My name is Chen Feng. I scraped by running the shabby antique shop my grandfather left me, until one night the old wooden box that had sat in the shop for twenty years suddenly grew hot. Inside lay half of a yellowed copy of The Secret Record of Dragon Seeking, along with a slip of paper stained with black blood: “On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, the coffin gates open. Heir of the bloodline, enter the tomb to prolong your life.”
I had just turned twenty-five that year. Since childhood, I had carried a bronze talisman embedded in my bone. The doctors said I wouldn't live past twenty-five. It turned out that Grandpa had left me a way out long ago. But what did I know about tomb raiding? The “dragon-seeking and acupoint-finding” in the notes might as well have been a heavenly script. That was until a group of people kicked down the antique shop door. The scar-faced leader pointed a gun at me and demanded, “The old ghost Chen's grandson? If you want to live, take us to Blood Corpse Ridge in western Hunan.”
From then on, I was forced onto the path of tomb raiding: white-haired zongzi that chased people through the forests of western Hunan, blood vines that ensnared you in Qinling's hanging coffins, and mermaid lamps that could ensnare your soul in a sunken ship off Xisha... Every tomb expedition was a dance at death's door. The writing in the notes changed color depending on the tomb's conditions, while the bronze talisman in my bone turned hot and cold, as if warning me.
Even stranger, my fellow tomb raiders all had their own agendas. The seemingly honest veteran always kept a black donkey's hoof hidden on him. The bespectacled female scholar was actually descended from the Gold Touchers, and even the scar-faced man secretly copied the maps in my notes. Gradually, I discovered that Grandpa had never been an ordinary antique dealer. Half of the notes he left behind concealed a secret that could rewrite life and death. But in the awakened ancient tombs, what awaited me wasn't just funerary treasure, but countless wronged spirits and a curse linked to my bloodline.
Some came for wealth, some for their lives, and some for the truth hidden deep beneath the tomb.
