《Under the Yellow Sand: The World of Life and Death》 Chapter 1 The Black Coffin Appears Lin knelt on the cracked riverbed, his fingertips brushing over an exposed shinbone. Silt mixed with broken shells flowed out from his fingers, quickly hardening into grayish-white lumps under the scorching sun. This was the seventh day that the Yellow River had stopped flowing. The turbid waves of the past disappeared, and the riverbed was like the belly of a giant beast that had been cut open, exposing white bones and rusted weapons. The diversion notice of the Sanmenxia Reservoir upstream said that this was a routine maintenance, but the old people in the village squatted in front of the Dragon King Temple to burn paper money, saying that the river god would always drain his own blood before taking people away. "Lin! There''s something here!" The shouts of his cousin Dazhuang came with the sound of shovels hitting each other. There were seven or eight figures gathered in a depression three hundred meters away, and the semicircle posture reminded Lin of the crows overlooking the grave at a funeral. He smelled a foul smell when he approached. The dark coffin was inserted diagonally into the mud, with nine wrist-thick iron chains cross-bound, and the iron spikes at the ends deeply wedged into the riverbed. The coffin was covered with dark red spells, as if written with blood mixed with cinnabar, and the edges were charred and curled as if licked by fire. The most bizarre thing was the gelatinous black liquid seeping out from the gaps in the coffin lid, pungent white smoke rising from the dripping places, and corroding the river clam shells into honeycomb-like holes. "During the Republic of China, the coffins of criminals were sunk. Opening such coffins will shorten your life..." The old village chief stepped back with his jujube wood cane, while several young men clenched their shovels and moved forward. Lin grabbed Da Zhuangju''s hand with the crowbar, and the hair on the back of his neck suddenly stood up - he heard the sound of nails scratching inside the coffin. Three green-headed flies hit the spells on the coffin and instantly exploded into a sticky slurry. "Wait for the Cultural Relics Bureau..." Lin''s dissuasion was drowned out by the sound of iron prying. The six men held the crowbars and shouted in unison. The coffin lid moved a palm width away with a tooth-grinding friction sound. The moment the black mist gushed out, Da Zhuang let out a scream that was not like a human voice. When Lin rushed over, he saw his cousin''s face melting. The skin was drooping and dripping like wax oil under high temperature, revealing pink muscles and white cheekbones. The right hand wrapped in black mist had finger bones visible, but it still held the crowbar tightly. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. "Close the coffin! Close the coffin!" A hoarse roar came from outside the crowd. Lin looked up and saw a hunched black shadow staggering towards him with a bronze bell stick. Half of his blue-gray arm was exposed under his sheepskin coat, and it was covered with tattoos similar to the coffin face spell. At the moment the coffin lid closed with a bang, Lin''s right arm brushed the edge of the coffin. The birthmark suddenly exploded with burning pain, and the scene in front of him was distorted and smudged like spilled paint-- Countless naked bodies struggled in the rainstorm, and the iron chains penetrated the scapula and strung them into a blood-colored bead curtain. The official in the python robe and jade belt swung a knife to cut off the right hand of the sacrifice, and the severed palm fell into the boiling Yellow River. Half of a face that looked very similar to him emerged in the waves... "If you don''t want to die, spread the black donkey''s blood!" The bell stick hit the ground heavily. Lin suddenly woke up and found that the old man who called himself Zhou was pouring the dark red liquid in the pottery jar into the coffin. The blood plasma hit the black fog and made a fried sound. The coffin suddenly trembled violently, and the nine iron chains were stretched straight. The dark red blood oozes out from the bottom of the coffin, winding into a snake-like trajectory on the dry riverbed, pointing to somewhere in the northwest. Lin''s birthmark jumped, and the burning pain rushed up his arm to his temple. He pulled open his sleeves and found that the originally brown birthmark had turned scarlet and glaring. Upon closer inspection, it was the outline of the terrain of Lop Nur. Two thousand kilometers away, in the heart of Lop Nur. Su held down the wildly vibrating Pisces jade pendant. The coordinate numbers