In Changsha in the year 2000, fifteen-year-old He Jiaxing is struggling with his mother’s serious illness and his family’s poverty. He follows his uncle, He Mantong, a renowned tomb appraiser in the area around Nanmenkou, into the tomb-raiding trade. He Mantong is recognized throughout the underworld as a master tomb raider. With a family skill for reading the earth to locate tombs, he can pinpoint a thousand-year-old burial site at a glance, even in the wilderness.
On an unnamed barren hill in Wangchengpo, He Jiaxing witnesses a real tomb raid for the first time. It is a brick-chamber tomb from the Western Han dynasty, with a thick earthen mound and a well-preserved burial chamber. When they pry open the roof and enter the dark chamber, no one expects it to become the longest night of their lives.
A skeleton lies curled on its side in a decayed lacquer coffin. Scattered beside it are jade discs, jade burial pieces, bronze artifacts, and a jade seal with a chi-dragon handle engraved with “Seal of the Marquis of Liuyang.” The moment He Mantong reaches for the seal, the skeleton that has slept for two thousand years suddenly moves. It sits up in the coffin and clamps its bony hand around the wrist of the living.
After a heart-pounding escape, He Jiaxing returns to Pozi Street with a hundred yuan in payment and a mysterious purplish-blue mark on his wrist. He doesn’t know that the jade seal of the Marquis of Liuyang, the thing that climbed out of the tomb, and the thousand-year-old secret of the Marquis of Liuyang in the Western Han Kingdom of Changsha have only just begun to entwine themselves with his fate.
