Northwest Secrets: I Dig Through Five Provinces with Ancient Building Craftsmanship

Folk Customs and Mystery | Intrigue and Suspense | Exploration | Ancient Building Mechanisms | Supernatural Horror | No System In the late autumn of 2012, a black cypresswood chest wrapped in seven blood-red ropes crashed into the carpentry shop at Lin Min’s home in the middle of the night. The person who delivered it died on the spot. Even more unsettling was this: his grandfather had been dead for three years, yet his voice came from inside the chest. “Min, pass Grandpa the chisel...” Only then did Lin Min understand that the three rules of carpentry his grandfather had left him before dying were no mere scare stories for children. Never open the door at midnight. Never touch bloodstained wood. If a stranger delivers a chest, leave as soon as you see the ropes. Unfortunately, he had broken all three. A corpse mark that spelled certain death forced Lin Min to shoulder the fifty-six-pound Resurrection Chest and follow the trail his grandfather had left thirty years earlier, deep into deserted villages, abandoned kilns, sheer cliffs, fissures in the earth, and underground forbidden grounds no one dared enter. Then he saw it with his own eyes: Deep within an abyss, eight enormous iron chains, each as thick as a barrel, stretched across empty space. An ancient wooden hall that defied all reason had hung upside down in the darkness for a thousand years! Others rely on courage to enter forbidden grounds. Lin Min relies on the carpentry skills passed down through his family. He reads mortise and tenon joints, judges load-bearing structures, dismantles mechanisms, reads the feng shui, crosses sheer cliffs, and breaks into ancient halls. As one sealed ruin after another is opened, he gradually discovers that what his grandfather brought back from the northwest all those years ago was far more than a secret. It was a trail of the dead, stretching across five provinces and buried for decades. And the chest on his back... Is only the key.