Dunjia Xunlong

On the Qinhuai River, seven months, seven floating corpses, corresponding to the Eight Gates of the Qimen, missing only the Gate of Death. Archaeologist Chen Guanlan is dragged into a deadly game by a Tang dynasty bronze mirror. Senior sister Su Jiuzhen has guarded the Qinhuai River for a lifetime, her pocket watch turning for a full 120 years. The Yin-walker Shen Qingluan bets ten years of her life span to rewrite fate with blood, determined to fight to the end! Six fragments of the ancient tripod tear open six sealed chapters of Chinese history. Yu the Great cast the tripod to suppress human desire; Zhuge Liang extended his life to mend the earth's fissures; Zheng He's voyages sought a path without sacrifice. Of the three thousand Qimen successors, fewer than a hundred remain. Lu Jiuyuan's obsession is hard to quell: 'I just want to erase all the suffering of these seventy-five years.' Chen Guanlan stands firm: 'China's survival has never relied on perfection, but on falling down and getting back up!' At the final ritual, the tripod is not forged into a weapon but transformed into a hub; Su Jiuzhen exhausts a century of cultivation to protect her junior, and the pocket watch from 1928 finally stops. Three years later, their daughter looks up and asks, 'Dad, how can a broken thread be reconnected?' Chen Guanlan recalls Li Chunfeng's maxim: Civilization is like a river; we are all drops of water, rushing to the sea without asking east or west. The Qinhuai River still flows, the red bean glutinous rice balls still taste the same, and a child murmurs, 'Someone in the water is laughing.' Using the body as the tripod, using blood to continue the pulse—China's five thousand years have never been broken!