The Forbidden Ancient Temple

The Forbidden Ancient Temple is a long-form supernatural mystery web novel by Xiangxi Guiwang. Serialization began on November 30, 2015, on the Heiyan Reading Network; the full text runs to roughly 1.74 million characters across 680 chapters, and it was marked as completed in December 2022. The story opens with an old family matter: the great-grandfather of protagonist Qin Bian once dug a well, accidentally broke into an ancient tomb, and took gold ornaments from a red-robed female corpse in a crystal coffin. From then on, the Qin family was burdened with an inescapable curse—the eldest son of each generation's main branch would not live past the age of seven. By Qin Bian's generation, a knowledgeable man in the village told the Qin family that to save the child's life they would have to send him into a temple. Unwilling to have their son become a monk, the Qin family instead had young Qin Bian join the temple-repair crew of builder Ning Lingsheng. From then on he traveled far and wide, repairing temples for others to accumulate merit. As his experience grew, Qin Bian discovered that temple repair was far from simple: the "great benefactors" who funded temple construction each had their own strange reasons, and a charitable heart was not necessarily the same as charitable intent. Moreover, in places few people visited—the mass grave in the black pine forest of the Northeast, the air-crash ruins on an unnamed island in the Bohai Sea, the human-medicine valley in the Shennongjia no-man's-land, and the ghost stronghold in the dense forests along the China-Vietnam border—there stood ancient temples of gray brick and dark tiles. Monkless and incense-less, these temples stood like silent guardians, keeping unknown secrets. Taking the obscure profession of "temple repairer" as its entry point, the book links feng shui arrays, kuman thong spells, corpse-driving sects, and other folk occult elements, writing about human nature and good and evil beneath the shell of supernatural adventure.