The Dragon Abyss Cipher: Heart of the Silk Road

In the dead of night in Dunhuang, a fragment of a Tang dynasty painting, Silk Road Landscape, stained with blood, mysteriously appears at an archaeological institute.

The star chart and cipher concealed in the fragment’s hidden layer point to the legendary “Treasure Vault of Ten Thousand Nations,” supposedly built by the monk Xuanzang himself and containing tribute from the thirty-six kingdoms of the Western Regions.

Lin Yuan, a young archaeologist, discovers that the bronze fish tally left behind by his grandfather is the first key to opening the vault.

But the international antiquities-smuggling syndicate Nightfall has already mobilized in full, and its mysterious leader is after far more than treasure.

From the Devil City deep in the Taklamakan Desert to the Hanging Temple on the Pamir Plateau, pursuit and intrigue unfold in one extreme location after another.

When Lin Yuan and Qin Lu, a bodyguard with a special forces background, reach the final vault, they find neither mountains of gold nor seas of silver, but a startling secret capable of rewriting the history of human civilization:

What Xuanzang ultimately hid was not wealth, but a warning from “beyond the heavens.”