In the tenth year of the Republic of China, the Shen family in Jiangnan was wiped out overnight. Shen Yanqiu, a former Qing Mo Jin captain, wandered the world carrying the broken "Atlas of Mountains and Rivers" and the bronze key that his mother stuffed into her palm before she died.
Becoming a disciple of the old leader of Xiling, befriending the arrogant and loyal Lao Mao, and the honest and brave Iron Hand, the three young men started from the Tomb of the Tusi King in western Hunan, and went all the way out of the desert in the west, to the Miao border in the south, and to the east to explore the Qin Tombs under the sea. Under the siege of the expedition teams of the great powers, Japanese spies, and the mysterious organization "Jiuling Society", they pieced together the ancient secret map one by one.
In the ancient tombs, poisonous insects of the government are startling at every step; in the rivers and lakes, the undercurrent of sectarian grudges is surging; among the mountains and rivers, Western gunboats and Japanese bayonets are sharpening at the doorstep.
Until he discovered that the so-called emperor's secret medicine of "immortality" was just a thousand-year scam that used people as bait. And the enemies who destroyed his entire family were actually people connected to him by blood.
What is hidden in the tomb is not gold and jade, but human hearts. Mountains and rivers are overturned, and immortality is a foolish dream.
Sixteen years of gold-making travels, four volumes of mountain and river legends - from western Hunan to the desert, from Miao territory to Kunlun, how a young man grew up to be a mountain guard in troubled times, and how he burned the map when the gunshots were fired at Marco Polo Bridge and led his best friends into the torrent of the Anti-Japanese War.
