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Final input: 「Please begin describing the opening scene」

(The AI will capture a dramatic moment in the river of history, bringing that era vividly to life.)

The late summer night in Xi'an, 1990.

From this dusty rooftop near the Wild Goose Pagoda, the lingering scent of coal smoke from dying communal stoves, the garlic and cumin from bustling Muslim Quarter stalls. Distant karaoke TV sets blared tinny love songs.

Bicycle bells clattered through lanes where old women sat fanning themselves on bamboo stools, their radio sets crackling through the night with the last broadcasts from Shaanxi People's Radio. A peddler's three-wheeled cart, piled high with watermelons, creaked past a row of newly installed neon signs that buzzed and spat, their pink and green characters advertising hair salons and "disco dance halls." Somewhere, a group of middle-aged men in white undershirts sat around a concrete table under a plane tree, slapping down cards and pouring beer into enamel cups printed with faded red characters for "Serve the People."

Hu Bayi, Shirley Yang, and Fatty Wang also appeared here.

A makeshift table had been formed from crates, lit by a single gas lamp that drew frantic moths. The remains of a simple meal—lamb skewers, stone-baked flatbread, a few bottles of Xinghua Village beer—had been pushed aside. A half-crushed pack of "Golden Monkey" cigarettes lay near Wang Kaixuan's elbow, next to a plastic lighter embossed with the Panda brand.

Wang Kaixuan, shirtless and gleaming with sweat, fanned himself with a bamboo fan that advertised a toothpowder. His singlet hung over the back of a crate, soaked through. A mosquito coil burned on the floor beside him.

「I'm telling you, Old Hu,」he said,「we're up here feeding mosquitoes, separated from the old gentleman underground by just a layer of dirt. He's lying in 'using mercury for the hundred rivers, seas and oceans, with mechanical circulation,' and we're drinking soda that's thirty cents a bottle. The contrast is downright tragic.」

Hu Bayi's eyes were on the dark, rolling silhouette of Mount Li to the east.

「Mercury rivers...」he said.「...Sima Qian's one sentence has driven people mad for two thousand years.」

「Fatty, that's the entire underground palace's 'bloodline.' And probably, its biggest 'killing line' too.」

Shirley Yang sat cross-legged on a straw mat. Before her lay a large piece of xuan paper bearing a dark, intricate ink rubbing. It was a recent, risky acquisition.

The source was a old man, from Lintong who claimed his grandfather had been a laborer on a secret Kuomintang survey in the 30s, and this was pressed from a stone fragment "no longer there": overlapping cloud patterns, ancient star charts, and at its heart, a stylized, multi-layered diagram of a city gate. Its pillars were twisted like ancient trees, and the "path" through it spiraled inwards, descending into a dark center labelled with two stark seal characters: 「壺天」 — Hú Tiān, "Pot Heaven," a Daoist term for a miniature, complete cosmos.

「Emperor Wu of Han sought immortality, building 'Dew Receiving Plates,' wanting to catch something from the heavens. But Qin Shi Huang... he seems to have been more ambitious. He wanted to create his own 'heaven,' a complete, inverted world under his control, buried underground.」

She looked up.「This 'Pot Heaven' on the rubbing... it's the blueprint for that world's entrance. The spiral—it's a kind of... ritual. A mechanism for twisting the living's 'sequence' into the dead's 'eternity.'」

Hu Bayi crouched beside her.

「The recent feng isn't right.」

「...Near the northern foothills of Mount Li, a few old villages, their well water suddenly has a metallic tang. Birds and animals are migrating south. This isn't a precursor to an earthquake. It's... something 'leaking' from below. The timing with us finding this rubbing is too coincidental.」

Fatty stopped fanning.

「Leaking? Leaking what? Two-thousand-year-old mercury vapor, or... some other 'thing'?」

Shirley Yang carefully rolled up the rubbing.

「The last clue Professor Chen gave me before he died was a fragment of a bamboo slip translation: 'When the strange star falls, the golden men melt, the nine-aperture jade turns cold, then the true self is revealed.' We never understood what 'strange star' referred to.」

「But recently, a declassified sealed report from the National Observatory showed that in 210 BC—the year Qin Shi Huang died—there might be a record of a very small meteorite impact in the Guanzhong region. The estimated location is the Mount Li area.」

The rooftop fell silent.

The legendary tomb was a cosmic one. An emperor had perhaps tried to use a piece of a fallen star to forge his eternity.

Hu Bayi stood up.

「The Qi is leaking, the map is found, the stars match up. Time to move.」

「We start at the northern foothills at first light—where the wells taste of metal and the earth is restless. We find the source of that 'leak,' see if the birds and beasts left us any more clues on the ground than they did in the sky.」

He began decisively checking their packs. Canvas satchels, rope, canteens, a first-aid kit, flashlights with spare batteries wrapped in rubber bands. Everything had its place. Everything had been packed the night before.

「Then we find the spot where that old man's grandfather made his rubbing. If the stone is 'no longer there,' the earth itself might still remember its shape. We'll need to confirm the alignment of this 'Pot Heaven' gate against the actual lay of the mountain.」

He tapped the rolled-up rubbing in Shirley Yang's hand.

「Finally,」he said, looking east towards the slumbering silhouette of Mount Li,「We find where the old surveys stopped, where the modern sensors get quiet or crazy. We listen to what the mountain isn't saying. The 'exam paper' starts there, at the threshold. Our job tonight is to read the first question.」

Fatty, with a grunt, finished lacing his boots—sturdy canvas-and-rubber liberation shoes, the kind every rural worker wore, but reinforced at the toe and ankle.

「So, recon first, fight later. Got it. Just point me at the weird-tasting water.」

He stood, hitching up his belt, and crushed the half-empty beer bottle under his heel with a crack that echoed across the rooftop. The gas lamp flickered.

Shirley Yang was the last to rise. She looked at the new member of their team and said:

「{{user}}, you're lucky; you've just joined us, and you're already going to be dealing with the Terracotta Army.」

She slung her canvas bag over one shoulder. A thin silver St. Christopher medal glinted at her throat, half-hidden under her collar.

「Every bit of living thought we bring in—curiosity, fear, even greed—might become a dissonant noise in that underground world, triggering an 'immune response' we can't imagine.」

「So, forget all the tomb knowledge you've learned. Think of yourself as the first living thing to step into a brand new, dark, and hostile 'world.' Your heartbeat, your breath, your intuition when you look into the darkness... these are the 'instruments' we'll rely on most tonight.」

「Are you ready?」

Downstairs, a modified old Beijing Jeep, its lights off, waited silently in the shadow of the alley. Its paint was scratched, its tires caked with mud from a dozen provinces. A faded red slogan on the side had been half painted over, leaving only the ghost of characters: "...advance through the storm..."

The massive shadow of Mount Li under the moonlight seemed, for a moment, to truly begin to breathe.

The autumn of 1980 in Beijing.

In the labyrinthine hutongs of Xicheng, beneath a sky pinpricked with sparse, cold stars, the air was thick with the smell of coal balls burning in communal stoves and the muffled static of wired radio broadcasts.

The city at dusk.

Bicycles had poured through the lanes in endless, ringing streams—black Flying Pigeon and Forever bicycles, their riders wrapped in blue and grey Zhongshan suits.

Old women had emerged to empty slop buckets into communal drains, pausing to exchange hushed gossip about whose daughter had received a factory placement.

The last red slogans still clung to brick walls, their characters chipped but legible: "Carry the struggle through to the end." Beneath them, hand-painted signs for new private repair stalls and "small merchandise counters" had begun to sprout.

The evening market had sold cabbages, turnips, and winter melons from wooden carts, weighed on iron scales, paid for with crumpled ration tickets and coins that clinked in cloth purses.

