Mountain Guardian: Blood Oath at the Imperial Mausoleum

Deep in the Greater Khingan Range lies a century-old blood oath: anyone who sets foot in the Taiqing Imperial Mausoleum becomes a living sacrifice to its mountain guardian.

On his first day as the new mountain guardian, college student Liu Tianqing runs into a gang of armed, modern-day bandits in a wooden cabin. Their leader, Third Master Cui, presses a box cannon to his temple and forces him to lead them to the legendary Taiqing Imperial Mausoleum, said to hold the secret arts of the Qing imperial dragon vein. Even more chilling, these desperadoes reveal a secret about his parents’ disappearance twenty years ago.

From bloody entrails dug up by a three-fingered mountain demon to a corpse-scented devil’s lair where heavenly-burial flowers bloom, Liu Tianqing is forced to maneuver between the compass of the Tomb-Watching Guards and the bandits’ gun barrels. When his parents’ bones, marked with blue dragon patterns, surface from beneath the ice, he finally understands his grandfather’s dying words: the mountain guardian’s duty is not to protect the forest, but to guard against the demons lurking in people’s hearts...

Northeastern bandit slang collides with tomb-raiding secrets, as strange snow-mountain tales meet a battle of human nature. In this deadly forest at -40°C, the most dangerous thing isn’t the thousand-year-old tomb. It’s making it out alive.