, he ran into a group of heavily armed “modern bandits” in a wooden cabin. The leader, Third Master Cui, pressed a Mauser pistol to his temple and forced him to lead the way to the legendary Taiqing Imperial Mausoleum, said to conceal the secret arts of the Qing dynasty’s dragon vein. Even more shocking, these desperate men revealed secrets about his parents’ disappearance twenty years earlier.

From the bloody guts dug up by a three-fingered mountain demon to the corpse-scented cave where the celestial funeral flower blooms, Liu Tianqing was forced to navigate between the compass of the tomb-seeking Taibao and the bandits’ gun barrels. When his parents’ remains, marked with Azure Dragon patterns, surfaced beneath the ice, he finally understood his grandfather’s dying words: “A mountain keeper does not guard the forest, but the demons lurking in people’s hearts...”

Northeastern underworld slang collides with tomb-raiding secrets, as mountain mysteries meet the struggle against human nature. In this deadly forest, where temperatures plunge to minus forty degrees, the greatest danger is not the thousand-year-old tomb, but making it out alive.