"It's a vertical drop—at least two meters into the sediment," I muttered, peering into the sun-drenched sandy passage.
"The entry to a burial chamber," my colleague whispered beside me. We had spent thirteen years chasing a historical figure, the Taixuan Emperor.
He had ruled for thirty-three years, yet history had scrubbed him nearly clean, leaving only fragments of his reputation as a violent, volatile tyrant. He was the ultimate archeological enigma.
Our breakthrough had only come five years ago, when local farmers unearthed shattered ceramic figures. We had moved slowly since then, terrified that a clumsy excavation would destroy whatever this little tyrant had taken to his grave.
"Look at the drainage," our Dominican archaeologist on my team remarked, while pointing his flashlight at the ceiling.
"Dry as a bone. How did they keep the water table from breaching the seal?"
"These ancient people are engineering genius" I replied, tracing the structural lines.
"They used subterranean walls of kiln-fired brick and thick, tamped earth to create a waterproof hull."
We had spent months mapping this out with magnetic anomaly surveying, tracking the faint magnetic signatures left by the fired bricks deep beneath the soil.
After hours of navigating the claustrophobic corridors, we turned a corner, and my breath hitched. A massive army of life-sized ceramic figures emerged from the darkness, their faces so lifelike they seemed to be breathing.
"The Longwei Army," we breathed in unison. Even under layers of dust, the craftmanship was terrifying, the scales of their armor were individually carved, and flecks of original cinnabar paint still clung to their cold, clay faces.
But as we moved toward a secondary chamber, the air changed. A sudden, violent spasm gripped my chest. It felt as though an invisible hand had reached through my ribs and squeezed my heart in a vice. Every step forward felt like wading through deep water.
In the center of this secondary hall sat the grand sarcophagus of Zhao Zhen Qi.
Surrounding him were twenty-three smaller, plainer tombs. The 'Sacrificed." In this era, when a Great Lord died, is harem followed him into the dark.
What an absolute bastard, I thought, a bitter taste in my mouth. To take Twenty-three lives just to keep him company in the dirt.
As the team pried back the lid of one of the side tombs, a familiar, suffocating grief washed over me.
"Oh, this one one wasn't preserved well. Terrifying," a colleague said.
The remains inside was skeletal. Unlike the others, who were draped in rotted silk and gold filigree. Her remains were wrapped in coarse, cheap linen.
"The inscription says 'Tang' likely a low-ranking concubine or a servant." I muttered.
I felt a magnetic pull, an urge so violent it bypassed my brain. I knew I shouldn't touch the remains without equipment or gloves, but my hand moved as if it belonged to someone else. As I reached for the rib cage, a sharp sting pricked my finger.
"Mo-Xian, What happened to you? You just dropped blood on the skull!"
The shout felt miles away. I stared down at the drop of my own crimson blood. Before I could pull back, a flash of white light exploded in my vision. It was blinding, searingly painful, and as the world dissolved into a roar of light, I felt myself falling, not into the tomb, but into somewhere else entirely.