The Grave Robbers' Chronicles

The Grave Robbers' Chronicles is a long-running mystery-adventure novel serialized online by Nanpai Sanshu (real name Xu Lei) starting in 2006. Physical editions were released volume by volume by several publishers from January 2007 onward; the series comprises nine books in total and concluded in December 2011 with The Grand Finale (Parts One and Two). The story begins with a Warring States silk manuscript: fifty years earlier, a group of Changsha tomb raiders (grave robbers) brought a damaged silk manuscript out of an ancient tomb. The fragment recorded the location of a peculiar Warring States tomb, yet the group encountered strange events inside and nearly all of them died. Fifty years later, the grandson of one of them, Wu Xie, discovers this secret in his forebear's notes. Wu Xie, a young proprietor of an antique shop in Hangzhou, follows his third uncle Wu Sansheng and a band of experienced tomb raiders into the Palace of the Prince of Lu and is drawn into an enormous puzzle far beyond anything he could have imagined. The Seven Star Suspicious Coffins, the Blue-Eyed Fox Corpse, the Nine-Headed Snake Cypress, the undersea boat tomb, the ten-thousand-year sacred tree of the Qinling Mountains, the sky palace in the snow mountains, the snake marsh of the Kingdom of the Queen Mother of the West, the underwater Yao village of Guangxi… each perilous site gives rise to new mysteries and to companions who share life and death with him, such as Zhang Qiling (Muyouping) and Wang Pangzi. The book follows the adventures of the "Iron Triangle" as its main thread, unfolding amid a chilling atmosphere and banter a network of puzzles spanning decades and entangling the Old Nine Gates and a mysterious organization.