Hooves Across the Nether Ruins

In the first lunar month of the Bingwu year, 2026, a construction site on Mount Mang in Luoyang suddenly collapsed, revealing the tomb of a Tang dynasty “Tomb-Guarding General.” Lin Yan, a graduate student in archaeology, is assigned to take part in the emergency excavation. Inside the tomb, he discovers a jade horse talisman engraved with the words, “Bingwu opens the path to the netherworld; the scarlet steed tramples the ruins.” That night, a strange cave-in strikes the site, and the jade talisman vanishes. Yet an identical scarlet mark appears in the palm of Lin Yan’s right hand. Three days later, a blind old man calling himself a “Guardian of the Ruins” finds Lin Yan and reveals something astonishing: “You’re not the first. Every sixty years, someone born in a Bingwu Year, the Year of the Horse, becomes a ‘Ruin Walker.’ In the last Bingwu Year, your grandfather entered the eye of the ruins beneath Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum. He never came back out.” From then on, Lin Yan is drawn into a secret legacy stretching back two thousand years: from the underground palace of Mount Li to the ghostly ruins of Yunmeng, from the shadow city in the Helan Mountains to the Return-to-Ruins Trench in the South China Sea, generations of Ruin Walkers have fought with their lives on the line to reinforce nine “eyes of the ruins” in every Bingwu Year, preventing the “Nether Ruins” deep within the earth’s veins from consuming the living world. This year, the seal on the ninth eye is about to break...