In the twenty-third year of the Republic, two scents always drift through the French Concession in Shanghai after dark: the smell of champagne on Avenue Joffre, and the smell of corpse wax in the old city.
Shen Yanqiu makes a living repairing funerary objects, but inside a bronze lamp base he discovers a map drawn on human skin. Blood marks twelve “sinkholes” on the map, each concealing a treasure capable of overturning the nation's destiny. Someone saw a jade funerary figure that blinked in the frozen soil of Kunlun; someone fished breathing lacquerware out of a sunken ship in the Xisha Islands. There are even rumors that the murals in an ancient tomb in Luoyang change according to the heartbeat of whoever looks at them.
When the mysterious qipao-clad woman Su Manshu knocks on his door carrying half a tiger tally, Shen Yanqiu realizes that the national treasures stolen by foreign museums are far from the most terrifying things. The real danger lies in the “Keepers” hidden in every sinkhole. They are neither mummies nor mechanisms, but living creatures wearing human skin, waiting to use tomb raiders' flesh and blood to complete a sacrifice that has continued for three thousand years.
It's a race against time: in the north, the Kwantung Army has a tomb-raiding regiment; in the south, Chairman Dai has special forces; even priests from the Vatican have entered the Qinling Mountains with crosses in hand. And every time Shen Yanqiu deciphers another part of the map, another body is found in Shanghai's concessions, gnawed clean.
What he doesn't know is that tucked into the slit of Su Manshu's qipao, alongside her pistol, is a birthmark identical to his own.
