Tomb of the Yuan

Tomb of the Yuan is a completed long-form historical time-travel novel by Wu Lie, serialized under the History · Song, Yuan, and Ming category on Qidian, originally titled The Policewoman Chased Me to the Yuan Dynasty. It runs about 2.881 million characters across 679 chapters and was completed in March 2025. The story employs a dual-protagonist, bidirectional time-travel premise: while pursuing artifact smuggler Li Luo, female detective Cui Xiuning and her target trigger a mechanism in an ancient tomb on Mount Mani, Ganghwa Island, Korea, and are swept through a rift in time to a frigid snow mountain in the 16th year of the Zhiyuan era (1279), during the reign of Kublai Khan. The Battle of Yamen had ended two years earlier, the Southern Song had fallen completely, the Mongol cavalry rode unchecked across the world, and the Yuan Empire stood at its zenith. In a blizzard at minus twenty degrees, the detective and the wanted criminal, on opposite sides of the law, are forced into an alliance to survive: Li Luo uses his tomb-raiding and artifact expertise to decipher clues in the ancient tomb murals and Mongol shaman totems, while Cui Xiuning employs criminal-investigation methods to gather intelligence on Yuan lower-class society and soon detects signs of local resistance. The two then infiltrate the Yuan bureaucracy under forged identities, walking a tightrope between serving the Yuan and rebelling against it: one manages politics and rises through the ranks, the other builds a spy network, buys intelligence, and plans assassinations, gradually accumulating anti-Yuan strength and becoming entangled in major events such as the Mongol invasions of Japan and the coup in Dadu, ultimately moving toward direct military confrontation with the Mongol Empire. The book depicts the plight of Han Chinese subjects in the early Yuan with a cold, restrained tone, and also portrays two modern people testing each other and joining hands in desperate straits.