The Essential Principles of Burial Scriptures

Night rain beat against the window, pattering on the old glass. Chen Yuan set down his magnifying glass and rubbed his aching brow. On the workbench, the bronze key he had just found deep inside the wooden box of his grandfather's belongings glowed an eerie green beneath the desk lamp. Its design was ancient and unadorned, but the pattern of the Twenty-Eight Lunar Mansions engraved on its handle was so smooth and precise that it seemed less like a thousand-year-old relic than a piece of modern micromachining. He had discovered the key while sorting through the old papers left behind by his grandfather, Chen Guanshan, the last feng shui master in Jiangnan with genuine talent and learning. It had been tucked inside the cover of a handwritten copy of The Essentials of the Burial Classic. Beside it lay a slip of paper written in cinnabar, the characters jagged and fierce: “The dragon vein hangs upside down; the gates of the netherworld open. Once the blood curse is unleashed, seven days remain before the soul is severed.”