Qianling Mausoleum

Chen Shisan, the last eye-catcher of the Northern Sect in Luoyang, Henan, has known a rule since he was a child - the male member of the Chen family cannot live past the age of forty. Before his death, my grandfather left half a picture of the tomb passage and a sentence: "If you want to break the curse, you have to enter the Qianling Mausoleum." Qianling, the joint tomb of Wu Zetian and Li Zhi, Huang Chao's 400,000 people couldn't dig it, Wen Tao was caught in a storm, and Sun Lianzhong's explosives couldn't explode it. I took five fellow villagers from Henan and used a Luoyang shovel to find the real entrance to the tomb under the wordless monument. Thirty-nine layers of stone bars were sealed with molten iron, but they were melted from the inside. There were fresh fingernail scratches in the tomb passage, and there were sixty-one human heads piled in the front hall. The murals on the wall told me that the person buried in Qianling Mausoleum was not an emperor, but a "thing" who had been imprisoned for thirteen hundred years. And our Chen family has been guarding this lock for generations. Now, the lock is about to open.