1974: A Tomb Raider's Beginnings on the Loess Hills

[Audiobook version now available] [Tomb raiding is illegal, and breaking the law can land you behind bars for life] [Tomb raiding + suspense + historical eras + ensemble cast + redemption of human nature]

Terminally ill veteran tomb raider Lu Ze tells his nephew the lifelong nightmare that has haunted him from his hospital bed.

He was born into a poor farming family. At sixteen, desperate to save his father’s life, he was led into the tomb-raiding trade by an old man who lived alone and smoked a long-stemmed pipe. From then on, his life was spent alongside the yellow earth, adrift in a sea of tombs and ghostly lights.

From the desolate, lonely graves in Qian County, Shaanxi, to the sprawling gang of the Northern Guanzhong faction; from the mirrored maze hidden in the mists of the Central Plains to the millennia-old mold poison in the secret tombs of Southern Chu... With the ancestral “inspection, listening, questioning, and diagnosis” techniques taught by his master, he became Lu Tanlong, a name that struck fear into both the underworld and the legitimate world.

But he had seen too much. In a Ming dynasty prince’s tomb, his master suffocated to death in poisonous gas. In a Han dynasty tomb in Bozhou, his partner turned against him over a golden cauldron. In a cavern on Mount Longhu, toxic fumes gave people bizarre hallucinations...

It was only when his apprentice, Little Sichuan, landed in prison for his greed that Lu Ze finally came to his senses outside an ancient Western Xia tomb in the Helan Mountains. He gave up the treasure within his reach and guarded it in silence for three years.

Now, with his life coming to an end, he writes down the tomb-raiding techniques he spent half a lifetime mastering, only to burn the manuscript to ashes just before he dies.

“Earth can bury a body, and it can bury a heart. Steal from others, and in the end you steal your own soul.”

This is the lifelong confession of a tomb raider, and the history of the vanishing underground world of China’s ancient relics.

When an archaeological team finally discovers that intact Western Xia tomb, no one knows that beneath an unremarkable shrub beside it lies the name of a man who once struck fear into the entire trade.