At the end of the Tang dynasty, General Qin was executed. His personal guard, Huang Lie, fled into the Min Mountains with Qin's corpse and a secret human-skin scroll. In an ancient witch city, he performed a blood sacrifice of a thousand people and forged an undying blood corpse. A Wudang master gave his life to make a blood sacrifice at the formation's core, sealing the tomb with a Soul-Suppressing Pearl. Taoist boys from the Wang and Wu families have guarded the tomb for generations, making their rounds once every sixty years.
In 1992, tomb-guarding descendants Wang Bo and Wu Yue reunite at Yangcheng Medical University and return to the Min Mountains with an expedition team. But when the luminous pearl is removed from the formation, the seal begins to weaken, revealing in turn an underground maze, a flesh-and-blood altar, an underground river filled with blind fish, and a witch city built on an inverted bagua formation. The two repeatedly come close to death amid waves of spiders, poisonous miasma behind iron chains, and a cultivated Gu King. Relying on their talisman pendants and sheer will, they turn the evil formation against itself, set the abyss ablaze, and escape, bringing the truth from Weng Shuhe's hidden casket back to the world.
After surviving the calamity, they keep the secret buried and make a life for themselves in the ordinary world. But in 2029, as the sixty-year cycle nears its end, a tunnel-boring machine accidentally breaks through the Dragon-Breaking Stone Gate buried deep underground. The thousand-year-old seal may be on the verge of collapse. This novel uses an adventure-mystery story to explore fate and human nature, warning of the limits of greed and reckless action.
