Ten years ago, Lin Ke, leader of an archaeological team, uncovered a Tang dynasty tomb that should never have existed beneath an excavation pit in Xiazhuang, Xi'an. Seven stone chambers, seven skeletons seated facing east, and seven scrolls of silk. On the last page of the sixth scroll was a star chart, with a line of tiny writing in the corner: the seventh day of the seventh month, the tenth year of Kaiyuan. It was his son Lin Yuan's birthday. He bit his fingertip, pressed a bloody fingerprint onto the scroll, sealed away the final volume, filled in the pit, and left. He stayed away for ten years.
Ten years later, construction began at the Taikoo Li site, and Lin Yuan led his team there. The same patch of ground, the same people, the same underground palace. Why had his father's hand trembled back then? What exactly was written in the seventh scroll? Why had the seven people underground for twelve hundred years remained seated without the slightest tilt? The lineage endures. He remembers.