on the GPS screen were strangely overlapping themselves. When she checked the longitude and latitude for the third time, the instrument suddenly went black, and when it lit up again, blood-colored lines appeared - exactly the same as the talisman that the archaeological team had copied in the Loulan tomb last year. "Su! There is a discovery at the No. 3 survey point!" Amid the noise in the intercom, the assistant Xiao Wang''s voice was crying, "It''s... it''s Professor Peng''s backpack..." The sand dunes cast a giant python-like shadow in the twilight. Su held tightly the last letter her father sent before he disappeared. The words "Don''t believe the ''I'' of the Yellow River" on the yellowed letter paper were dyed bloody by the setting sun. She didn''t notice that the yin-yang fish in the center of the jade pendant was slowly rotating, dividing her reflection into two silhouettes that were moving away. The blood oozing from the coffin suddenly boiled. Zhou''s face changed drastically, and he swept the bell stick across to knock away two villagers who tried to touch the coffin: "Go! It''s calling..." Thunder exploded over the Yellow River. When the first drop of rain hit the talisman on the coffin, Lin clearly heard the crisp sound of the chain breaking from the ground. Chapter 2 Corpse Divination The bronze bell stick in Zhou''s hand was inserted three inches into the mud, and the rusty bell tongue whimpered in the wind. The coffin splashed with black donkey blood was like a dormant beast, and the nine iron chains glowed in the rain. Lin stared at the old man''s blue-gray arm. The talismans and tattoos were coiled on the skin like snakes, biting into strange totems with the lines on the coffin. The raindrops suddenly became sticky and hit the skin with a fishy smell. Lin wiped his face and found that his palms were full of tiny blood beads, each of which stretched out silky tentacles while rolling. A muffled sound came from the depths of the riverbed, and the cracked silt arched and collapsed, revealing half of the rusty Luoyang shovel - it was an artifact left by the dredging engineering team in 1953, but now it was covered with new blood moss. Zhou grabbed Lin''s collar, bloodshot eyes bursting: "If the Dragon Gate is not sealed before midnight, the whole village will be fed to fish and shrimp!" The lights of the distant village twisted into a ghost-like green in the rain. Two thousand kilometers away in the heart of Lop Nur, Su''s fingers sank into the sand. Thirty meters away at the bottom of the sand dune, half of the canvas backpack revealed the faded word "Peng", and the zipper teeth were stained with undried blood. Assistant Xiao Wang''s metal detector suddenly burst into a sharp buzzer, and before the voice fell, the camp car ten meters away was swallowed by quicksand. The satellite antenna on the roof was twisted into a twist, and the figure standing on the top of the sand dune made Su cold all over - the white lab coat was spotless, and the word "Peng" on the badge glowed coldly in the moonlight. "Run!" She grabbed Xiao Wang and rushed towards the camel, and the sand waves chased her heels. The moment she fell into the quicksand pit, she fell into an underground river. The blue light of the Pisces jade pendant illuminated the grooves on the cave wall that were as dense as a honeycomb. In each groove was a dried corpse with a left hand broken at the wrist. The red lacquer door of the river temple creaked in the strong wind. Zhou inserted the bronze bell stick into the incense burner, and when the incense ash splashed, five shrunken geckos arranged in the shape of a Big Dipper were revealed at the bottom of the furnace. The left eye of the clay sculpture of the Dragon King on the altar fell off, revealing a white skull, and a ball of fetal hair wrapped in red thread was stuffed in the right eye socket. "A black coffin was fished out in 1953," Zhou tore open his sheepskin coat, and the scar on his chest was blue-black. "The twelve engineers who opened the coffin began to petrify from their toes..." The sound of nails scratching outside the temple was getting closer and closer. Lin looked through the hole in the window paper and saw the old village chief crawling upside down with his head against the ground, and octopus-like tentacles protruded from the cracked mouth at the back of his head. Zhou shouted "Kneel!", and Lin''s knees hit the blue bricks uncontrollably, and black water seeped out of the cracks of the bricks and soaked his trouser legs. The old man bit his index finger and wrote a blood curse on the skull of the Dragon King: "What exploded in Lop Nur in 1958 was not an atomic bomb, but the mother body of the Yinxu worm!" Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. The water level of the dark river suddenly surged. Alena emerged from the sand and dust, her glazed right ear reflecting a colorful halo, and the copper bell in her hair was engraved with the Loulan sun pattern. "Your father''s backpack is the bait thrown by the Yang coffin," she raised her hand and pointed to the bottom of the river. Countless canvas bags embroidered with the word "Peng" floated in the blue light. "The Loulan people fed the Yang coffin with their left hands. Your bloodline is not accidental." Su''s left hand uncontrollably pressed against the crystal coffin, and the broken wrist of the figure in the coffin perfectly overlapped with her wrist. At the moment of the sharp pain, the memory fragments of 1980 flooded into his mind-Peng stood in the same position and broke the Pisces jade pendant. In the ancient city in the sandstorm, countless "Pengs" were repeating the same action. The roof of the river temple collapsed in the explosion. Zhao emerged from the smoke, his gold-rimmed glasses adorned with a jade pendant from the Imperial Astronomical Observatory. The black-clad man''s rocket launcher smashed the left half of the Dragon King statue. "Master''s zombie Gu is well-fed," Zhao rolled over the insect corpses on the ground, and opened Lin''s eyelids with a bronze dagger. "The mirror image is being reassembled at the missing point of Peng. Doesn''t the Yin Key host intend to save the Yang Key?" Lin''s right arm was burning and bleeding, and the birthmark merged into a topographic map of Lop Nur on the incense ash. He vaguely saw Su trapped in a crystal coffin, and the next second he was pinched by the throat and pressed on the altar. Zhou took the opportunity to throw the bell stick, and the exploded bronze bell released the Yinxu insect swarm. The old man grabbed Lin and broke through the rear window and disappeared in the rainstorm. The water flow of the dark river swept Su against the rock wall. Alena inserted her glass fingers into the cracks of the stone, and the sand condensed into Loulan characters in the air: "The Yin-Yang Coffin is opened, the Xiran appears, and the desert will swallow half of China." The Yinxu worm crawled out of the cracks in the crystal coffin, drilled into Su''s skin along the trouser legs, and the birthmark on the wrist glowed with blood. She heard Peng in 1980 whispering in her ear: "Don''t believe the ''I'' of the Yellow River..." Lin vomited in the rainstorm, and the transparent worm swimming in the black water drilled back into his fingers. Zhou tore open his sleeves, and green smoke rose when he smeared the birthmark with incense ash: "The mirror body Zhao said is the reflection of the Yinxu worm after parasitism. Zombies like you and me are just watchdogs of the Yin-Yang Coffin." In the distance, the river surface was rising with turbid waves of a hundred meters, and countless blurred figures stood on the waves. Lin saw that the nearest "person" had his own face, but his right hand was connected to the broken palm in the crystal coffin. The old man lifted up his trouser legs, and his petrified calves cracked into salt crystal-like lines: "I ate the Yin coffin mud in 1959. Now it''s your turn to choose - restart the world, or be replaced by the mirror image?" When the thunder rolled over the horizon, Lin''s birthmark suddenly tore the skin, and a line of blood shot into the western night sky, igniting red stars in the direction of Lop Nur. Chapter 3 Letter against the Current 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. Chapter 4 Uranium Marks Lin''s back was pressed against the copper hoop of the coffin, and his fingertips stroked the cracks that glowed blue. Zhao called it "uranium marks" - the fluorescence of uranium 238 decay meandered on the coffin surface like a river, as if someone had carved a vicious curse on the lead layer with stardust. The beeping sound of the radiation detector pierced his eardrums, and he remembered Jiu Ye''s last warning before he petrified: "These marks are not caused by years, but the teeth marks of the mother gnawing at time and space." Su''s voice came from the headphones of the radiation protection suit, with a rustling sound of electric current interference: "Your father hid the videotape under the third copper hoop. He said... Don''t let the pictures from 20 years ago eat into the present." When he opened the rusty copper hoop, the radioactive dust burned Lin''s fingers. On the yellowed film, in 1983, father Lin Maocai held up the fragment of "Hetu", the edge of which matched the year "1979" engraved on the