My name is Chen Bei. I make a living selling antiques from a street stall in the antique market, and my greatest talent is talking a fifty-yuan fake into looking like it’s worth fifty thousand.
Then one day, the owner of a hot pot restaurant took a liking to me. He handed me a hundred thousand yuan and asked me to lead a team into the Taklamakan Desert to find a legendary jade pendant from Loulan.
The team was one bizarre character after another. Our sponsor was a chubby hot pot restaurant owner who was always sneaking messages on his shattered phone. Qu Zijin, an aloof female archaeologist, was as cold as ice, yet wore a red cord on her wrist to ward off evil. And then there was Lin Xiaoman, a rich kid who’d come to the desert to make Douyin videos, with half a suitcase of face masks and two bottles of Moutai.
I thought it’d be a taxpayer-funded vacation. But on the very first day, near an abandoned military post, we dug up a patch of earth someone had recently disturbed and a cigarette butt from a brand that had stopped being made ten years ago.
Someone had gotten here before us.
At night, a woman’s cries drifted from the dunes. Qu Zijin said it was “singing sand,” a natural phenomenon.
But on the ground beside our campfire was a clear trail of bare footprints, and they belonged to none of us.
