A Perilous Tomb-Raiding Adventure

A bronze compass led me to dig up my ancestors’ graves. On the day I dropped out of school, I burned all my archaeological notes. Yet the bronze compass my father left behind reassembled itself in the ashes, its needle spinning wildly as it pointed beneath the ancestral shrine. On my first tomb excavation, I unearthed a Western Zhou bronze coffin. Carved into the inside of its lid was an inscription: “Lin Jiuchuan, you who dig your own grave shall never be reborn.” And inside the coffin lay someone wearing modern clothes: me.