The Secrets of Loulan: Buried Beneath the Sands for a Thousand Years

I spent ten years picking up stones in Lop Nur. The villagers called me an idiot.

One day, I dug a stone tablet covered in strange writing out of the sand. Somehow, I could read it.

The tablet said: Loulan did not fall because of a lack of water. It fell because of a secret. Everyone who learns that secret must die.

An archaeology team arrived that very day. Professor Lin, the team leader, said he had seen this tablet thirty years ago. Of the five people who saw it, four were already dead. That night, the fifth died with sand pouring from every orifice.

I didn’t run. There was another line on the back of the tablet: “The blood of a city guardian can ward off one calamity of death.”

And I am the last city guardian in the world.

After that, I followed the archaeology team into dry wells, dug up tombs filled with a thousand corpses, and descended into an underground river city. With every tablet we found, the truth behind Loulan’s disappearance became clearer. It wasn’t a natural disaster or a war. The king of Loulan had made a deal with “outsiders.”

He traded the memories of an entire city for a hollow form of immortality.

The price was that the people of Loulan buried themselves alive in the yellow sands, neither living nor dead, waiting for someone to open the door and awaken them. And I was the one chosen by blood to be that key.

But the seventh tablet was blank. In the mirror, there was only one question:

“Will you open the door, or bury the secret in the sand once more?”

Aygul, who stayed with me to the end, was descended from the seekers of the lost city, and the only person who might be able to kill me.

She cried many times, never letting me see.

In the end, she gave me her knife and walked into the sandstorm.