Guanshan Hall

My name is Zhou Guan. I’m twenty-eight, and I run a feng shui shop in an urban village called Guanshan Hall. Other feng shui masters look for signs of good or bad fortune. I look at a site and ask one thing: Is it a person buried beneath the ground, or something else? My grandfather was a feng shui master too. Eight years ago, he died in this shop. The police concluded it was a heart attack. I didn’t believe them. The night before he died, he met a “guest” in the shop. By the next day, he was dead, and one of the rubbings of the ley-line patterns on the Mountain-Sealing Compass had vanished. I’ve kept this shop for eight years, ostensibly to make a living, but in truth I’ve been waiting for the people from back then to come looking for me again. Then the urban village was slated for demolition, and an excavator stopped in front of my family’s ancestral grave. The earth was black as ink. The needle on the Mountain-Sealing Compass didn’t point north. It plunged straight down at my feet. The excavator operator jumped out, his face deathly pale. “I heard someone talking beneath the ground...” That night, I pressed my ear to the earth and listened to its veins. I confirmed that the grave had two chambers: an empty coffin above, and the real coffin below. From deep beneath the ground came the sound of chiseling. Two groups were working at the same time, separated by a single layer of earth. Only later did I learn that my Zhou ancestors belonged to the Ming dynasty’s Bureau of Mountain Surveyors, and had been tasked with sealing nine ancient tombs. All thirty-seven members of the family were slaughtered, and the surviving branch changed its name and went into hiding. The ancestral precept, “If the mountain does not move, no one dies,” was not a curse. It was a warning. Someone wants to break the seal and seize the power of the ley lines, then sell fortune-altering services for seven figures a job. They’ve been looking for me for eight years. Now they’ve finally found me. And the ancestral compass in my hands is the key to opening the door. Every time I use a spell, I see a figure growing clearer and clearer. Is it the seal my grandfather left behind, or the thing beneath the ground that must never wake?