The Bronze Secret Files

The Tianyan lineage is a bronze appraisal family with a three-thousand-year legacy, guardians of China’s cultural heritage.

Twenty years ago, the international cultural relic smuggling syndicate Ghost Hand Tower colluded with a traitor from their sect and orchestrated a massacre. All 137 members of the Tianyan lineage were killed. Only Chen Shisan, the lineage’s seal-holder, escaped into the depths of the Qinling Mountains with half a bronze tiger tally and a fragment of the Secret Bronze Archives.

Twenty years later, as Chen Shisan lay dying, he passed on the lineage’s three supreme arts, the Bone-Piercing Eye, Rejuvenating Hands, and Exquisite Heart, along with the sect’s final instructions, to his sole disciple, Lin Yan.

With half a tiger tally in hand, Lin Yan leaves the Qinling Mountains and enters the treacherous world of antiques.

With eyes that see through authenticity and forgery, he exposes scams involving cleverly disguised counterfeits, sees through deadly traps in ancient tomb passages, and dismantles schemes to launder national treasures through corporate capital. He turns one scheme against another, maneuvering through a battlefield where truth and falsehood clash.

With hands that restore the old to its original state, he repairs bronze treasures shattered thousands of years ago, uncovers historical truths from broken artifacts, tracks down vital clues to the massacre, and brings national treasures lost overseas back to their homeland.

From the street stalls of Gusu Antique City to the ancient tombs of Mount Mang in Luoyang; from the auction rooms of Shanghai’s top auction houses to the cross-border smuggling docks of Lingnan, Lin Yan uncovers the truth behind the massacre one step at a time. He gathers all twelve bronze fragments and unlocks the Secret Bronze Archives, which record the whereabouts of more than a thousand lost national treasures.

Facing Ghost Hand Tower’s layers of assassination attempts and the ultimate showdown with the sect traitor, he never forgets the Tianyan lineage’s founding principles:

First understand people, then antiques; first judge the heart, then the treasure. He would sooner sacrifice himself than abandon a national treasure.

In the end, he will bring China’s lost treasures home, make the perpetrators pay for their crimes in blood, and ensure that a cultural legacy passed down for three thousand years continues to burn like a living flame