Deep in the Qinling Mountains at midnight, the stench of rotting leaves and a chill a thousand years old dragged “Little Third Master,” Old Smokey, and Fatty into a deadly gamble. This hastily assembled expedition hoped to follow traces of a Han dynasty tomb wall in search of the tomb’s treasures. They had no idea that lethal traps had already been laid beneath the soft humus underfoot. A collapsed burial beast lay hidden in a false-earth pit, while silver-threaded corpse parasites wriggled out through cracks in the soil, giving off a sweet yet foul stench of death.
When the blue-brick wall came crashing down, revealing a tomb passage covered in cinnabar blood talismans, they realized they had stumbled into the legendary blood-talisman tomb of a feudal lord, where the living were sacrificed. Deep inside, soul-guiding lamps swayed without a breeze, and the faint sound of cloth shoes echoed through the darkness. Wherever their flashlights landed, they glimpsed crouching skeletons and glints of metal. Worse still, a blood corpse lurked in the shadows, waiting for the scent of the living to awaken its bloodlust.
A frantic escape failed to end the danger. Fatty’s lost entrenching tool had become a marker for the blood corpse to track. That mangled face, the tattered Han official’s robe, the rotting hand clutching a rusted tool: it pursued them like a shadow out of the mountains, all the way until their off-road vehicle roared out of the Qinling Mountains. Even then, the black blood in its pupil-less eye sockets remained fixed on its prey.
Old Smokey’s talk of a “blood corpse that had become a spirit,” the unidentified glint of metal in the tomb passage, the shadow of the stench of corpses from the ancient tomb in Luoyang three years ago… Every clue pointed to a nightmare that wasn’t over. “Little Third Master” clenched the black donkey’s hoof in his palm, unaware that this expedition, born of greed, had already dragged them into a darkness deeper than any tomb.
