Grave robbing is not a polite gathering, nor is it calligraphy, nor is it embroidery; it cannot be so elegant, so leisurely, so refined, so courteous and yielding. Grave robbing is a craft, the craft of systematic destruction.

When the ancient nobility constructed their tombs, they invariably went to the utmost lengths to prevent desecration, employing every conceivable means. They peppered their tombs with intricate mechanisms, hidden weaponry, ambushes, massive boulders, quicksand, poison darts, venomous insects, pitfalls—the list was endless.

By the Ming Dynasty, influenced by ingenious Western techniques, some grand tombs even incorporated elaborate Western rotary mechanisms. The imperial mausoleums of the Qing Dynasty, in particular, were masterpieces integrating millennia of anti-theft technology. The warlord Sun Dianying, aiming to excavate the Eastern Tombs for their treasures to fund his armies, deployed a massive force, employing both digging and blasting over five or six days to succeed—a testament to their formidable construction.

The grave robber’s challenge is to devise every possible method to bypass these traps and enter the tomb to uncover the treasures within.

However, in modern times, finding a tomb is often more difficult than excavating it. The major burial mounds marked by obvious features like earthworks and steles have mostly been plundered. To locate those ancient crypts buried deep beneath the earth for ages, bearing no surface markers, requires specific skills and specialized tools. Implements like the iron probe, the Luoyang shovel, bamboo pegs, the ground-penetrating dragon, the yin-probing claw, and the black ledger have all been developed. Furthermore, some masters eschew tools entirely; some locate tombs by deciphering clues within ancient texts, while a very select few have mastered secret arts, able to read the very pulse of the mountains and rivers, using geomancy skills to pinpoint the burial site. I fall into this last category. In my career of tomb raiding, I have traversed every corner of the land, experiencing countless bizarre and strange incidents along the way. Should I recount them one by one, they would surely shock the beholder and astonish the listener—for those feats involving dragons coiling and tigers hiding, lifting the heavens and rooting out the earth, overturning seas and flipping rivers, are anything but ordinary.

All these accounts must begin with a damaged manuscript left to me by my grandfather: The Sixteen-Character Secret Art of Yin-Yang Geomancy. For reasons unknown, the latter half of this book was violently torn away, leaving only this first volume, the Chapter on Geomancy. Much of what is recorded within describes proprietary techniques for deciphering the Feng Shui arrangements of tombs...