A woman in a padded jacket and a red armband had argued with a fishmonger over a single wasted tail. Two old men in thick spectacles sat on folding stools by the public water tap, playing chess under a bare bulb strung from a plane tree, their cigarette smoke coiling into the cold air.

A hand-cranked cinema poster outside the neighborhood cultural station showed a pale, heroic figure clutching a red flag, the paper already peeling at the corners.

And somewhere, from an open window, the tinny voice of a radio announcer from the Central People's Broadcasting Station read the day's production quotas in Mandarin, each sentence framed by the staticky hiss of the long-wave band.

---

Now, in the deep night.

The chess players were gone. The water tap dripped into a frozen pan. The only movement was the occasional rattle of a night-soil cart's wheels on cracked cement, or the silhouette of a work-unit truck rumbling past the hutong entrance.

In a secluded, unlit back courtyard, shielded from prying eyes by high, the only light spilled from a single kerosene lamp set on a stone table.

The lamp's flame guttered, wavering shadows of four figures against a backdrop of stacked brick, a rusted tricycle, and a pile of coal briquettes draped in a canvas tarp.

Wang Kaixuan, huddled in a thick cotton-padded jacket and a military surplus cap with the flaps pulled down, blew on his hands.

「Freezing to death... I'm telling you, Old Hu, not holing up at home on a night like this, coming to this broken yard to drink the north wind, just to wait for some 'old Bannerman'? That Sun Dianying business—hasn't the press settled it? Feudal warlord, abandoning darkness and embracing the light. What more flowers can you dig up?」

Hu Bayi sat motionless on a stone stool, his olive-drab overcoat buttoned to the throat, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. A wool scarf, dark and coarse, was wrapped around his neck.

「People are people, and tombs are tombs. These are two separate things.」

「The case of '28, they blasted open Cixi's Dingdong Tomb, Qianlong's Yuling Tomb. But the papers won't tell you what later happened to a few of Sun Dianying's engineers who lived past Liberation.」

「Among the old Jianghu folks of my grandfather's generation, a saying circulated: 'What's buried beneath the Eastern Tombs isn't just the Aisin Gioro family's wealth, but a potent prescription meant to keep their dynasty's mandate from scattering.' Sun Dianying... perhaps only saw the gold and jade, not the prescription.」

Shirley Yang stood slightly apart, leaning against a persimmon tree. She wore a dark wool overcoat, tailored, with a silk scarf tied loosely at her throat.

「My father's academic contacts in the early 50s included a historian who was part of the initial post-liberation cultural relics assessment team for the Eastern Tombs. His personal journal, which I inherited, mentioned a sealed archive box from the cleanup. It contained several rolls of engineering blueprints copied by Sun Dianying's military engineers before the chambers were... looted and damaged.」

She opened the folio, revealing a large, carefully hand-traced diagram on translucent drafting paper. In the dim lamplight, it showed a cross-section of a colossal underground structure.

The burial chambers were clearly marked, but they occupied only the upper third. Below them, drawn in finer, was a vast, multi-layered network of channels, cavities, and nodes, connected in a pattern that resembled neither plumbing nor conventional tombs.

「These blueprints were never published. The official explanation was 'irrelevant military engineering.' But look at this pattern.」

「It doesn't align with any known drainage, ventilation, or defensive system of Qing imperial tombs. Its geometry is repetitive, concentric, and... it originates from a point below the deepest imperial burial chamber, spreading upwards to encompass all major mausoleums in the Eastern Tombs complex.」

Hu Bayi leaned in.

「...This—it's a formation. Using the entire dragon veins of the Eastern Tombs as the body, using the coffins of several Qing emperors as... 'formation anchors'? What they aimed to preserve wasn't their corpses, but the unbroken continuation of the dynasty's fortune.」

Fatty's eyes widened.「Dynastic fortune? That... that kind of thing can be buried and stored? Like cabbages?」

Shirley Yang's voice was hushed.「Think of it as the ultimate Feng Shui manipulation, for institutional immortality. An attempt to weld the fate of a ruling house directly to the foundational energies of the land itself, making one dependent on the other in perpetuity.」

The heavy wooden gate of the courtyard creaked open. A stooped, elderly man slipped in. He wore a patched, dark blue cotton jacket, a knitted cap pulled low over his brow.

This was Old Qi.

He nodded nervously to Hu Bayi, then placed a small, cloth-wrapped bundle on the stone table.

「From the family... left by the old master.」he muttered in a Beijing dialect thick with old inflections.「He was... in Marshal Sun Dianying's engineering battalion, managed the warehouse. This—it's... from deeper down, a side tunnel during construction. The few others who picked up similar things, within two years, all... didn't die well. He said this object brushes against the edges of 'the grand formation below.' It's... the box for the 'medicinal catalyst.'」

With trembling hands, he unwrapped the cloth. Inside was a flat, octagonal bronze case, about the size of a palm. Its surface was covered in intricate, non-Chinese script—Manchu. But at its center was a hollowed-out inlay in the shape of the Eight Trigrams, and within that space, there was a slight, crystalline deposit of a strange substance, glowing with a faint, internal bioluminescence like a trapped deep-sea creature.

Shirley Yang's breath caught.

「Manchu directives... surrounding a Daoist trigram matrix... housing a biological or mineral phosphorescent agent. This is a hybrid artifact. A ritual object from the 'formation.'」

She looked at Old Qi.「Did he say what they were building down there? In those side tunnels?」

Old Qi shook his head rapidly.

「Only said one thing... said there were 'bricks' down there, but not bricks for walking on. They were... bricks for building the 'veins.' And... sounds. Like many people far away... chanting the same words in unison, the melody was very strange.」

After Old Qi left, as silently as he came, the courtyard plunged into a silence.

Shirley Yang gave a mocking smile.「I think I understand the situation now—an attempt to steal eternity for a regime, and the chaos that followed its failure.」

She closed the folio. Then she looked at {{user}} beside her and said:

「Most start with ghost stories in the wilderness. Your initiation begins with the lingering echo of an empire's heartbeat. Congratulations. Your first engagement is with a tomb that dreamt of being a nation, forever. Consider yourself... uniquely fortunate. The descent into history's id begins now.」

「Are you ready to listen to what the mountain has been chanting for fifty years?」

In the distance, a train whistle blew, heading towards the shadowy mountains to the east.

Changsha in the spring of 1991.

The early plum rain had arrived. In the shadow of newly rising commercial buildings, the remains of old Qing and Republican-era courtyards clung on, some marked with the bold red character "拆"—Demolish.

The city was halfway between its old bones and a new skin.

Along Zhongshan Road, bicycles and rattling three-wheeled carts wove through puddles, their drivers huddled under plastic ponchos in bright primary colors—red, blue, yellow—moving. Old women squatted on doorsteps, sorting piles of fresh chilies and garlic shoots under the shelter of dripping eaves. At the corner, a man in a Mao suit of faded blue stood over a charcoal brazier, grilling skewers of stinky tofu.

The buses ran packed, their windows fogged with breath. At every stop, the conductor leaned out the open door and shouted, "上车!上车!" — Get on, get on! . Passengers pressed body to body, clutching woven plastic bags and string-wrapped parcels, the city's daily cargo of fish, vegetables, factory parts, and the occasional caged chicken.

Down near the Xiang River, the old riverside markets still sprawled beneath patched awnings, where boatmen argued over prices and porters with bamboo shoulder poles carried goods up the embankments. Across the water, Orange Island lay low and mist-shrouded, its name a small joke against the grey sky. Beyond it, Yuelu Mountain rose.

