"Well, shit." Wei-Ling tossed the counterfeit jade seal in the air, catching it with practiced swagger. "Another overpriced piece of crap from our friends in Guangzhou. Tell Mr. Zhang if he wants to blow twenty million yuan, he should at least buy me dinner first."
Her AR display pinged: UNKNOWN HEAT SIGNATURE DETECTED.
"Oh, fuck off," she muttered, swiping the alert away. After ten years in the tomb-raiding business, she'd learned to trust her gut over glitchy tech. The Ghost Market Queen didn't need a babysitter – digital or otherwise.
"You kiss your ancestors with that mouth?" Mei Chen's voice crackled through her earpiece.
"Only the rich ones." Wei-Ling's fingers traced a hairline crack in the wall, her black-market quantum scanner humming to life. While those meatheads from the Shanghai crew were out there treating Ming tombs like a goddamn construction site, she did things old school. Well, old school with enough black market scanning gear to make MIT's engineering department wet themselves.
"Speaking of rich assholes," Mei chimed in, "heard about those Song Dynasty tombs?"
"Yeah, those needle-dick Zheng Brothers and their goddamn explosives." Her scanner projected a 3D grid across the wall. "Fucking amateurs. These tombs are like vintage wines – you don't open them with dynamite."
The wall's hidden mechanisms revealed themselves under her tech's penetrating gaze. "Hot damn, we've got ourselves a Ming Dynasty pleasure cruise here. Check these warning glyphs – some ancient craftsman had serious skills."
"You're doing it again," Mei snickered. "Getting all hot and bothered over thousand-year-old graffiti while ghosting actual humans on WeChat."
"Because dead people don't send dick pics." Wei-Ling's fingers found the pressure points with practiced ease. "They just leave their cool shit organized all nice and pretty. Like this bad boy – definitely a top-tier noble. The dragon motifs are basically ancient bling and—" She broke off, something tingling at the back of her neck. All her years of tomb raiding had taught her to trust her instincts, but this time the warning came a split second too late.
Cold steel kissed her ribs before she even registered the presence behind her. One second she was rattling off tomb statistics, the next – fuck – the blade slid through her like she was made of rice paper, turning her thousand-dollar thermal suit into expensive garbage.
"Son of a bitch." Blood filled her mouth, tasting like stolen copper.
Her display strobed red: MAJOR TRAUMA DETECTED. EMERGENCY SERVICES NOTIFIED.
"Mei?" She coughed, watching her attacker's shadow disappear into the darkness. "Nuke the servers. All of them. And tell Zhang he can stick his fake seal up his—"
Her phone hit the ground with a crack, still documenting her final heist in ultra-HD glory. The infamous Ghost Market Queen, bleeding out in some bougie nobleman's tomb, surrounded by all the precious crap that made her rich. The jade burial suits she'd stripped from countless corpses suddenly felt like a cosmic middle finger from the universe.
As her vision faded, Wei-Ling couldn't help but laugh. She'd spent her whole career learning to read dead people's stories – their secrets, their swagger, the way they flexed even in death. Now she was about to become another footnote in someone else's tomb, another ghost with unfinished business.
Should've seen this coming, she thought, black spots dancing at the edges of her vision.
Her life had been one giant "fuck you" from the universe: parents who went from Party darlings to street vendors overnight, eighteen years breathing concrete dust in those vertical slums they called urban villages, and finally making it big by giving guided tours through rich people's graves. The Ghost Market Queen – pain in the ass of every museum curator from Beijing to Guangzhou, nightmare of the archaeology department, and now just another stiff in a fancy hole.
"Zhou Wei-Ling." The voice resonated like temple bells through the subway's mechanical drone. "Your time wasn't supposed to end in this desecrated place."
She tried to laugh, but it came out as a wet gurgle. "Yeah? Tell that to the asshole with the knife."
A figure materialized – something that made her black market tech look like dollar store LEDs. It glowed with inner radiance, its form fluid as flowing silk. "What if I told you there's a way back?"
"Back?" Wei-Ling could barely whisper, her fingers still clutching that damn imperial seal that would've set her up for life. "Like a cosmic ctrl-Z?"
"A second chance. A new path." The being knelt beside her, its form shimmering like moonlight on water. "But it comes with a price. A purpose."
Wei-Ling's vision blurred, the being's outline fracturing like light through crystal. "Getting philosophical... with a girl who's bleeding out? Real classy."
