In the bitter winter of 2002, Xiang Feng, a boy from a mountain village in the Northeast, cuts off a finger and swears an oath to join the northern tomb-raiding gang Silver Fox in hopes of saving his sick mother. On his first expedition, to a blood-soaked Western Zhou tomb, his teammates are poisoned and undergo corpse transformation. Only he is spared, after touching the bizarre markings on a bronze tripod. A black line appears on his right arm and spreads toward his heart. The line turns out to share an origin with his missing father’s keepsake, the Xiang family pocket watch, which vanished twenty years ago...
From a Khitan princess who has remained uncorrupted for a thousand years in a Liao tomb in Inner Mongolia to a blood-gu worm pool in Miao territory that devours human skin, Xiang Feng rises through the world of tomb raiding, transforming from an apprentice into a master appraiser.
But when he deciphers the tomb-raiding diary his father left behind, he discovers that three generations of the Xiang family were subjects in the mysterious Puppet Society’s experiments on immortality. Even worse, Wang Xiansheng, the Silver Fox leader who is both his mentor and his enemy, seems to be the culprit who personally pushed his father into a tomb all those years ago...
At the summit of the Kunlun Mountains, the tomb gate bearing nine dragons carrying a corpse swings open.
The remnants of the northern faction, the southern faction alliance, and the Puppet Society converge on the imperial tomb of the Xia dynasty, where the key to opening the gate is the blood of the heirs to the Nine Lineages.
Only when Xiang Feng faces his father, transformed into a corpse puppet inside a bronze coffin, and Wang Xiansheng on the verge of death does he understand:
The black line has never been tied to life itself, but to a world of tomb raiding that three generations have been unable to escape.
To end it all, he must detonate the dragon vein and be buried alongside this thousand-year curse!
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