Chapter 1: Worth the Trip

A brilliant beam swept through the passage inside the tomb. The man holding the high-powered flashlight played it over the stone walls, the vaulted ceiling, and the pitch-black darkness ahead. When the beam struck the wall at close range, the reflected light picked out the man’s appearance from the darkness. He was middle-aged and lean, his hair slicked neatly back without a strand out of place. His face was fair and clean, his bearing full of vigor, his eyes bright and keen. He looked calm and entirely at ease. He was immaculate from head to toe, his clothes just as neat: a black Tang-style suit, with a straight walking stick in one hand.

Anyone who did not know him would have found such immaculate grooming unusual in a tomb. Anyone who did know him would have thought it perfectly normal. He was an “underground archaeologist.” In his early years in the jianghu, people had called him Master Thief. Later, as his seniority and standing grew, he came to be respectfully known as Master Dao. These days, Master Dao generally stayed in seclusion, cultivating in quiet retreat almost like a Daoist priest. He rarely went out in person anymore, unless a place was interesting enough to tempt him. The tomb before him, for example, had a layout unlike anything he had seen before.

His walking stick went tap, tap against the floor as he advanced. When one strike rang out with a metallic clang, Master Dao stopped. He did not immediately look down. Instead, his gaze followed the beam of his flashlight as it swept the space ahead. A vast black underground chamber opened before him. Under the beam, he could just make out that he had reached the tomb’s subterranean palace. A chamber of such enormous scale was exceedingly rare. Only after surveying the surroundings did he lower the beam to his feet. He tapped the floor several more times with his walking stick, producing another pair of metallic clanks, then scuffed the ground with the toe of his shoe. A layer of accumulated dust scraped away, exposing a metal floor with the dull sheen of aged bronze.

He raised the walking stick and tucked it beneath the arm holding the flashlight, freeing one hand. Letting that hand hang naturally at his side, he slowly lifted his palm. The dust on the floor began to spiral in a faint vortex. Suddenly he turned his palm and thrust it forward. Internal force surged out, and the gust from his palm swept ahead with a whoosh, blowing a path through the dust. He struck out several palms in succession, sending dust billowing through the air. He took his walking stick in hand again and planted it beside him to wait. The churning dust could scarcely come near him. He shone the powerful flashlight over the stretch of floor his palm winds had cleared. From what he could tell, the ground for more than ten meters ahead was all paved in metal, not merely the small patch beneath his feet. Patterns seemed to have been engraved into the metal, but without clearing away all the accumulated dust, there was no way to see their full form.

Once the dust had settled, Master Dao continued forward with his walking stick. Every so often, his flashlight swept the vaulted ceiling overhead. Several other black openings yawned around the chamber, much like the passage through which he had entered. Where they led, and what secrets lay at their ends, he could not know. “I really have never seen a layout like this before. Interesting…” Master Dao murmured with a smile.

A click sounded beneath his foot. Something seemed to have sunk under his weight. A low humming immediately rose from below, accompanied by the movement of hidden springs and mechanisms.

Boom! A tremendous crash came from the direction of the passage through which he had entered. Master Dao’s expression changed slightly. With his experience, one sound was enough to tell him that something heavy had dropped and sealed off the entrance passage. Then came deep grinding creaks from the other dark openings, as though massive doors had begun to open.

Master Dao lifted his foot and retreated several paces, sweeping the flashlight rapidly around the chamber. He knew he had stepped on a trigger and set off some mechanism in the tomb. Anything designed to cut off every route in and out was unlikely to mean him well. He watched the surroundings with heightened vigilance. Yet after waiting a while, he heard nothing. The entire chamber was dead silent. Instead, a deafening bang suddenly came from the entrance. The blast made the floor tremble beneath him, its reverberation humming through the underground palace.

Before long, he caught a different sound within the echoes. His flashlight snapped toward one of the black openings. Something seemed to be running toward him. Deep in the tunnel, a pair of luminous green eyes appeared in the beam. An instant later, the rest of the figure emerged: a person in tattered clothes. No, not quite a person. It looked like a desiccated corpse, its body covered in white hair, its mouth full of sharp teeth. Its eyes glowed green under the flashlight, and the claws at the ends of its ten fingers were blue-black and razor-sharp. It charged out of the opening with a roar and hurled itself at him.

The other openings erupted with the same creatures. Zombies!

The thought flashed through Master Dao’s mind, but his hands never stopped. He twisted the handle of his walking stick, and a streak of cold light slid free from within the shaft. His body flickered back a step, turning sideways to evade the zombie’s vicious lunge. His hand rose, sword light flashed, and a spray of green blood burst from the creature’s neck. The zombie’s head flew free of its body. Its torso slammed onto the metal floor and convulsed, trying several times to crawl but failing. Master Dao was already moving again. Sword light flashed again and again as lunging figures were cut down before him, the beam of his flashlight jerking wildly through the darkness. There was far more than one zombie. Roaring shapes kept pouring from the openings all around him, more and more of them with every passing moment.