New construction was everywhere. Skeleton frames of half-finished concrete buildings thrust up from the old city blocks, their scaffolding wrapped in green safety nets that flapped in the wind. The clang of hammers and the grinding of cement mixers started at dawn and did not stop until after dark. Migrant workers in torn cloth shoes and bamboo safety helmets ate rice from enamel bowls at roadside stalls. They had come from the countryside in tens of thousands, chasing the promise of the new.

But in the old lanes, life went on as it had for generations. A barber set up his chair under a plane tree, shaving a man's head with a straight razor. A letter-writer sat at a small wooden table, composing love letters for a young woman in a factory uniform, her head bowed as she whispered. An old man with a birdcage wrapped in blue cloth shuffled past.

Evening came early under the rain. Neon signs buzzed to life, improvised tubes of pink and green above tiny private restaurants and newly opened "song and dance halls." The first karaoke machines, imported from the coast, had begun to appear in these rooms.

The "Honglou" courtyard was one of many such places—old, half-collapsed, waiting either for restoration or the wrecking ball.

Its name, "Red Chamber," had been poetic once, perhaps a nod to the great novel, perhaps simply to the red-lacquered columns that had long since rotted away. Now the name was ironic. The courtyard's enclosing walls were patched with corrugated iron and salvaged brick. The wooden screens that had once divided its rooms had been ripped out, leaving only the stone sockets where they had stood. The roof tiles lay in broken heaps, thick with moss. A single grey cat watched from a collapsing veranda, then vanished.

Their focus was the central well, long dry and supposedly slated for filling under the new development plan. A patched canvas tarp was stretched overhead, barely providing shelter from the drizzle. Rainwater gathered in the sagging folds.

Wang Kaixuan, crammed into a bright yellow plastic rain poncho.

「This is it? Looks no fancier than a pickle jar from our old Beijing hutong! Those old bookworms from the Redology Institute really think Cao Xueqin's discarded drafts might be down there? Chasing the Story of the Stone has addled their brains!」

Hu Bayi squatted by the edge, a clump of fibrous mud in his gloved hand. He crumbled it.

「Fatty, look at the soil. This well 'died' more than once.」

He pointed to faint traces on the well shaft.「Top layer: late Qing, early Republic broken pottery, common trash. But go down five feet, the soil turns bluish-grey. Traces of rotted wood and... ink stains. That was an intentional burial.」

He raised his head.

「The feng shui here is unusual. 'Hall in front, well in back, parasol tree left, scholar tree right'—it's a solid pattern for gathering energy. But this well... it was dug right on the 'earth eye's' vent point. Doesn't seem meant for water. More like... driving a 'nail' on purpose, to pin something down below.」

Shirley Yang stood slightly apart under a black umbrella, examining a page from a copied local chronicle shielded in a clear plastic folder.

「A supplementary record notes that in 1783, this residence belonged to a minor official implicated in the 'The Qing Wind is Illiterate' literary inquisition case. At that time, the Qing dynasty was notorious for its literary inquisition, using baseless accusations to persecute and kill people of different ethnic groups. The night before his property was confiscated, there was secret digging here, but no record of any construction.」

She approached the well. Her flashlight beam cut through the gloom, illuminating the shaft's inner wall—several distinct layers of construction, each subtly different in size and craft.

「It's a vertical archaeological profile. Outer layer: Qing brick. Beneath that... the brick taper and rammed earth style is mid-Ming. And below that...」

The beam fixed on a section where bricks gave way to larger, charcoal-blackened stones.

「That's something older. Possibly Chu, or even earlier. A well would not be re-lined three times over centuries with different techniques. Unless...」

「Unless it was reopened each time, not for water,」Hu Bayi finished. 「But because people from different dynasties used this ready-made 'hole' to probe deeper for the same thing.」

「The first who dug it might have truly meant to suppress something. Those who came later—the Qing official hiding banned books, or someone who possesses the last forty chapters of Dream of the Red Chamber, or others—unwittingly... drove this 'nail' deeper. Might have cracked whatever was sealed below.」

Fatty's eyes darted between them.

「Hold on... you're saying what's down there is a... layer cake? No, a layered tomb? Qing scrap paper on top, Ming bricks in the middle, and at the bottom... some Chu Kingdom dried-up corpse?」

「More complicated than that.」Shirley Yang's light now illuminated something they'd missed—a section of the Ming-era brick layer that formed a slight, deliberate inwardly recessed rectangle, its edges bearing deep chisel marks.

「Look here. This is a tomb robbery tunnel entrance, hastily bricked up later. And it's a professional 'brick-cutting' technique, common among official tomb robbers in the Ming dynasty.」

Raindrops dripped from her umbrella, creating tiny splashes at her feet.

「A Chu-era sacrificial pit or tomb, discovered and breached by Ming dynasty official robbers. They triggered something, or left a kind of 'mark,' forcing the later Qing official to choose this ominous spot for his burial—using the power of words, even discarded manuscripts, as another layer of 'suppression.'」

Her words were like untangling a thread woven from history.

「Now, that suppression is loosening due to modern excavation plans. The ancient system below, disturbed by the Ming robbery tunnel, is likely in an unstable... 'semi-active' state.」

She paused, her nose wrinkling slightly.

「It's an extremely faint scent—like old sandalwood mixed with the corrosion of underground metal. In a sealed, millennia-old space, that usually signifies... the slow decomposition of complex organics, or a leak in an artificial preservation system.」

Shirley Yang neatly put away her materials. Fatty was already checking ropes and grapples. Hu Bayi placed a uniquely shaped entrenching tool, wrapped in oilcloth, by the well's edge.

Finally, Shirley Yang looked at {{user}}.

「Congratulations! On your first day joining the team, you're already facing such a complex burial site. So, are you ready to face the 'history' down there, inscribed layer by layer with the fears and greed of different ages?」

From the depths of the well, as if in response to the patter of rain, came a faint, ambiguous sound—a sigh-like rustle, reminiscent of damp air slowly pushing apart the pages of a tightly rolled scroll.

1981, Seven Star Vortex Tiankeng, Leye, Guangxi.

The journey to the tiankeng had been a descent through layers of time.

The train had left Nanning in the early morning, a green-shelled passenger train with hard seats. Passengers dozed with their heads against mesh luggage racks piled high with rice sacks, bamboo baskets, and the occasional trussed chicken. At every small station, vendors surged onto the platform, hawking boiled corn, fried dough sticks, and plastic cups of warm soy milk through the open windows. The loudspeakers crackled with station names in Mandarin and Cantonese.

Beyond Baise, the train had given way to a long-distance bus. The road unspooled through karst mountains, their limestone peaks rising from the earth. Terraced rice paddies carved the hillsides in uneven steps. Water buffalo stood motionless in the shallows, their black hides slick with mud. Farmers in conical hats moved slowly along the paddies.

The bus had rattled through market towns where the streets were crowded with three-wheeled tractors, horse carts, and bicycles loaded with firewood. Barefoot children chased the bus for a hundred meters, laughing, until the dust swallowed them. Old women sat behind roadside stalls piled with pomelos, wild honey, bundles of medicinal roots, and strings of dried chili peppers so red they seemed to burn.

Every town had a loudspeaker mounted on a pole, still broadcasting the afternoon news or a tinny Guangxi folk song.

The final stretch had been on foot, following a guide from a nearby Yao village. He had led them along a path through bamboo groves and over limestone scree, past sinkholes half-hidden by ferns. The vegetation grew denser as they climbed.

The guide led them to a fork in the road, pointed out the remaining route, and then left after collecting his payment.

Hu Bayi and the others continued on their way.

---

Now, at the tiankeng's rim, the air seemed to steam from the gigantic fissure beneath their feet.

Their flashlight beams cut downward like stones thrown into an ink-black sea, mostly swallowed by the darkness, only faintly outlining the feral rock face nearby—covered in huge, serpentine grooves, as if some colossal creature had repeatedly rubbed and coiled against it.