coffin perfectly: "When we found it 700 meters underground in 1958, the uranium layer had not been sealed yet..." The picture suddenly shook, and the photographer''s panting tore through time and space: "Something is breathing inside... It''s the vibration frequency of the bronze ware!" The prayer flags on the sky burial platform were twisted into a twist in the wind. Zhou''s petrification had spread to his throat, and when the bronze bell rod was nailed into the ice, the salt moths swarmed towards the living compass suspended in the air. "Master Jiu left a message at the bottom of the coffin," the old man''s hoarse voice mixed with the sound of ice cracking, "These uranium traces... are the time residues excreted by the mother body of the Yinxu worm..." Half of the jade pendant flew out of Lin''s arms and resonated with the fragments in Su''s hand thousands of miles away. The blue light on the coffin suddenly surged, and a gelatinous black liquid seeped out from the uranium marks, condensing into the phantom of Emperor Chongzhen - the Yinxu insects under the dragon robe were mating, and the pupils of their compound eyes reflected the radiation cloud above the nuclear explosion crater. Su''s scream was cut by the echo: "It''s not the emperor! The mother is emulating history!" The father in the video suddenly turned to the camera. Lin Maocai tore open his trouser legs and sutured the wound of "Hetu" with black blood oozing out: "30,000 labor reform prisoners dug this tunnel, not to find a mineral vein at all..." The picture shook violently, and the humming of bronze instruments came from the well in 1983, and the frequency was synchronized with the burning pain of the birthmark on Lin''s wrist. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Zhao''s laughter seeped out from the radiation cloud. The umbilical cord of the living compass wrapped around Lin''s wrist, and pus and blood flowed back into the blood vessels: "These uranium marks are the birth canal where the mother lays eggs... Welcome to witness the time and space pregnancy." Lin''s back of the hand bulged with a tumor, and under the translucent skin, the father in 1983 was running wildly in the well, chasing a group of human-shaped uranium light behind him. When the dark river poured back into the nuclear explosion pit, Su''s left hand had completely turned into crystal. Alena''s consciousness reconstructed the voice through the sand: "Use the Yang key to pierce the dragon pattern... The end of the uranium mark hides the "Luo Shu"..." The moment the water curtain cracked, Peng in 1980 stepped out, and the Geiger counter returned to zero in his palm: "I rewrote the nuclear parameters of thirty-seven time and space... But you have to leave someone trapped in 1983 forever..." The lead coffin opened with a bang. Lin saw countless of himself trapped in the time bubble - the rotting corpse in the flood of 1998, the mirror image on the dragon throne of the Forbidden City in 2024, the carbonized skeleton of the uranium mine explosion in 1979... The video tape of his father suddenly froze, and the picture of 1983 jumped out of the screen, turning into a physical figure and pounced on the compass in Zhao''s hand. The swarm of salt moths smashed seven green fire pits on the sky burial platform. Zhou''s last flesh and blood disintegrated in petrification, and the splashing salt crystals pierced the corner of Lin''s eyes. The Yin Key and the Yang Key touched each other in the air, and the shadow of Chongzhen collapsed into a black hole. Half of Zhao''s body was sucked into the crack of the uranium mark in 1979. "These marks... are the spawning path of the mother body!" Su''s cry was distorted by the black hole. Her crystal left hand automatically wrote the future - the mirror image of Lin in 2024 pressed the Pisces jade pendant into the dragon throne, and the Yellow River Basin was desertifying at a speed of ten meters per second. The moment the lead coffin melted into molten iron, Lin caught the key picture: in the rainy season of 1995 when the Yellow River stopped flowing, Jiu Ye used a syringe to inject fluorescent liquid into the heart. The afterimage of Peng in 1980 emerged from the pus and blood of the living compass, and his dying roar shattered all the instruments: "Go find... the rain in 1995..." The dark river under the ice overflowed the sky burial platform, and the uranium light flowed in the green water. Lin saw that her reflection was splitting - her right arm was covered with petrified spots, but her left half was the mirror image smiling on the dragon throne. Chapter 5 Drought Demon Lin''s fingers sank into the cracked riverbed, and the