Dragon Coffin

Dragon Coffin is a long-form suspense and supernatural novel by the web author Little Green Snake. First serialized on Novel Reading Network, it runs to over 1.8 million Chinese characters and concludes after several hundred chapters. The story begins with Su Bai, a boy born with strange anomalies: he has reverse scales from birth and barely survives delivery. A one-armed Daoist priest sacrifices his own strength to save him, granting him twenty more years of life—but this also alters his fate, and after twenty years he must save himself to survive a great calamity.

Twenty years later, Su Bai's mother, Bai Ling, arranges for him to work at an antique shop of mysterious origins, where he meets Yue Qing, a nineteen-year-old Maoshan youth. Yue Qing bears a lotus-shaped golden mark on the back of his hand and suffers from a rare name-memory disorder, yet he remembers Su Bai's name alone. A "cross ghost road" marked by white marble ghost stakes suddenly appears in the city, its menace aimed squarely at the antique shop, and the two youths, whose fates are intertwined, set out to uncover the truth.

Following a freshly preserved Ming dynasty corpse that bears the same golden lotus mark on its hand, they descend deep into tomb passages, surviving a series of perils including ghost roads, soul-snatching spirits, thunder-pool arrays, and twin coffins. The return of novelist Cui Ying and the arrival of Bai Moxuan, a superstar of fox-spirit descent, bring further clues to light. The mystery reaches back to the early Ming—to Emperor Jianwen, the Shaobing Song, and the sworn brotherhood of the seven stars of the Big Dipper—as a centuries-old obsession and curse are peeled back layer by layer.

Blending tomb raiding and exploration, Daoist arts, and the annals of nation and dynasty, the novel moves beyond the thrills of tomb mechanisms to focus on its characters' fate, loyalty, and choices. It is one of the longer works in its genre, distinguished by its steady pacing.