Undertale: Stuck Underground and Sick of Chocolate

A long spell of rain draws Shen Yan, a graduate student in history, back to the old Shen family residence in the ancient town of Duchuan. In a dust-covered camphorwood chest in the west wing, he stumbles upon a bronze fish tally engraved with Qin seal script. The tiny inscription inside it, “A boat capsized at the mouth of the river; not one of the thirteen survived,” eerily echoes the mystery of a Qin dynasty shipwreck unearthed at Jiangkou in the 1980s.

Rumors that Shen's ancestors served as post-station officials on the Duchuan waterways during the Qin dynasty, strange entries in fragmentary notes about “monsters beneath the river,” tales from the town's elders of a cursed stretch of water known as “Ghost Gate,” and a fleeting glimpse of a colossal bronze shadow on the riverbed... Layer upon layer of mystery closes in around Shen Yan. Following clues from the fish tally and bamboo slips, and aided by his mentor Zhang Yanzhi, he joins forces with an old boatman who knows the waterways well, drawing ever closer to the secret hidden in the depths near Jiangkou.

This is not merely a historical investigation spanning two thousand years, but also a search for the meaning of protection and inheritance. What secret beyond military provisions lies aboard the post boat asleep on the riverbed? Why did Shen's ancestors hide the bronze fish tally, a token of the waterway post station, away for a century? As ripples of truth slowly spread across the waters of Duchuan, the story of Qin dynasty clerks and soldiers buried by time will finally come to light.