My name is Chen Pojiu. I just got out after serving seven years in prison. Nobody knows that during the gold-rush days around the turn of the millennium, I was the youngest tomb-raiding boss in Chang'an's underground black market. When I was seventeen, I dropped out of school and started collecting scrap. Some thugs in the antiques district beat me until my head bled, and pickpockets even stole the only three thousand yuan I had to save my life. Just when I was so desperate I wanted to jump off the Weihe River Bridge, a bony hand grabbed me. That was Qiao Ye, the benefactor who changed my life. He brought me into one of the darkest and most lucrative trades among society's outcasts: tomb raiding. To survive and never be humiliated again, I learned the secret jargon, trained in digging, and inherited the rare book Qiao Ye kept hidden away, The Guide to Hidden Mountains. From the Han-dynasty tombs of Mangshan in Luoyang to the shifting-sand death pits of the Western Xia's Heishuicheng, we fought leeches for our lives and battled rival raiders in ruthless backstabbing. There were no flying zombie corpses in those tombs, only human hearts more terrifying than ghosts and gods. This memoir reeks of money and blood, recording how I rose from an insignificant nobody and clawed my way to a fortune through a trail of blood.