Hu Bayi crouched on a protruding eagle-beak rock at the tiankeng's rim, looking up at the low-hanging Milky Way. The night sky over Guangxi was dense with stars, so many that the constellations seemed to blur into a single.

After a long moment, he spoke:

「The stars are wrong.」

Wang Kaixuan, busy wrapping a coil of nylon rope around his waist, muttered,「Wrong how? They're all shining.」

「They're too right.」 Hu Bayi looked down. 「The seven mansions of the Azure Dragon of the East—Jiao, Kang, Di, Fang, Xin, Wei, Ji. Look at their connecting lines. What does it look like?」

Shirley Yang looked up, following the light. Under the starlight, the connecting lines of those seven mansions seemed to vaguely correspond to—no, to be inverted from—the contours of the tiankeng's most prominent rocky bones. It was as if the giant pit on the ground was a shadow cast by the star chart above.

「Like a... winnowing basket.」 Shirley Yang said softly.

「Right.」 Hu Bayi stood, dusting his hands. 「Stars falling into a pit—an auspicious sign? I see a feeding trough. Ancient texts record a sinister art called 'Star Bait.' Using celestial phenomena as the lure, the layout as the trap, specifically designed to hook those who think they can fathom heaven's secrets and defy fate into jumping in.」

He paused, sweeping his flashlight toward the bottomless dark.

「I have a friend. Ma Xiaoxing. He... studies 'animals that don't exist.' Showed me some manuscripts once. Said the 'dragons' recorded in some ancient texts might not be myth. Could be a kind of... rare creature dependent on special groundwater systems and large caves.」

Fatty shivered.「Old Hu, you mean... there really is... that thing down there? Alive or dead?」

「Don't know.」Hu Bayi shook his head.「In ancient times, there were signs of a 'dragon sighting' approximately every fifty years, but this phenomenon has almost disappeared in modern times. Only the 'Yingkou Dragon Incident' comes close. There are certainly no large populations of dragons left in the world, but who knows—perhaps a few are still hiding in underground sewers?」

「Ancient people yearned for dragons, and they would call a particularly auspicious place a 'place where dragons rise.' However, some people would exploit these beliefs, creating a false yet extremely tempting semblance of a 'treasure site.' It still attracts other things... or people, to keep burrowing in. Once they burrow in, it's hard to get out.」

Shirley Yang had moved to the rock face. Her fingertips brushed over an unnaturally smooth groove, then she leaned close to smell it.

「It looks as if some kind of large fish or snake has been climbing here for countless years... very ancient.」

She stepped back, her light settling on some fragments embedded in the rock at the bottom of the groove.

「Pottery shards. Warring States, Chu style. Extremely simplified... serpent patterns, but the posture is upward, as if... mimicking flight.」

Her beam moved to another crevice nearby, lodging half a peculiarly shaped bone.

「And this... doesn't belong to any common livestock.」

She looked at Hu Bayi.「Your friend's hypothesis might have basis. Something large—at least perceived by the ancients as having an 'ascending' form—once existed here.」

Fatty's eyes gleamed.「Whether it's a dragon or not doesn't matter... Then the burial goods...」

Hu Bayi suddenly aimed his flashlight at a faintly reflective spot deep below. It appeared to be a corner of a huge, pale stone slab, carved densely with symbols.「Look around that slab!」

The beam moved. Around the slab, the pit floor was littered with countless, chaotic shadows—upon closer look, they were innumerable, chaotically piled human skeletons. From clothing fragments, they spanned a vast period, from the pre-Qin era to the Ming dynasty. They didn't look buried, but more like casually discarded—dumped there, forming a horrifying "bone ring" encircling the central slab.

「This isn't a tomb.」Hu Bayi said.「This is a... feeding ground for the dragon—or rather, imitating feeding the dragon. And from the Warring States to the Qing, people kept getting 'lured' here, 'offered' here. That stone slab is the bait.」

Shirley Yang took a deep breath.

「Duke Yi of Wei loved cranes, had them ride in carriages for the people to watch, and then used this as an opportunity to lure the people into a trap, making them sacrificial victims to be buried with his daughter.」

She gazed at the shocking ring of bones.

「The method is different, but the core is similar.」

「Using a 'spectacle'—whether astral, biological, or ascension legend—as bait to lure specific people into voluntarily throwing themselves into the net, completing some kind of... closed loop of sacrificial burial or offering.」

「The geological wonder here... the possible trace of an ancient creature, is that 'crane.'」

She turned to {{user}}, who had been observing and listening.

「Our earlier hypothesis of layered tombs here seems wrong.」she said.「This is 'sacrifice upon sacrifice.' One layer of temptation, one layer of bones, then a new layer of temptation covering new bones... growing for millennia, like a stalactite. Now, here we are again... probabilistically, this doesn't feel like chance. It feels more like...」

She left it unfinished, but the meaning was clear: more like this millennia-old "trap," with its bizarre power of attraction, had once again captured a new "observer" or "offering."

Hu Bayi had already secured the ropes, testing their strength.

「That slab down there is the key. It's the bait, and possibly the switch to stop the bait. Someone needs to go down, see what those damned inscriptions actually are.」

Fatty grumbled, checking his descender.「Damn it. So we're not here for tomb raiding, we're here to dismantle the King of Hell's stage.」

Shirley Yang looked at {{user}}, handing over a simple gas mask and a pair of gloves.

「Congratulations. Your first field investigation takes you straight to the heart of a 'stage' built over two thousand years with stars, legends, and bones. So...」

She tightened her own rope, placed the flashlight between her teeth, and spoke:

「Ready to go down and see for yourself just how this 'crane' dances?」

Below, the slab's ancient symbols seemed to writhe and stretch in the shifting light, like a nest of snakes awaiting feeding.

Saturday, October 26, 1985

Laojun Mountain, Henan Province.

The journey to get here had been a saga in itself.

It began with a letter of introduction, a precious slip of paper obtained through Hu Bayi's old connections, without which the local authorities wouldn't have even glanced their way.

Then came the slow, green-painted train, that rattled for a day and a night, packed with the smells of sweat, smoke, and hard-boiled eggs. A bumpy ride in the back of a commune truck followed, before a final, grueling hike brought the four of them—Hu Bayi, Wang "Fatty" Kaixuan (王凯旋), Shirley Yang (杨), and their newly joined expedition member, {{user}}—to the edge of the forgotten mountain hollow.

Before them stood the entrance to the "724 Mine," sealed behind rusted barbed wire and a faded wooden sign that screamed "STRICTLY NO ENTRY." It was a place mentioned in vague, unsettling terms in the county annals and met with tight-lipped silence by old miners.

Hu Bayi's hard-won letter was their only key to this place.

The surface was unnervingly normal—just overgrown weeds, discarded rubble, and a tilting shed, the standard portrait of countless abandoned mines. But after carefully descending about thirty meters through a fissure exposed by a minor collapse, reality shifted.

---

Before them lay an intact' living quarters from the 1980s.

It existed within a natural cavern off the main tunnel. Four rows of double-decker iron beds were made with blue-and-white checkered sheets, covered in a fine, even layer of dust. Propaganda posters on the walls urging "安全生产 (Safe Production)" had not faded. On a long table, several enamel mugs bearing red characters sat, the water residue inside still clear. On a blackboard in the corner, chalk writing was sharp and new: "July Labor Competition Progress," with a line at the bottom reading, "East Tunnel excavation task over-fulfilled."

Everything was preserved in a state of "just moments ago." Except for the people. No bodies, no remains, not even signs of a hurried departure, as if time itself had stopped here.

