Prologue

Tomb raiding is not like inviting a guest over for dinner, or writing an essay, or painting, or embroidery. It is not that elegant, calm, refined, or honorable. Tomb raiding is a skill. A destructive skill. In the past, when nobility built their tombs, they would think of all ways to prevent their tombs from being raided. They would do anything to stop that. There are various hidden mechanisms in the tomb. There are giant stones, quicksand, poisonous arrows, venomous bugs, and traps. In the Ming dynasty, having been influenced by the interesting and skillful technologies of the West, some large tombs even use gears and other Western mechanisms. The Emperor tombs of the Qing dynasty, especially, are deemed masterpieces against millennium-old tom braiding technology.

Warlord Sun Dianying tried to seek the Eastern Tomb to use the treasure inside to fund his army. They dug and blasted the earth apart, taking almost six days before unearthing the tomb. One can imagine how difficult the process is. Tomb raiders try all sorts of ways to unravel these mechanisms to seek treasure inside these tombs.

However, in contemporary times, compared to digging for tombs, it is much harder to find ancient tombs. Large tombs that have tombstones and tumuli and other obvious markers have long been raided. If you want to seek tombs hidden deep down beneath the earth that have been long forgotten and have no markers, then you would need some skills and special tools. Iron rods, Luoyang shovels, bamboo tacks, drills, Yin-detection claws, extendible crowbars, as well as many other tools are used in tomb raiding.

There are also some experts who do not make use of any tools. Some find ancient tombs through reading historical texts and some have secrets that only a small number of people possess. These people are able to look at mountains and rivers and find tombs through geomancy.

I am one of those people.

I traveled to many places in my life as a tomb raider and have experienced many incredible and odd things. You would be shocked if I were to tell you about them. After all, these incidents were all remarkable, astonishing, and sensational. They were all extraordinary.

Everything started with the book my grandfather left me. It was called "The Secrets of Yin and Yang and Geomancy". The book was in tatters and the second half of it was missing. Someone had torn it apart deliberately, leaving behind only the first half of this geomancy secret manual. The book mostly talks about how to understand the geomancy structures of tombs as well also some secret skills...