Tomb Codex

The party that hired Shen Zhaoye to go into the imperial tomb has no face. An encrypted mailbox, a Swiss bank, no name, no face. It wants 'one particular thing' from inside the tomb.

An old lineage in the Fenjin school, carried 4 generations on one Dragon-Stirring Fragment. By Shen Zhaoye's generation the house has fallen, and the Fragment survives only as a copied First Half.

Seal characters written in reverse are nine times out of ten a lock-curse. The rule in the trade: don't force your way through characters you can't read, and don't look long at ones written backward.

The rules for going into a tomb, handed down through the generations, resting on experience several generations paid for with their lives. The core of it is one line: you came to look and to take, not to leave anything behind.

The stone door carries 4 lines: Those who enter this gate, know the dragon and turn back, hold the mirror and enter, the soul returns at thirty-one. A bronze mirror matching the recess was later dug out of the gully.

The pupils of the pottery figures are carved as a single vertical line — like a cat's, like a snake's, anything but a man's. No craftsman carves that way for no reason.