Northern School Tomb Appraiser: The First Tomb I Robbed Wasn't Right

Grave robbers never see the light of day, and never meet a good end. Their lives are tied to three feet of yellow earth, and their fortunes are stained with blood debts.

That is the business of the yin trade.

Once you get into this line of work, there's no turning back.

On my very first dig, I encountered three strange things.

The Luoyang shovel went seventeen meters down. The soil it brought up dated to the Warring States period, but the tomb on the surface was clearly from the Ming dynasty.

My grandfather's name was carved into the blue bricks in the tomb passage. The cuts were fresh, as if they'd been made only three days earlier.

When the coffin was opened, there were no bones inside, only a yellowed notebook. On its cover, it said: "Jiu'er, don't go any farther."

My name is Chen Jiu, grandson of Chen Shoushan, a Northern School tomb seeker and connoisseur.

My grandfather disappeared in a tomb collapse in 1998. Everyone said he was dead.

But the handwriting in this notebook was his.

To repay the 120,000 yuan in loan-shark debt my stroke-stricken father owed, I broke the family rules and teamed up with a veteran from the Southern School and a mute. It was my first time on a dig.

Identifying soil, digging tunnels, checking oxygen, venting gas, clearing quicksand, dismantling spring traps, opening coffins. There were no zombies, no ghosts or gods, only suffocation from a lack of oxygen, the despair of cave-ins, and the unfathomable human heart.

Beneath this Ming dynasty tomb lay another tomb from the Warring States period.

And what my Chen family had guarded for generations was no mere tomb-raiding skill, but the secret of an ancient imperial mausoleum.