The Broken Coffin

The Broken Coffin is a long horror-suspense novel by the online author Zonghuo Fengyu (Arson in the Rain). It was first serialized on 17K.com starting December 25, 2013, later on platforms such as QQ Reading, and completed on May 25, 2015, totaling about 1.82 million Chinese characters. The story is told in first person, with the narrator and protagonist Wang Zilong, a young man from Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. Starting from a series of strange incidents at a construction site and a silver coin of unknown origin, he sets out with childhood friends and is drawn step by step into a bizarre mystery revolving around a "broken coffin." According to the author's setup, what happens in the dark, silent tomb passages is not an ordinary tomb-raiding story, and what lies in the broken coffin at the end of the passage is not necessarily a mutilated corpse—a woman who has not died for a thousand years, eerie and mysterious tomb chambers, the soul-summoning of Shaman Kui San, painted-coffin lucky dolls, human-faced golden spiders, an underground palace, and other supernatural images together form an uncanny netherworld full of strange suspense. The work drives its plot with dense suspense and grotesque creatures and mechanisms, interwoven with antique markets, feng shui taboos, shamanic sorcery, and folk legends, with a tight narrative pace and an eerie atmosphere. It should be noted that this is an online serial novel; copies circulating in the market are mostly reader-compiled electronic texts, and no formally published print edition has been found, so no publication information beyond the publisher, ISBN, and word count is available.