I Walked into My Own Grave

I Walked Into My Own Tomb

Before my father died, he gave me a mysterious bloodstained silk manuscript. It described an ancient tomb deep in the mountains of Yunnan.

When I led an expedition team to find the tomb, I discovered that the tomb-raiders depicted in the murals had faces exactly like mine.

Inside the stone coffin, a thousand-year-old corpse suddenly opened its eyes and smiled eerily at me.

"You finally came. I've been waiting for you for a long time."

When my dad died, he was clutching half of a bloodstained silk manuscript, his eyes wide as he stared at the old, swaying chandelier on our ceiling. He kept repeating just one sentence: "Don't go... Don't go looking for..." His breath caught in his throat, wheezing like a broken bellows for a long time, but he never managed to spit out those final two words. His hand let go, his body went rigid, and the half-sheet, charred-looking thing that felt like human skin drifted down to my feet.

The light bulb in the old house flashed with a sharp pop, then went out. I stood in the darkness, smelling incense and death mingled together, and felt as if my father's ghost were crouched on the rafters, twitching like that broken light and watching me with cold eyes.