Lin Yan, a restorer of ancient paintings, discovers by chance that the pupils of a "Black Armored Warrior" in a damaged Ming dynasty scroll conceal the coordinates of an ancient tomb in the Western Regions. When the first jade token engraved with a "Black Tortoise pattern" falls out of the scroll, the dormant "Tomb Keeper" bloodline within him awakens, drawing the pursuit of the mysterious Inkshadow Society. Descended from a lost civilization, this faction covets the forbidden "soul-bone symbiosis" technique hidden in the jade tokens. It plans to revive an army of "Black Armored Corpse Guards" fashioned from human remains and achieve immortality through consciousness transplants.
To uncover the secret of his ancestral bloodline, Lin Yan forms a team with Jiang Ye, a retired special forces soldier burdened by the mystery of an archaeological team's disappearance; Su Qingyuan, an archaeology PhD whose identity is shrouded in mystery; and A Mu, a mute boy capable of forming a mental link with the Corpse Guards. Following the jade tokens' clues, they venture deep into the shifting maze of light and shadow in the Black Armor Mausoleum of the Western Regions, infiltrate a shipwreck tomb beneath the South Sea's Guixu, brave the corpse-and-venom corridors of the Ten Thousand Gu Insect Cave in Bashu, and ascend the Celestial Palace atop the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Every step brings bizarre mechanisms that fuse machinery with flesh, attacks by genetically mutated monsters, and deadly traps laid by the Inkshadow Society.
As the nine Black Armor jade tokens are gradually gathered, Lin Yan discovers that his bloodline is the key to opening the civilization's core, the Soul-Bone Altar, and that A Mu is actually a clone of the last priest of the Black Armor civilization. More astonishingly, the consciousness of the Inkshadow Society's leader, "Mr. Mo," has long been entangled with the "soul-bone consciousness" formed from the collective obsession of the Black Armor civilization. When they face the Corpse Guard army in a decisive battle at Ghost Valley in the Qinling Mountains, a contest over the temptation of immortality and the survival of civilization slowly comes to light: the Black Armor civilization