fluorescent blue liquid seeping out from between his fingers exuded a fishy sweetness like amniotic fluid. This was the remnant of the strange rain in 1995, which formed a spider web-like uranium mark on the loess after drying up. The yellow sand accumulated in the radiation protection helmet slid down with his panting, and Su''s warning came from the headset, mixed with the howling of the sandstorm: "The weather station data has been tampered with... The rain clouds are flowing back from the Forbidden City in 2024..." When the first drop of rain hit the mask, he thought it was an illusion. Until the blue light water droplets corroded the protective suit, countless dry hands stretched out from the cracks in the river ditch in the distance - those labor reform prisoners who drowned when building the reservoir were crawling out from the ground, and the tentacles of Yinxu worms drilled out of their empty eye sockets, stretching into pale mycelium in the rain. "It''s not the drought demon!" Su''s scream pierced the eardrum. The moment Crystal''s left hand inserted into the console, Alena''s stream of consciousness reconstructed the voice line in the circuit board, "Rainwater is the amniotic fluid excreted by the mother... They are activating the corpse to lay eggs!" The iron sheet of the abandoned sand pumping ship was hit by the raindrops, making a chime-like sound. Lin''s back was pressed against the hull, watching the zombies swell into a tumor in the blue rain. A tumor suddenly cracked, and half of Zhao''s body squeezed out of the pus and blood. His festering right hand held a living compass: "Do you know why 1995 was chosen? The sunspots that year could make the uranium mark crack into a birth canal..." The radiation meter was beating wildly, and half a page of burnt yellow diary floated out of the pus of the tumor. The handwriting on July 23, 1995 was scribbled like a ghost: "Brother Maocai is going to blow up the uranium mark core under the Forbidden City tonight. He said that Emperor Chongzhen is buried there..." The second half was dissolved by the corpse fluid, leaving only the dragon pattern afterimage swimming in the pus and blood. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Alena''s glass fingers penetrated time and space, and drew the Loulan star map on the sand: "The thousands of miles of red land are not brought by the drought... It is the drought that the mirror body has poured back from the future!" The bulletproof glass of the mirror weather station burst. Su was knocked to the ground by the air wave. In the cold light reflected by her crystal left hand, she saw countless of herself repeating the same action at observation stations in different years - injecting cyanide into artificial rainmaking rockets. The young version of Peng suddenly appeared in front of the broken window, his white coat stained with rain from 1995, but the weather balloon in his hand showed the coordinates of 1979: "I sow catalysts in all time and space... Only the rain here can breed mother and larvae..." As the console screen flickered, the Forbidden City in 2024 emerged in the rainstorm. The mirror body Lin stood on the top of the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Every time the Pisces jade pendant rotated a circle, new rain clouds spewed from under the dragon throne. Su''s right hand pressed the launch button uncontrollably, and the rainmaking rocket dragged the purple mist across the night sky, and the poison and rain mixed into a deadly neon. Mycelial roots grew wildly in the riverbed, and each mycelium had a human face. Lin crushed the nearest tumor, and a baby cried from underground. Countless bronze keys fell with a new wave of blue rain, each engraved with "Made by Chongzhen Emperor". Amid the radiation alarm, he touched the pistol on Su''s waist. The rain in 1995 suddenly changed its texture - no longer water droplets, but tiny bronze keys, taking root as soon as they landed. "Go to the basement of the weather station..." Alena''s glass body disintegrated in the crystal fragments, "Peng is hiding there..." Before Su''s left hand completely exploded, Lin saw the last image sent back: his father in 1995 stood in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the remote control of the explosives was connected to the uranium core under the dragon throne; he embedded the Pisces jade pendant into the dragon throne in 2024; Zhao in 1979 took out a beating bronze heart in the mine. The rain stopped. More dry hands stretched out from the cracks in the Yellow River Basin. This time they held the weather station''s file bag, with the date circled in red printed on the yellowed pages.