When Goudan was six, he clutched his father’s threadbare padded jacket and cried at the entrance to the mine. It was his scar-faced Third Uncle who dragged him into the business of “digging in the dirt,” which was just a euphemism for Tomb Raiding.
Third Uncle always said the trade was all about courage, but no one told Goudan that even the bravest person was no match for the horrors in the Blood-Mist Tomb:
A severed hand that crawled out of the grave grass and grabbed at the ankles of the living;
A mural in the passageway painted with human blood, depicting a woman having her heart ripped out whose face was exactly like his mother’s, who had died young;
And a faceless corpse drenched in blood. Third Uncle’s glutinous rice and black donkey hooves were useless against it. Like a red-hot branding iron, it chased them as they fled deeper into a dead end...
Goudan had thought it was just a vicious tomb nourished by evil magic, until the female corpse in the side chamber, clutching half a lotus jade pendant, opened her eyes. Only then did he realize:
Third Uncle had never brought him here to rob a tomb;
His mother’s death was inextricably linked to the sacrificial rites in this warlord’s tomb;
And even his name, “Goudan,” concealed a secret that could turn the living into tomb corpses...
“You think you’re alive? Feel the back of your neck again. That scar should have rotted away long ago.”
The instant the blood corpse’s nails broke his skin, Goudan finally saw what was embedded in the blood-filled hole in the faceless corpse’s neck: half a lotus jade pendant, a perfect match for the one his mother had left him, which he wore close to his body.