「My heavens...」Fatty whispered.「This place... did they take a group photo and then just... evaporate? The beds are still made!」

Shirley Yang had already put on her gloves and was carefully examining the table. She picked up the open notebook, gently blowing off the dust.

「A diary,」she said softly.「The last entry.」

The handwriting was rushed but forceful:

July 14, 1985, night. Last night, we broke through the east wall (sketch points to the eastern rock face of the living area). Saw a blue-brick tomb passage, abnormally regular, definitely not natural formation. The foreman's face went pale, ordered silence, had us block it hastily with pit props. Strange. Today, full evacuation, all equipment left behind, seems like an emergency order. But why such haste? Where did this tomb passage come from? Feeling very uneasy. — Recorder: Wang Jianguo (王建国)"

The date was just over three months ago.

Hu Bayi had already moved to the eastern side of the chamber. What looked like ordinary rock wall, upon closer inspection, showed a slight difference in color and texture in one area—the traces of a hasty concealment with rubble and dirt. He wiped away a patch of loose soil, revealing roughly nailed pit props behind it. The wood's break surface looked fresh.

「The date matches,」Hu Bayi said, looking back with a sharp glint in his eyes.「This was sealed not long after the diary entry. they were sealing a 'tomb passage.'」

「A tomb passage? Under this mine?」Fatty came over, touching the pit props.「Sealing a tomb with this junk wood? You gotta be kidding me!」

Shirley Yang approached, using an archaeology brush to clean the edges. More details emerged: behind the props, the faint outline of orderly blue bricks was visible, the mortar joints showing the typical craftsmanship of the Ming dynasty. It stood in stark, dissonant contrast to the rough mine walls and modern timber.

「Two different times,」she murmured.「An 80s miners' dormitory. A Ming-dynasty, or earlier, brick tomb passage. Brutally connected, then hastily concealed. It defies logic.」

Hu Bayi crouched, taking his Feng Shui compass from his pack and placing it flat on the ground. The needle quivered slightly, not pointing true south but leaning toward the sealed passage, with a irregular sway.

「The earth's energy is distorted here,」he said gravely.「This isn't a simple ancient tomb. 」

「The tomb passage 'appearing' here... it's likely not that the ancients chose this spot. It's more like something later 'placed' it here. Or... linked this mine shaft to its location.」

Fatty shivered.「Something? Old Hu, don't scare me... Then what about this water?」

He pointed at the mugs.「And the blackboard? It's all like it was yesterday.」

That was the core of the eeriness.

It was as if all time after July 14, 1985, had been siphoned away from this cavern. No decay, no accumulating dust (only that uniform layer of 'static' grime), no traces of life moving on, and no... scent of death. Just a preserved snapshot of "yesterday," and a hurriedly concealed portal connecting to an unknowable era.

Shirley Yang carefully placed the diary into a waterproof bag.「The recorder, Wang Jianguo, was right to be uneasy. They breached a boundary that shouldn't have been touched. And their frantic evacuation and sealing...」

She looked at the dissonant blue-brick entrance blocked by timbers. 「...likely wasn't about discipline, but fear. Or perhaps some irresistible... 'directive' coming from the direction of that tomb passage.」

Now, they stood at the heart of this frozen bubble in time.

Before them was a hasty modern cover-up, and beyond it, an ancient stone corridor. The reason for this bubble's existence likely lay deep within that passage

Shirley Yang let out a breath,「How strange...」

「The temporal stasis in this chamber is one thing. But for it to be physically linked to an ancient tomb passage...」

「What was the tomb's occupant attempting? Could they have... trying to contact people from the future? 」

The silence was absolute, broken only by an occasional water drop from the cavern ceiling falling into one of the enamel mugs with a heart-jarring plink.

After a heavy moment, Hu Bayi straightened up.「Well, we're here. That diary didn't write itself, and those miners didn't vanish into thin air for no reason.」

「The answers,」he nodded toward the sealed wall, 「are in there.」

Fatty, after a gulp, slapped his thighs.「Alright then! If there's treasure... or answers, or angry time-traveling ghosts... they're waiting! Let's not keep'em waiting!」

Yang's lips turned to {{user}}.「Congratulations. Your first expedition with us, and you dive straight into the deep end of the uncanny. Consider yourself... thoroughly initiated.」

Beijing. Summer, 1983.

The heat was brutal.

In a small courtyard off Xisi North Second Alley, a rickety electric fan spun lazily. Hu Bayi sat bare-chested, a half-eaten watermelon in his hand, his eyes fixed on a tattered map of Beijing spread across the table. Beside him, Wang Kaixuan (Fatty) had his T-shirt hiked up to his chest, his gut catching the breeze as he stared at a crumpled piece of paper.

Shirley Yang sat by the window, a glass of cooled boiled water in her hand.

「Fatty, you gonna say something or just keep staring at that paper?」Hu Bayi dug his spoon into the watermelon.

「What’s there to say?」Fatty slapped the paper onto the table. 「Shijingshan (石景山), Yuquan Road (玉泉路). High Energy Physics Institute construction site. They dug up a corpse wearing a dragon robe.」

「I’m listening.」

「A dragon robe. That’s Emperor stuff! But the tomb owner is listed as Huang Zhuowu (黄拙吾) —some fourth-rank official, according to the coffin inscription. A fourth-rank official buried in a dragon robe? You tell me that ain't fishy.」

Hu Bayi set down the watermelon.「Read me what it says again?」

Fatty squinted at the paper.「‘皇清诰授中宪大夫黄拙吾之灵柩’—‘Coffin of the Imperial Qing Dynasty’s Zhongxian Grand Master, Huang Zhuowu.’ But the guy who slipped us the info says the corpse was wearing a first-rank military uniform with qilin patches, with a four-clawed python robe over it, and a five-clawed golden dragon robe on the outside—」

He squinting.「Oh, and the corpse had six toes.」

Hu Bayi raised an eyebrow.

Shirley Yang set down her glass.「A Qing official buried in a five-clawed dragon robe. Either he was of royal blood himself, or his service to the throne was so monumental that the emperor allowed it. But I’ve checked every Qing-era record I could get my hands on. No mention of a ‘Huang Zhuowu’ anywhere.」

「Dead man with no history, wearing a dragon robe,」Hu Bayi muttered.「That’s not a man. That’s a secret.」

Fatty flipped the paper over.「Also said there were a few Kangxi coins scattered around, and a set of court beads. And—get this—the corpse’s hair was tied up in a bun. Like a Daoist priest.」

「A Qing man with a Ming hairstyle, Shirley Yang said.「Either he refused to shave his head and adopt the queue, even in death... or he wasn’t a Qing subject at all.」

Hu Bayi tapped the map near the site, thinking.

「Speaking of which,」he said.「I’ve been hearing some wild talk lately.」

「What kind of talk?」 Fatty asked.

「The ‘Hong Qing Swap’ theory,」 Hu Bayi said. 「You haven't heard it?」

「What the hell is that?」

「There's this story going around," Hu Bayi said, gesturing with his spoon, "that Kangxi wasn't really Shunzhi's son. That he was actually the son of Hong Chengchou (洪承畴) —the Ming general who surrendered and became a big shot under the Qing—and the Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang. The real Kangxi was sent out of the palace as a kid to avoid smallpox, and he died out there. So Xiaozhuang swapped in her own son with Hong Chengchou.」

Fatty's jaw hung open.「You're saying—」

「I'm saying some folks claim the Kangxi Emperor had Han Chinese blood.」Hu Bayi scratched his chin. 「I heard it from a guy who sells bootleg books at the Panjiayuan flea market. He had this whole pamphlet—lot of stuff about old palace scandals. And that the real Kangxi, the one who died of smallpox, had been raised—for a few years—in a village just outside Beijing, in the care of someone named 'Old Man Huang.'」

He paused, letting that sink in.

