Zhou''s palm covered Lin''s eyelids, and the salt on his palm was scratching painfully. The heavy rain washed the abandoned brick kiln where they were hiding. The black glutinous rice in the pottery jar was churning with the stench of corpses. The old man dipped half of the jade pendant into the jar. The image emerging from the turbid liquid made Lin''s pupils shrink - Su was trapped in the crystal coffin, the Yinxu worm was drilling into her ear hole, and the blood light of the birthmark on her wrist penetrated the water flow, projecting the Loulan star map on the dark river rock wall.


    "When Yin Yao awakens, he will see Yang Yao''s revolving lantern." Zhou''s voice was mixed with the muffled sound of the kiln''s exoskeleton bells, "The pain that girl is experiencing now is worse than when you opened the coffin."


    Twelve skeletons with copper bells appeared from the rain curtain, and the jade piece between the eyebrows of the leading skeleton flashed the seal of the Imperial Astronomical Observatory. Lin rolled sideways at the moment the corpse puppet pounced on him. When his fingertips touched the cold jade, the underground river in Lop Nur in the distance suddenly flowed backwards.


    Su''s teeth sank deeply into his lower lip. When Alena''s glass fingers penetrated her lower abdomen and pulled the bronze key from her spine, Peng in 1980 appeared in the crystal coffin. "The upstream message can only be transmitted three times," the mirror image''s right hand was intact, and the palm print overlapped with the outline of Lin''s birthmark, "Tell Lin that his grandfather was the only survivor of the coffin opening in 1953..."


    When the sandstorm rose, the underground river water wrapped Su and crashed into the altar. The blood-colored chalcedony peeled off Alena''s chest, and the glass body of the Loulan witch was recast in the hurricane: "Emperor Chongzhen engraved the "Luoshu" on the bottom of the yang coffin. What Zhao wants is not a double coffin, but a Xujie compass that combines the river and Luo."


    Blood words appeared in the backward river water, and Su recognized that it was the handwriting he would write three days in the future.


    Lin twisted the cervical vertebrae of the corpse puppet, and the jade piece rippled in his palm. Zhou cut his wrist and smeared the black blood on the kiln wall. The map that emerged showed that the secret passage in the 1950s led directly to the place where the ghost coffin was placed. "Your grandfather Lin Maocai opened the coffin and took away the fragments of the "Hetu" scroll," the old man said before the bucket of the excavator smashed the kiln roof, "It was sewn into the thigh to avoid inspection." Zhao stood on the steel behemoth, and the umbilical cord of the living compass in the gilded box trembled. Lin''s birthmark suddenly burned, and he saw Su inserting the Yang key into the altar, and the entire mirror city began to turn over. Jiu Ye''s petrified body rolled out of the sack, and his right hand twitched and carved the blood "coffin in coffin" on the blue brick. "Uncle Master, do you know that the real coffin of Emperor Chongzhen is wrapped in uranium 238?" Zhao kicked Jiuye''s head away, and the eye sockets of the living compass opened up a pupilless abyss. "In the center of the Lop Nur nuclear explosion, radiation is the best nutrient for Yinxu worms."


    Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.


    The dark river flows backward to form a vortex, and the half jade pendant in Su''s hand resonates with the fragment in Lin''s arms. Alena''s copper bell plays the elegant music of the Ming Dynasty, and the sand flows back to form a sundial projection: "Go to the sky burial platform at the source of the Yellow River and pierce the time anchor point with a double key."


    Lin saw twelve kneeling salt sculptures at the end of the secret passage, and the shroud coffin in the center oozed a gelatinous black liquid. The "Hetu" tattoo on Zhou''s back suddenly bleeds, and the blood words carved by Jiuye spell out the longitude and latitude - exactly the location of the altar where Su was. When the umbilical cord of the living compass wrapped around Lin''s ankle, he heard his father''s voice coming from the gilded box: "I buried videotapes in Lop Nur in 1958..."


    Thunder rolled over the ground, and Lin''s birthmark cracked and bled. Light beams shot into the western night sky, igniting red stars in Lop Nur. Su looked up and saw the star map changing. The letter for help he wrote three days ago was pouring down from the Milky Way, and every word was burning:


    Don''t touch me in 1980


    The moment the crystal coffin completely exploded, the fragment of "Hetu" in Lin''s arms floated up, and the projection of "Luoshu" in Su''s hand merged into a complete star map in the air. Alena''s glass body exploded into powder, and Zhao''s laughter came from every grain of sand and dust: "Welcome to the parallel time and space of Chongzhen 20 years."


    The riverbed suddenly heard the roar of the chain breaking. Lin grabbed Jiu Ye''s petrified right hand and inserted it into the living compass. Amid the screams, he saw the future clearly - in the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City, his mirror image was pressing the Pisces jade pendant into the dragon throne.