Xu Nian, the last surviving child of the Yu family, was adopted by the Xu family as a child and knows nothing of his origins.
At fifteen, he entered an ancient tomb known as the Earth Dragon and became trapped in an illusion woven by an ancient will.
In the illusion, he inherited the legacy of the Yu family's ancestors and met Yu Zhong, a skeletal evil spirit who had guarded the tomb for a thousand years. Though reduced to bones, the old servant crawled out of a secret passage and placed a knife hilt made of broken stone in Xu Nian's hands. He traded a thousand years of solitude for Xu Nian's life.
When Xu Nian awoke from the illusion, he was still fifteen. All the power he had gained by killing the commander of the Shadow Guard Division in the illusion was gone. Only a blunt stone knife formed from the broken hilt, a token of the Yu family's legacy, and a tiny gold-red mark between his brows remained as proof that everything in the illusion had really happened.
Yu Zhong was still there, transformed into an incredibly fine gold-red line on the stone knife, beating in time with Xu Nian's heart.
To awaken the scattered fragments of the Benevolent Dragon's will hidden in seven ancient forbidden tombs, Xu Nian set out alone on a tomb-raiding journey. The nuclear-radiation crystal reefs in the ruins of the South Sea Dragon Palace, the living-root poison miasma in the Eastern Border's tree-knot maze, the subterranean fires and magma fissures of the Western Border's Flame Tomb, the eternally frozen mass grave on the Northern Border's snowy plains, the corpse-filled mire in the Southern Border's marshes, the uncontrolled electric arcs of the Central Thunder City, and the time-warped ruins in the northwestern desert: each of the seven tombs, sealed by nuclear contamination and ancient mechanisms, tested a different kind of resolve.
In the face of utter desperation, he must not run. When outmatched, he must not retreat. When everyone thinks he is about to fall, he must only grip his knife tighter.
"Remember this: the deepest nightmare in this tomb isn't the mechanisms or the poison miasma. It's me."
