My name is Zhou Mancang, from Changsha.
When I was nineteen years old, I pried open an unclaimed wooden box in the luggage room of Changsha Railway Station. There was a male corpse lying in the box. The corpse's pocket contained the ID photo I had just taken that day, and my name was also signed on the consignment note.
I am still alive, but my employer has received a death cancellation form stamped with a red seal.
In order to find out who was anxious to make me dead, I followed my uncle He Danian into the coffin tunnel under the cargo yard. That coffin path led to a batch of things transported with the names of the dead, and also led to the old account of my father Zhou Changlin's disappearance for fifteen years.
From then on, I followed my uncle to look at soil, identify roads, palm eyes, and visit tombs. From the abandoned theater in Ningxiang to the sunken ship in Dongting Lake, from the black mines in Xuefeng Mountain to the Iron Buddha Temple with all the dead cards, there are mechanisms, poisonous smoke and unexplained strange things under the tomb, and there are people who are plotting, snatching accounts, and colleagues who are ready to take advantage of others at any time.
I don't have any ancestral secrets, and I wasn't born knowing this. When I first went to the grave, I just wanted to keep my name and earn enough money to live a good life for my family. Later, I saw more dead people and more living people were carried out of the tombs. I realized that the person holding the pot was not only responsible for how the goods were divided, but also decided whether the person in the pot should be killed and whether he could come back alive.
This is not a treasure-hunting saga.
This is an old story told by a Changsha native master himself after snatching his name from the dead.