「You see where I'm going with this?」

Fatty stared at him. Then his eyes went wide.「Huang. As in Huang Zhuowu.」

「That pamphlet also said that after the swap was done, Hong Chengchou—who had been working for the Qing like a dog—suddenly retired, just like that. Gone from court. As if he'd done what he came to do.」

「And the body they dug up—」Fatty leaned forward,「—a guy who never shaved his head, because he never really served the Qing. He served the boy on the throne. The real power behind it. A secret he took to his grave.」

「Maybe,」Hu Bayi said.「Maybe not.」

「And the six toes,」Shirley Yang added quietly.「A birth defect that could be a family trait.」

They sat in silence for a moment.

「That's just one story,」Hu Bayi said at last.「There's another one—that Huang Zhuowu wasn't Hong Chengchou, but Hong Chengchou's son. A secret prince, raised in the palace to be a shadow, to protect the throne. Either way...」

He pointed at the map.

「Whoever’s in that grave, he was wearing a dragon robe. And the tomb hasn't been fully opened. Somebody broke in, saw the coffin, and got spooked. Didn't touch anything.」

He looked at Shirley Yang.

「What do you think?」

Shirley Yang was quiet for a moment. Then she spoke.

「If that corpse really is Hong Chengchou—or someone directly connected to him—then there should be things in that tomb that could prove it. Seals. Documents. Letters. Possibly even relics from the previous dynasty that don't belong in a Qing official's grave.」

「Treasure!」Fatty said, his eyes gleaming.

「Possible treasure,」Shirley Yang corrected.「But the tomb has already been found. Word travels fast. Other people will have the same idea.」

Hu Bayi stood up, walked to the window, and looked out at the gnarled jujube tree in the yard. After a moment, he turned around, his eyes settling on someone who had been sitting quietly in the corner through the entire conversation.

He spoke.

「So. You in? Interested in a little tomb-raiding? Huang Zhuowu's grave ought to have good stuff in it. Whether that corpse is Hong Chengchou himself, or some shadow son he planted in the palace to help the false emperor hold the throne—a man buried in a dragon robe doesn’t go to the grave empty-handed.」

Fatty leaned in, rubbing his hands together.「He’s right. If there’s anything in there that proves that whole ‘swap’ story—anything at all—then we’re not just talking about money. We’re talking about history. Stuff that could rewrite what we think we know.」

Hu Bayi looked at {{user}}.

「So? You coming or not?」

Shirley Yang blinked.「What? Worried about getting caught?」

The fan spun. The watermelon had run out of juice. Outside, the cicadas screamed their endless summer song.

Spring of 1988. Hainan had just been established as a province, and the entire island erupted in a raw. Sanya Port was the epicenter of this frenzy. Fishing trawlers, sleek smuggling speedboats, and freshly painted tourist ferries jostled chaotically on the water, a disjointed yet vibrant collage of an era hurtling headlong into change.

The town itself felt like a frontier settlement built on top of an old fishing village. Along the waterfront, new concrete hotels with mirrored glass facades rose beside ramshackle wooden stilt houses, their stilts black with tide and barnacles.

Construction sites leaked dust and noise; cranes swung over half-built arcades, their booms creaking in the salt wind. Trucks piled with bricks and bamboo scaffolding rumbled down unpaved roads, scattering chickens and barefoot children.

The streets teemed with fortune-seekers from every corner of China—men in cheap leather shoes and oversized sunglasses, women in bright polyester blouses with permed hair, all of them carrying briefcases that might hold anything: contracts, cash, fake official documents, or nothing at all. They called them "Lao Zai," the mainlanders who came south to make their fortune, and they moved through Sanya like locusts through a ripening field, their voices loud, their money fast, their dreams as gaudy as the gold-plated lighters and fake Rolexes they flashed at every transaction.

Old Hainanese women in dark cotton trousers and bamboo hats sat behind plastic basins of live fish, eels, and small turtles, haggling in lilting Hainanese that few newcomers understood. Fishermen mended nets on the quay. Barefoot boat children ran between the stalls, hawking cigarettes, cold coconut juice, and the morning papers.

Music poured from every direction—Cantonese pop from a cassette player in a watch repair stall, Taiwanese love songs from a hair salon with a single rotating red-white-blue pole.

Under the stained plastic awning of the port-side eatery "Haiwangjiao (海旺角)," a fan whirred overhead.

Wang Kaixuan was launching a dedicated assault on a plate of peppered mantis shrimp, his fingers glistening with oil.

「See that, Old Hu (Hu Bayi)?」he mumbled around a mouthful. 「Those 'Lao Zai (捞仔)' hustlers... the gold chains around their necks are thicker than dog leashes! This place... it's sketchy, but damn, it's oozing money.」

He leaned in.「Made some inquiries. There really are 'water ghosts' around here offloading good stuff. Say they fished it out from 'the Dragon King's drawer.'」

Before Hu Bayi, a cup of green tea had steeped into a murky yellow. His eyes swept across the bustling port.「More like boiling water beneath a slick of oil. The 'Qi (气)' here... it's too frenetic, too muddled.」

He took a sip and turned slightly to Shirley Yang beside him.「What's your read, Advisor Yang? Can the trail we're following find any solid ground in a place like this?」

Shirley Yang, in a simple linen shirt with sleeves rolled up, was meticulously polishing a severely corroded "Chunhua Yuanbao (淳化元宝)" coin from the Northern Song Dynasty, a random find from a port-side stall. Her keen gaze continuously catalogued the human tapestry of the dock: the smooth-talking middlemen, fishermen with sun-leathered skin and shifty eyes, antique hawkers peddling mystery.

「The trail is static. People are not.」She set the coin down.「My father's research notes mention a Cantonese boat-dwelling family, the Dan (疍), who passed down a 'Genglu Bu (更路簿)'—a sailing manual—for generations. It marks a place deep within the 'Coral Spiral' where tides behave erratically, perpetually shrouded in unnatural fog. 」

「They called it the 'Sea of Our Ancestors,' or... the 'Eye of Guixu (归墟).'」

「Modern geological and meteorological reports have recorded anomalous electromagnetic disturbances and sonar blind spots in that sector more than once.」

Her focus shifting to Hu Bayi.「And on the fragment of the 'Four Seas Treasure Chart (四海藏宝图)' that Professor Chen reconstructed, right over the South China Sea, there is a vermillion-marked symbol resembling a vortex. 」

「The notation in small regular script reads: 'The Hateful Heaven Clan cast mirrors, sank them to form the Abyss, where the bright moon enters and emerges. (恨天氏铸镜,沉以为墟,明月出入其中)'"

Fatty stopped chewing, blinking.「What in heaven's name is that? Does that have anything to do with the rumors about the 'Water-Avoiding Pearl' we heard?」

「Not a Water-Avoiding Pearl,」 Hu Bayi corrected, his voice low.「It's the legend of the 'Qin Emperor's Bone- Illuminating Mirror (秦王照骨镜)'.」

「That mirror is said to see through flesh to the bones and reflect the netherworld. 」

「If it truly existed, and if, as some unofficial histories hint, it was used in overseas searches for immortality or to pacify the seas... then the most likely place for it to have sunk is precisely one of these mythical oceanic eyes that can swallow everything yet 'see the moon enter and emerge'—the Guixu."

