Qingshigou, deep in the Qinling Mountains, is a hidden realm absent from every map, and the place where Chen Feng grew up. Mountains surround it on three sides, with a sheer cliff on the fourth. Its muddy trail is the only link to the outside world, and it hides ancient legends known to no one.
His father died young and his mother left. Chen Feng was raised by his Buddhist grandmother, but strange nightmares plagued him from childhood: a woman in red shoes, a comb made of human bone, and gray-white hair beside his pillow. They all hinted that his connection to this land was far from ordinary.
The heavy snow when he was seven, the crying from the back mountain, and a mound of earth that appeared from nowhere planted the seed of curiosity in his heart. At ten, he wandered into a collapsed pit and found a green brick carved with the words “Gengzi Year, Nine Palaces Bury the Dead, Those Who Defy Fate Perish.” He also unearthed the rare ancient coin known as the “Treasure of the Heavenly Strategy Bureau,” drawing him into the secrets of the “Earth Treasury Society” passed down through the generations, and the shadow of a village buried inside the mountain.
Unwilling to believe in the supernatural, Chen Feng began crossing mountains and ridges in search of deserted tombs and forgotten burial grounds. Over the next three years, he dug up Tang-dynasty epitaphs, Ming-dynasty burial objects, and ivory waist tokens, hiding his secrets in a compartment beneath his bed. An old, battered volume called Archaeological Illustrations also gave him a glimpse of a clue: “Seven Stars Accompany the Moon, the Dragon Vein’s Spine Is Broken.”
On his sixteenth birthday, he came upon an unmarked grave in a mass burial ground and a strange coffin beneath an upside-down cypress. The moment he opened it, a woman in a plain robe opened her eyes and smiled, then turned into a skeleton in an instant. All that remained was a cinnabar talisman in his backpack and a line of writing: “What you seek is not underground, but in the sky.”
From ancient tombs and hidden graves belowground to the unknown mysteries above, Chen Feng’s search has only just begun. The yin energy overwhelming the yang in Qingshigou, the Earth Treasury Society’s legends of retribution, the mysteries of the dragon vein beneath the Seven Stars and Moon, and the mysterious woman who keeps appearing,
