Tales of the Strange in China

Beneath the shadows of history lies another truth. The First Emperor cast twelve bronze figures, not to show off his skill, but to suppress the dragon veins. Liu Bowen severed every dragon vein beneath heaven, not to extinguish the ancestral rites, but to lull civilization into dormancy. A secret organization has guarded these forgotten pacts for generations. It deals with “anomalies” from the past: a newly unearthed bronze artifact can plunge an entire city into an illusion; a lost Han-dynasty silk manuscript contains a forbidden algorithm capable of rewriting reality. When his mentor becomes embroiled in a bizarre incident, young archaeologist Shen Mo is forced to join the organization. Alongside a group of extraordinary colleagues, he follows clues scattered across five thousand years and hunts a fanatical organization bent on turning myth into real-world catastrophe. This is a secret war spanning time and space. Their battlegrounds are the surviving pages of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the underground palace beneath Yin Ruins, the hidden codes in Tang poetry and Song lyrics, and modern cities ablaze with neon. But when they finally reach the heart of the truth, they discover that all their struggles are insignificant. What the sages feared was not some demon god, but the ultimate law of the universe: spiritual essence wanes, and civilization will eventually fall silent. Their choice will determine the final chapter of human civilization: will it quietly fade away, or... defy Heaven and change its fate?