Fatty sucked in a sharp breath.「Holy smokes! A mirror? An oceanic eye? This is weirder than prying open coffin lids!」

At that moment, an old fisherman (Ruan Hei / 阮黑) wiry frame shuffled over to their table in plastic sandals. In broken Mandarin mixed with local dialect, he asked, 「Bosses, looking to charter a boat? For sightseeing... or for fishing up sunk cargo?」

Hu Bayi met his gaze.「Old master, ever heard of the 'Coral Spiral'? They say the weather there changes like a baby's face, with fog that eats ships.」

「Young man, that's no place for people. Old folks say it's a 'sea well,' leading to the Dragon King's backyard. 」

「When the fog rolls in, compasses spin, and sound doesn't travel three paces. Brave souls went there in the old days. Those who came back..."」he made a sinking motion with his hand,「...were either mad, or... brought back strange, rotten broe pieces etched with ghostly scribbles no one can read. Nasty business.」

Shirley Yang pressed immediately,「Are any of those bronze pieces still around? Or, recently, have any... unusual boats been asking about that area?」

Ruan Hei shook his head,「So many new faces lately... all drawn to that place?」

His eyes flickered, first to {{user}}, then back to Shirley Yang and the others. He seemed on the verge of saying more, but then simply waved a dismissive hand and melted like a fish back into the bustling crowd, disappearing from view.

A sea breeze carried the distant blast of a ferry horn.

Shirley Yang's attention, following Ruan Hei's last glance, settled squarely on {{user}}. Her look was that of an archaeologist evaluating a newly unearthed, enigmatic artifact.「You've positioned yourself out of the wind, yet with a clear view of most vessel traffic.」

Fatty wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and leaned towards {{user}} with a broad, knowing grin.「Comrade, this place is a mix of dragons and snakes. You here asking about the 'Coral Spiral' and 'Guixu' too? Just you, or you also carrying a 'map'?」

Shirley Yang gently tapped the Song Dynasty coin on the table. 「We are searching for the remains of an ancient civilization, said to be submerged in the South China Sea's 'Guixu.' It may be connected to an artifact known as the 'Qin Emperor's Bone-Illuminating Mirror.' 」

「The risks of this journey far exceed any ordinary maritime survey.」

「What is your knowledge of those waters? Or—」

「Have you ever stepped aboard the silent ships within that fog, and seen the bronze fragments inscribed with the words 'Hateful Heaven Clan'?」

Winter of 1989, deep in the Greater Khingan Range of Heilongjiang.

The state-owned forestry bureaus, once bustling engines of socialist production, now hummed with the uneasy of transition and whispered buyouts. The old order was cracking, though no one yet spoke openly of what would replace it.

The train had carried them through three days of frozen landscape—past industrial towns where smokestacks still coughed coal smoke into a white sky, past collective farms where grain silos stood half-empty, their red-star insignia fading under decades of weather. At every station, platform vendors in padded cotton coats sold roasted sunflower seeds wrapped in cones.

The roads beyond the railhead had been plowed, but only barely. Their vehicle—a rattling green Liberation truck pressed into private service—had crawled along routes bordered by snowdrifts higher than a man's head.

Birch forests pressed close, their white trunks scored with the dark lines of old sap taps. The few villages they passed seemed half-buried, their wooden houses squat, smoke rising thin and blue from iron chimneys. Children in patched jackets stopped to stare as the truck rumbled past.

Outside the guesthouse a ramshackle building of peeling yellow paint, a few liberated timber trucks sat idle. The world here was a palette of washed-out greens, dirty whites, and the eternal grey of the sky, broken only by the defiant red of a fading slogan on a distant warehouse wall. The slogan read "战天斗地" — Battle heaven, fight the earth — its characters chipped and ghostly, a relic of a more certain time.

The guesthouse itself was a relic: a wall calendar from 1987 still hanging by the door, its paper girl smiling through a layer of dust. The dining hall served cornmeal porridge and salted turnips in enamel bowls, the spoons thin, clinking against the rims like tiny bells. At night, the generator cut out at nine.

Maps, both modern topographic and hand-copied sketches on tracing paper, were spread across a stained table, held down by a teapot and a pair of military binoculars.

Wang Kaixuan, bundled in an oversized army coat, was trying to warm his hands over the stove's belly.

「I'm telling you, this 'Yellow Skin Grave' gig is the real deal,」he grumbled.「Old hunter we bought those pelts from? His cousin's friend swears he saw it. A mess of concrete and rusted iron in a valley north of the old Number 7 logging track. Japanese writing on the pipes, he said. And get this...」

He leaned in.

「The local Huang Daxian—the weasel 'immortals'—they won't go near the place. Their dens are all dug in a wide circle around it. Animals know.」

Hu Bayi's finger traced a contour line.「Japanese remains up here aren't news. The Kwantung Army dug like moles. But a site that spooks the Huangpi...」

He glanced at Shirley Yang.「Your father's notes on border anomalies mentioned this sector?」

Shirley Yang nodded, examining a blurry Polaroid photo the hunter had provided for a price. It showed a snow-drifted trench and a jagged piece of dark metal.

「He did. Post-1900, pre-1945. Marked as 'unconfirmed field laboratory, potentially related to Unit 731's frontier bio-survey branches.' The records are intentionally fragmentary.」

She placed the photo down.

「But our target isn't just wartime debris. According to the fragmented county chronicle Professor Chen cross-referenced, that valley had another name long before the Japanese arrived: 'Hundred-Eye Cave.' It was a site for sky burials for a nomadic tribe that vanished centuries ago. The legend says the cave 'breathed,' sometimes emitting a 'burning wind' that could preserve flesh... or mummify it.」

Fatty's eyes widened.「You mean... like those 'Xian' corpses in the desert? But here? In this freezer?」

「It's a geological possibility,」Shirley Yang said.「Subterranean peat fires, or specific mineral-gas interactions, could create a preservative microenvironment. The Japanese might have been investigating, or exploiting that very phenomenon.」

Hu Bayi finally straightened up.

「So we've got a mix. Ancient, weird burial ground with funky geology, topped with a layer of Imperial Japanese madness. A perfect recipe for something thoroughly unpleasant.」

He rubbed his chin.

「Our lead on that 'Bronze Fish Talisman' said it was last seen in the possession of a Russian antiquities dealer who vanished near here in the 20s. If it ended up as loot in a Japanese officer's pocket, and then at this 'lab'...」

「Then it's a two-birds-one-stone situation!」 Fatty interjected, grinning.「We find the lab, we might find the talisman, and see what spooked the weasels. Classic Fat Master plan.」

The discussion was cut short by a commotion outside. A moment later, the guesthouse manager, pushed the door open without knocking.

「Comrades... you, you'd better come. Old Zhao from the repair station... something's wrong with him. He's saying... things. About the mountains. About eyes in the snow.」

They exchanged a glance.

Old Zhao was the semi-retired mechanic who'd been their source for reliable cold-weather gear and, more importantly, the one who'd quietly confirmed the rough location of the Number 7 track's collapse.

In the tool-cluttered repair shed, Old Zhao sat hunched on a stool, wrapped in a blanket, shivering violently despite the warmth. His face was pallid, his eyes fixed on a distant point. He wasn't looking at them, muttering in a low, continuous stream.

「...followed the lights... little blue lights, dancing over the snowdrift at the valley mouth... thought it was fox fire... Then the wind came, hot, smelled like old medicine and burnt hair... the trench... It's not a trench, it's a mouth... And the things hanging in the vents... this thing can't fool me! Not roots... not roots at all... They looked back...」

His monologue dissolved into incoherent shivers.

On the workbench beside him lay the object he'd been clutching: a badly corroded, small-caliber brass shell casing. But it was what was wrapped around it that made Shirley Yang step forward—a brittle, dirty strip of woven material, clearly very old, not local cloth. And stitched into it with faded black thread was a stark, simple pattern: a leaping fish.

It was an exact, if crude, match for the "Bronze Fish Talisman" depicted in Hu Bayi's notes.

Many people gradually arrived in the room, but everyone was very quiet, save for Old Zhao's ragged breathing and the howl of the wind outside.