Surrounded and caught off guard, he could no longer fend them off with the sword alone. Hands and feet came into play. In the confusion, he drove his blade through one zombie’s heart, only to discover that piercing its heart did nothing. The creature still raked a claw at him. Master Dao lashed out with a powerful kick. The force sent the zombie flying backward into several more behind it. Before his foot had even touched the ground, he sprang into the air, twisted, and drove another heel into a second zombie. His waist turned again in midair and his legs whipped out in rapid succession, sending several more creatures flying, while cold sword light took off several heads. In only a short while, more than twenty strong, ferocious zombies lay around him. Not one had managed to wound him despite the encirclement, but neither could he stop moving. Any normal opponent would long since have been beaten into fearing close combat with him. These zombies did not fear death at all, and their attacks were brutally aggressive. They were savage, stubborn things.

Da-da-da-da!

A burst of rapid gunfire erupted from the entrance. A small, wiry man stood there with a rifle spitting flame, pouring bullets into the zombies swarming Master Dao and taking the pressure off him. After the first burst, the wiry man saw that ordinary hits did little. Worse, the shots drew some of the zombies toward him. He clearly had experience with such things as well. His aim shifted at once to their heads and knee joints. The zombies charging him either had their knees blown apart and crashed to the ground, reduced to crawling, or had their heads burst open and collapsed with brain matter splattering out. The muzzle flashes lit the wiry man’s cold, expressionless face. He was extraordinarily composed.

Seeing the zombies charge without the slightest fear of death, he advanced instead of retreating. His hands moved with astonishing speed as he swapped magazines and racked the rifle, the gunfire pausing for scarcely an instant before resuming. As he continued forward at an even pace, he shifted the rifle into one hand and drew a pistol with the other. He hooked the slide against his belt and chambered a round with a sharp click, then, without even looking, fired two shots into the head of a zombie whose ruined knees had left it crawling almost to his feet. At intervals, the pistol snapped back behind him with another pair of shots, blowing apart the head of a zombie lunging from the rear. Rifle and pistol moved freely in his hands as he changed magazines one-handed. His familiarity with firearms was far beyond ordinary. The zombies fell one after another before they could get close.

Master Dao slipped aside and cut the head from the last zombie before him. At almost the same moment, the wiry man’s rifle barked twice, knocking down the final creature charging him. Master Dao flicked the shaft of his walking stick up with the toe of his shoe. It spun overhead and dropped. In one smooth motion he caught it, slid the sword back into its sheath, and turned it once more into an ordinary walking stick, which he planted on the floor. Then he raised a hand and smoothed back the hair that the fight had knocked out of place. A strange, rank stench filled the underground palace.

The wiry man circled around Master Dao. Whenever he found a zombie still twitching after being cut in half, or one that had lost both legs but was still thrashing, he put the rifle barrel to its head and fired twice, or stepped in with the pistol and did the same. Only when every zombie in the chamber had gone still did he resume watching their surroundings. He quickly changed magazines, tucked the pistol back into his waistband, and slung the rifle over his shoulder. Pulling a tube from behind his back, he snapped it open with a hiss. A flare ignited, trailing smoke as he tossed it away. He threw several more in different directions until the broad outline of the underground palace emerged in their light: a circular vaulted ceiling above, and the floor littered with zombie corpses.

The wiry man walked over to Master Dao, who was straightening his clothes. In a flat voice, he said, “Master Dao, the tails outside have all been dealt with. Our men are holding the entrance, and the rockfall sealing it has been blasted open. We can withdraw whenever we want.”

Master Dao gave a quiet acknowledgment. His flashlight played over the corpses on the ground while he prodded one with his walking stick and turned it over for a look.

The wiry man surveyed the bodies. By a rough count, there had to be at least a hundred. Somewhat puzzled, he asked, “Where did so many zombies come from?”

“Who the hell knows? On previous jobs, even when we ran into them, there would only be one or two. This many really is something…” Master Dao chuckled. “This place is interesting. Worth the trip!”

His flashlight swept the chamber again and came to rest on a seated statue of Guanyin nearly ten meters tall, pressed against the wall in an attitude of infinite compassion. The rest of the underground palace was almost completely empty. With a single enormous Guanyin statue sitting there so conspicuously, it was impossible not to notice it. The beam settled below the statue’s neck, revealing a pendant hanging there. The Guanyin was a single piece carved from stone, while the pendant had clearly been added afterward. For the moment, at least, it appeared to be the only movable object in the entire seamless structure of the underground palace.

Master Dao approached cautiously. Having already been caught once, he knew this tomb was far from ordinary. He tapped the floor ahead with his walking stick as he went, almost like a blind man feeling out the road. In truth, he was listening for any abnormal echo beneath the floor, wary of triggering another mechanism. At the base of the Guanyin statue, he raised his head to study it. He tapped the stone figure with his walking stick and listened to the sound, then drew a breath, gathered himself, and sprang lightly upward. He landed on the statue’s leg, bounded again, and quickly climbed to its shoulder. Crouching there, he pulled at the chain around Guanyin’s neck. It was metal. He hauled the pendant up, blew off the dust, and examined it under his flashlight. It was an ancient bronze mirror no larger than his palm. He had never seen a bronze mirror of this design. Unlike its chain, which had corroded badly, the mirror looked richly antique yet bore no trace of rust.

This was no place for a leisurely examination. He tried to remove the mirror and take it with him, only to discover that the chain from which it hung was fixed into the statue itself. The chain was already so badly corroded that it could not have much strength left. Master Dao set aside what he was holding, gripped the chain, exhaled, and pulled hard. Snap! The chain broke in his hands. But from inside it came a strand of golden filament, as though his pull had tugged on something hidden within the statue’s neck.

[End of Chapter 1]