Records of Chang'an's Ley Lines

In the fifth year of Huichang, Emperor Wuzong of Tang ordered the suppression of Buddhism. In Chang'an, 4,600 temples were torn down, 260,000 monks and nuns were laicized, bronze Buddhas were melted down for coinage, and iron implements were turned into farm tools. Pei Qian, an assistant judicial officer in Jingzhao Prefecture, was temporarily assigned to inventory objects at the demolition sites, a miserable task no one wanted. Then, in the crypt beneath the first temple, he discovered that the clay seal had been broken before they arrived, the murals had been removed overnight, and a space far older than the Tang Dynasty lay hidden deep within the walls. The more temples they demolished, the stranger the things they uncovered became. Well water changed color, workers all dreamed the same dream, and cracks appeared in the ground where none should have been. A laicized monk told him that the temples had not been built on empty ground. They were lids. Someone was after the same thing he was: an occultist from the Directorate of Astronomy. Behind that man stood Zhao Guizhen, the Daoist priest Wuzong trusted most. Amid the chaos of the Buddhist suppression, Pei Qian had to uncover the truth before his rival: what exactly was buried beneath Chang'an? What had the demolished temples been holding down? And when he finally found the answer, the question before him was not “How can it be used?” but “Should anyone be allowed to know?” Inspired by Duan Chengshi's Tang Dynasty collection, Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang. Every strange tale in this book has its original in that thousand-year-old classic.