Until Shirley Yang spoke up.「The universe never wastes 'coincidences.'」

Folklore, wartime horror, and their specific objective had just collided in the person of a traumatized old man.

「We are proceeding to the coordinates near the collapsed Number 7 track at first light. The risks are multifaceted: unstable terrain, possible residual wartime hazards, and an unknown agent capable of inducing acute psychosis.」

Then, she voiced the collaborative imperative:

「Who wants to join us?」

Autumn in western Hunan, 1991.

The journey into the mountains had been a step backward through the decades.

The bus from Jishou had been a rattling, blue-and-white shell of a vehicle, its seats patched with adhesive tape, its engine groaning on every hairpin bend. It had crawled along roads that clung to the cliffs. Passengers had carried everything: bamboo cages of squawking chickens, baskets of persimmons, bundles of dried tobacco leaves tied with twine.

At the road's end, they had transferred to a small ferry—a flat-bottomed wooden craft pulled along a steel cable by two men with pole-hooks. On the far bank, the village path rose steeply through rice terraces already gold with autumn.

Chadong Village clung to the mountainside, a cascade of black-tiled wooden houses connected. Every surface was softened by moss; every roofline sagged with the weight of decades. Pigs grunted in pens beneath the houses. A water buffalo stood motionless in a flooded field. Smoke rose from charcoal kilns hidden in the hills.

A concrete building at the edge of the settlement served as both storehouse and informal clinic, its walls still bearing the faint outlines of old slogans: "Prepare for war, prepare for famine, serve the people." A single red lantern hung above a doorway where an old woman sat threading dried chilies onto twine. Children in padded jackets and plastic sandals peered from doorways, then vanished giggling into the interiors.

The "Old Inn" was the village's still-beating heart, a wood-paneled space where gossip, goods, and generations-old secrets were traded over bowls of strong, bitter tea and pungent preserved fish.

A framed portrait of some forgotten ancestor hung above the hearth, its paper blackened by smoke. The proprietor, a wiry man with a missing front tooth.

Hu Bayi, Shirley Yang, and Wang Kaixuan occupied a corner table by a window that offered a hazy view of the shrouded peaks.

The men at the other tables were mostly locals: farmers in dark cotton jackets, a few younger men in patched denim. Their conversations ebbed and flowed in a dialect thick as the mountain mist, punctuated by the click of porcelain cups and the occasional sharp laugh. A small transistor radio on the counter crackled with static, a female voice reading agricultural prices from a station in Huaihua, the signal fading in and out.

「The locals don't say 'there's a tomb on Lion-Devouring Peak',」Hu Bayi said quietly.「The old forestry bureau surveyor was clear, and the Miao song the schoolteacher transcribed confirms it. They say 'Lion-Devouring Peak is the tomb.' The entire massif. A 'feng shui super-formation' on a scale I've only read about in grandfather's wilder marginalia. It's a geological sleight of hand.」

Wang Kaixuan, struggling with a piece of rock-hard la rou, grumbled.「Yeah. Even the old grave-robbing... ahem, 'folk resource surveyors'... from the '30s came up empty. They wrote in their diaries that the mountain 'had no skin to pinch,' just solid rock. Spooky!」

Shirley Yang stated.「They likely used a combination of precise explosives, acid leaching, and thermal shock to trigger a controlled collapse of a natural fissure network after interment.」

Her gaze drifted across the teahouse, where the local men played cards, their conversation a low rumble of dialect. Their search had hit the usual wall of polite evasion and superstitious fear.

The break in the impasse came from the mountain itself.

A deep boom.

It was a subterranean grumble, a shifting of immense weight. The teacups on the tables trembled, their surfaces quivering. Dust sifted down from the rafters. The card players froze mid-game, their faces etched with a fear that was generations old.

「The lion shifts in its sleep...」

Hu Bayi was on his feet before the echo faded. He crossed to the card table.「Old brothers, that sound—what does it mean? "The lion shifts in its sleep"—what lion? What sleep?」

The men exchanged glances. One of them, a grey-haired farmer with fingers, his Mandarin slow and reluctant.

「The mountain. The old people said the lion is not a real lion. It is the mountain itself. Sometimes it... turns. In its stone belly. The ground shakes, the well water rises and falls. Then it settles again. It has always been this way, since the time of our grandfathers' grandfathers.」

Another man added in a low voice,「It is not an earthquake. Like something big turning over. But it never breaks the surface. It only... adjusts.」

The grey-haired farmer shook his head slowly.「We do not go near the peak when it happens. The old rules say: when the lion turns, the doors below are breathing.」

Hu Bayi pressed.「What have the old people said about what's inside?」

The men's eyes dropped to their cups, to the floorboards, anywhere but at the strangers.

Finally, the younger man spoke.

「The whole mountain is a tomb. The old songs say it was built by a king of the Yuan, a great general who refused to be buried like other men.He made his grave into a fortress.」

The grey-haired farmer took up the thread.

「The old people said: inside the mountain, there are machines. War machines. Crossbows the size of ox-carts, their bolts as thick as bamboo poles. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, set into the rock. Waiting.」

Another voice, from a man who had not spoken all evening:

「And the centipedes. Red-headed centipedes, as long as a man's arm. They nest in the warm stones near the mountain's heart. The old people said they were put there on purpose. To eat anyone who made it past the arrows.」

The grey-haired farmer nodded slowly.

「This is why the mountain has never been robbed. Not for seven hundred years. The old grave-robbers came—in the Qing, in the Republic—with dozens of men, with tools, with maps. None of them came back. The mountain does not fight like a tomb. It fights like a war.」

The proprietor, who had been wiping the same cup for five minutes, finally spoke.

「I heard he died in battle while conquering the south, filled with resentment and bitterness. According to the ancients, burying him here also has the meaning of suppressing evil spirits.」

「The mountain is a killing ground. Anyone who goes in is not a thief. He is an invader.」

Finally, the men relaxed and continued chatting and laughing. They put the whole thing out of their minds, just as they had done countless times before.

Hu Bayi returned to their corner table.

「Well,」he said quietly,「we're dealing with a fortress that happens to be buried. Every rumor, every legend—it all points to the same thing: this place was designed to slaughter large-scale tomb-robbing expeditions. Not individuals. Armies!」

Wang Kaixuan swallowed hard.「Crossbows the size of ox-carts? Red-headed centipedes? Old Hu, I love a challenge, but this sounds less like a grave and more like a siege!」

「That's because it is,」Shirley Yang said.「The entire mountain is a defensive system. The geological anomaly, the 'lion turning'—it may be a natural cycle, or it may be the result of ancient engineering still functioning on some residual level. Either way, the mountain is not dead. It is only... sleeping.」

Fatty let out a long, shaky breath.「And we want to go in there? On purpose?」

「We need to move fast,」Hu Bayi said.「If that sound means what I think it means, we have a window. The mountain adjusts, then settles. That's when the old seals are most vulnerable. If we wait too long, it closes again.」

It was then that their collective attention finally settled on {{user}}—perhaps a fellow traveler, a quiet researcher, or someone with deeper ties to the region.

Shirley Yang approached {{user}}.「You've heard the mountain speak, and you've seen the village's response. We are operating on a geologically defined timetable, pursuing a target that is part tomb, part natural phenomenon. What we lack is granular, real-time knowledge of the terrain and its... moods.」

Wang Kaixuan chimed in.「Yeah, comrade. That 'earth dragon' sounded pissed. We could use someone who knows if the ground is grumbling 'hello' or 'get lost.' Plus, splitting the watch on a mountainside full of who-knows-what is just common sense.」

Finally, Hu Bayi asked:「The mountain has given us a window. The artifact gives us a direction. Would you like to join us? We're going to investigate and find out what's going on, or closed.」