The being continued as if she hadn't spoken, its voice carrying the weight of centuries. "One thousand souls," it intoned, its essence rippling like wind-touched silk. "Each one a puzzle more intricate than any tomb you've breached. You've become adept at reading the dead – their beliefs, their fears, their hopes buried in jade and gold. Now you shall learn to read the living."
Wei-Ling spat blood. "Bullshit. Dead people make sense. The living are like drunk pandas on crack."
The being's light flickered with gentle amusement. "Are they not the same? Each soul carries treasures and traps, hidden chambers and false doors. You read broken pottery to divine its maker's intent – now you shall read broken spirits to divine their healing."
Through fading vision, Wei-Ling started connecting the dots. She could spot a tomb's weak points – maybe that'd help her see through people's emotional armor. She could spot fake artifacts – that'd be handy for catching bullshitters. Hell, she knew more about ancient spiritual crap than most temple monks.
"In every tomb," the being said, "you sought the most precious artifact – the one treasure that made your transgression worthwhile. With these souls, you must find their buried truth: the hope or dream they've hidden so deeply, they've forgotten its existence."
"So instead of stealing shit, I'm... what? Some kind of spiritual archaeologist?"
"Indeed. You will transform from taker to restorer. Consider this your final excavation – perish here, or begin anew. Choose wisely, Ghost Market Queen."
Wei-Ling thought about all the graves she'd pillaged, all the ancestral tablets she'd hawked to the highest bidder. She could read thousand-year-old grief in pottery patterns but couldn't decode her dad's face when the hospital bills crushed him. She'd learned six dead languages but couldn't find the words to talk to her own mom without starting a fight.
"Fuck it," she whispered, the seal slipping from her bloody fingers. "I'm in."
As soon as the words fell from her lips, the tomb dissolved into pure white light, a thousand stolen artifacts screaming their stories into her fading consciousness. Her body felt like it was being unmade, each atom pulled apart and reassembled by invisible hands. The last thing she saw was that fake jade seal, hanging suspended in the void, before reality twisted inside out.
Then, like surfacing from the deepest dive of her life, Wei-Ling gasped awake. Above her, a fancy-ass wooden ceiling bloomed with clouds and dragons, their colors so vivid they seemed to writhe and dance. She knew these patterns intimately – hell, she'd sold photos of similar ones to art dealers for small fortunes. But these weren't faded by centuries; they were fresh as wet ink, painted by hands that hadn't yet become dust in some forgotten grave.
"Young miss?" Some servant girl's voice. "Your mother requests your presence for calligraphy lessons."
Wei-Ling sat up so fast her head spun. Holy shit. She was in a Ming Dynasty bedroom – not some museum reconstruction or tomb, but the real deal. The silk paintings were pristine, the air thick with incense, and that porcelain vase in the corner... Son of a bitch. She'd fenced that exact piece to a tech bro for three million yuan.
Her shaking hands found a bronze mirror. The face that stared back was hers, but factory reset to teenage years. Her hair was done up all proper noble-daughter style, with the same jade pins she'd pried from about a dozen noble corpses.
"Young miss?" The servant sounded worried. "Are you unwell?"
Wei-Ling bit back a hysterical laugh. She'd spent years memorizing Ming Dynasty everything – which stuck-up noble wore what hat, which emperor had a hate-boner for specific colors, who bought jade from whom. Now she had to actually live in this perfectly preserved pressure cooker.
A memory hit her: carefully lifting a jade bracelet off some noblewoman's bones, dating it by the cut. She looked down at her wrist. There it was, fresh as morning dew, probably still warm from the craftsman's hands.
"I'm good," she managed in Guānhuà, mentally high-fiving whatever cosmic force had copy-pasted her language skills along with her memories. "Tell Mom I'll be there in a minute."
The servant left, and Wei-Ling stood on wobbly legs, mind racing like a Shenzhen subway. She had eighteen years to save a thousand souls, stuck in an era when women were basically fancy furniture. One wrong word could bring down more shame than that time she accidentally sold a Tang Dynasty dildo to a monastery.
Then she saw the calendar scroll and her stomach dropped through the fancy floor.
Three months before the Shaanxi earthquake turned half of China into history's biggest mass grave.
"Well," she muttered in extremely non-Guānhuà, "this is gonna be fucking interesting."
Note:
During the Ming Dynasty, the primary spoken language was a form of "Mandarin" called "Guānhuà" (官話), which translates to "language of the officials."