The Yellow River Coffin Maker

Chen Jiuzhang wakes up in a coffin shop with only a name and calloused hands from carpentry. He was pulled from the Yellow River three years ago by an old fisherman, with no memory except an instinct for wood. Strangely, something stirs in his mind—not a voice or text, but a vague intuition. It glows when he touches coffins and aches when facing deep earth. Liu the Fortune Teller says it's the 'Coffin Maker Sutra,' a forbidden craft passed down from the last generation of the Chen family's corpse herders. On White Deer Plain lies a town-suppressing river coffin buried under tree roots for ages. The coffin bottom bears a map—the hydrological course of the Yellow River's old path, completely different from the current riverbed. Chen Jiuzhang's old scar on his tiger mouth burns at the sight. Beneath the riverbank hides something not stone or earth, but man-made—an underground complex buried in silt for a millennium. Its ventilation still works, its structure hasn't collapsed. It's neither tomb nor city, but a living thing waiting. Meanwhile, a local squire named Zhou Degui eyes Chen's skills, and a mud-splattered jeep stops at the village entrance.