1944, Changbai Mountain. Four hundred and twenty-seven laborers were sealed inside an underground fortress, leaving behind an unfinished game of chess. Someone carved four words into a bone: Don’t forget me.
2024, Chen Jiuyuan gets a phone call.
After that, he travels through five places across the land:
In a steel fortress in the northeast lies a chessboard laid out in human bones. Beneath the reefs of the South China Sea, an ancient cannon from the Opium War has kept watch for a hundred and eighty years. Deep in the northwestern desert, the top-secret report of seven engineers lies buried alongside the shifting sands. In the wilds of the southwest, the souls of tens of thousands of soldiers from the expeditionary force are still waiting to hear, “Come home.” Beneath a corner tower in Beijing, a secret kept for a century waits to be seen.
He’s no tomb raider. He works for the National Cultural Heritage Administration.
Foreign forces have their eyes on every site. Someone is racing him to each one. He has to descend into them all, into places the living dare not go, and bring the stories of the dead back to the surface.
He has two partners: a taciturn veteran of the special forces, and a doctoral student whose grandfather died in the underground fortress. Their mission has never been to dig up treasure. It is to give those who were forgotten one more chance to see the world.
Some say that once you go down, you’ll never come back.
He says, “Someone has to go down.”
Across these ancient lands, dragon bones lie everywhere.
As long as someone remembers them, they are not truly dead.
