The first time Yang Xiang heard the term "bone compass," he was fifteen.
It was whispered in a dry, rasping tone from the lips of a dying man — a professor who taught ancient cartography and comparative mythography at Nankai University. The man had survived two strokes, a car accident, and ten years of silence before speaking again. And his final words were directed at a boy who had only come to deliver a thermos of bone broth.
"The compass… doesn't point north. It points… down."
That sentence would haunt Yang Xiang for over a decade. But it was not until July of 2023, at the excavation site near Fenglin County in Shaanxi, that he realized the old man hadn't been mad.
He had been warning him.
It had rained the night before. The kind of rain that thins the dirt and exhumes what should have stayed hidden.
Yang crouched at the edge of the sinkhole, his boots clinging to the slick red loam. Behind him, the archeological team murmured in fragmented dialects, poring over ruined cart-wheels, bronze shards, and decomposed silk.
But what lay in front of him wasn't part of the standard dig. It was a perfectly smooth spiral stone — about two meters across — buried into the earth like a plug in a drain. Cold to the touch, unnaturally preserved, and most disturbingly… engraved with an inscription no one could translate.
He brushed more mud aside and found a symbol.
A hand — missing the thumb — pressed against a black sun.
Yang's chest tightened.
He had seen this symbol before. Once. In a photograph. In a classified folder belonging to his father's old military unit.
The artifact was removed that night. Quietly. No records logged.
By the following morning, two team members had resigned without explanation. A third—Dr. Gao—was found muttering at the camp's edge, her fingernails torn off one by one, her journal soaked in kerosene.
And the stone?
It was gone.
Only Yang had kept a rubbing of the inscription. He didn't trust anyone else. Not anymore. Not after what he found beneath the spiral. Not after the dreams began — the same one each night: a tunnel with walls that breathed, eyes etched into clay, and a child's voice counting backwards in an unknown language.
Ten…
Nine…
Eight…
That was only the beginning.
Because the next excavation site wasn't in Fenglin.It was in the mountains outside Xi'an.And what they found there… wasn't from this dynasty. Or any recorded one.
Not even the First Emperor's.