A Retired Special Forces Soldier Digs Up the Treasure Appraiser CEO's Ancestral Grave

Retired special forces king Lin Ye walks into an antiques shop with his family jade pendant, hoping to raise money for his mother’s surgery. The beautiful CEO Su Qingmo takes one look and offers him a sky-high price. “This is a fine Song-dynasty imitation of a Han piece. I’ll take it. But I’d rather have you.” My company is looking for a consultant who can conduct “on-site inspections” of ancient ruins. The salary is 500,000 yuan a month, paid a year in advance. I thought the job was about appraising artifacts.

Until my first “field assignment,” when I joined her team on a nighttime raid on an unmarked grave, pointed a gun at grave robbers to drive them off, and seized a bronze ritual wine cup they’d just pulled from a tomb. Su Qingmo wiped the mud from the cup, as composed as if she were in a meeting room. “Consultant Lin, the real antiques market is underground. Our competitors have never been auction houses. They’re grave-robbing gangs and international smugglers.” I laughed. So it was my old line of work after all. From then on, I used counter-sniper tactics to check for threats at auctions, military surveying techniques to recreate tomb layouts, and battlefield first aid skills to help her determine whether “blood staining” on antiques was genuine.

Together, we stirred up the antiques world. Then, inside a Western Xia royal tomb, we found half a tiger tally that fit my family jade pendant perfectly.

The sound of iron armor scraping came from deep within the tomb. On the satellite phone, Su Qingmo’s voice trembled as it never had before. “Lin Ye, the last page of my grandfather’s archaeological notes says, ‘When the tiger tally is made whole, the tomb guardian will awaken.’” “I think... we just dug up my family’s ancestral inheritance.”