My name is Chen Shanhe. When I was nineteen, my father died of illness, leaving me buried in debt. I made ends meet by pedaling a tricycle and collecting scrap.
A Han dynasty pottery shard led me into the northern school of tomb raiding.
My master, Old Zhou, had a lame leg. He taught me how to read soil and identify tombs, dig passages, and scatter the earth. He had only three rules: never hunt for treasure after the rooster crows, always refill a tomb passage, and never touch fresh grave goods stained with blood.
I thought this was just a trade that let you earn a living with your skills, until I found half a jade fragment carved with the character “Jing” beside a skeleton whose skull had been crushed by falling rocks in a Western Han tomb at the foot of Mangshan.
When my master saw that character, his face looked worse than a corpse's.
From Luoyang to Guanzhong, from desert to snowy wilderness, from beneath the waters of Qiandaohu to the sheer cliffs of Bashu: thirty years of jianghu grudges, a strange map pieced together from four broken jade plaques, a state forgotten by history, and a bloody case within my master's sect were all bound together by this thread.
Third Master Zhao hid a blade behind his smile, while Boss Huang had connections everywhere. Some people lost their lives over these jade plaques, some were crippled, and one person personally returned them to the state.
The Wuzhu coin in my pocket is the one I secretly kept the first time I entered a tomb.
All these years, it has weighed on my conscience.
