My name is Chen Sanhe, a poor kid from some backwater in Northeast China.
As my grandfather lay dying, he clutched my hand and stared at me with wide eyes. "Stay away from our ancestral trade. It'll get you killed."
He left behind an incomplete copy of The Secret Arts of Yin-Yang Feng Shui, along with a Luoyang shovel that had been passed down for three hundred years.
I thought I'd spend my whole life collecting scrap, until a creditor came to demand a hundred thousand yuan. If I didn't pay within three days, he'd take my life.
With no other choice, I followed my fellow villager, Scar, into my first tomb.
That was when I learned for the first time:
A corpse in a coffin might have a luminous pearl in its mouth, and the moment you reach in, its eyelids might twitch.
There could be another tomb beneath a tomb, an ancient Ming tomb pressing down on a Qing tomb, the dead pressing down on the living.
My grandfather had once been known as the Yin-Yang Shovel, a legendary figure in this line of work.
From that day on, I was swept up in a secret that had been passed down for a hundred years:
The Yin-Yang Sect, the Yin Ghost Sect, the Nation-Guarding Cauldron, the underground city...
I discovered that the most terrifying thing in this world isn't ghosts. It's the human heart.
