Sand Sea (沙海)

Premise

The story begins when Li Cu, an ordinary high-school student, is attacked without warning on the street and a strange pattern is carved into his back. Treated at a hospital, he meets the nurse Liang Wan, and through her the two encounter Wang Meng at a restaurant and learn the identity of the mysterious attacker. Returning to Liang Wan's home, they find Wu Xie waiting for them; he asks Li Cu to go with him into the desert, where a series of hard-to-explain events unfolds.²

In the fuller plot summary, Wu Xie, preparing a plan against the Wang family, makes Li Cu part of that scheme and takes him into the desert before sending him home. Strange objects then keep arriving at Li Cu's home, leading the Wang family to believe he holds important information, and Wu Xie reappears to take Li Cu and his friends back to the desert. At the lowest level of the desert the Wang family follows to obtain Li Cu's information, and several industry figures, convinced that enormous treasure lies beneath, capture both parties and force Li Cu to lead them deeper.³

The series is set eight years after the end of Grave Robbers' Chronicles. Wu Xie, now a middle-aged travel and photography writer using the name Guan Gen, searches the desert city of Gutongjing for a missing subordinate, and the story alternates between the middle-aged Wu Xie and the teenage Li Cu, weaving new events together with old memories.^{6 • 7 • 8} The desert setting draws on a real place: Gutongjing is a fictional setting in the novel Sand Sea and not a historically established predecessor of the ancient Juyan state, but the idea of seas moving beneath the sand echoes the shifting Juyan Lake.^{9 • 21}

Cast and characters

Wu Lei plays Li Cu, a restless, impulsive high-school senior with claustrophobia and a broken family background, who is chosen as the key figure in Wu Xie's plan against the Wang family. Qin Hao plays Wu Xie, who has shed his earlier naivety and become a calculating strategist; the casting was widely praised by fans of the novels, since the character's age of roughly 36 or 37 matched the actor.^{5 • 8} The series uses a dual-lead structure, unlike the novels, which center on Wu Xie alone.⁸

The supporting cast includes Yang Rong as Liang Wan, Zhang Meng as Su Nan, Yu Hewei as Wu Sanxing, Zhang Ming'en as Zhang Rishan, and Ji Chen as Hei Yanjing (Black Glasses).³ Zhang Rishan, identified through his name and his double-ring bracelet as the adjutant of Zhang Qishan from The Mystic Nine, appears as chairman of the New Moon Hotel, opening a second narrative thread alongside the Gutongjing storyline.⁵

Place in the franchise

Sand Sea belongs to the commercial universe built around Grave Robbers' Chronicles. After Nanpai Sanshu regained the adaptation rights in 2016, the web series The Mystic Nine and the film Grave Robbers' Chronicles followed, and Sand Sea was set up afterward with the story adaptation already relatively mature.⁵ Its chief executive, Ye Fangcang, described a "tomb-raiding universe" of four series: modern exploration (Grave Robbers' Chronicles and its Reboot), Ming-dynasty detective stories, Republican-era legends such as The Mystic Nine, and youth adventure, which is Sand Sea.⁵

The franchise extended beyond the series itself. A spin-off network film, Sha Hai Fan Wai: Bang Ren, the first of a planned series, was released on Tencent Video on 2 August 2018.¹⁵ A Sand Sea mobile game developed with Kongzhong and Tencent Video was planned for release in August 2018, designed to interweave the drama's story with gameplay.^{16 • 5} An animated adaptation, Grave Robbers' Chronicles: Sand Sea, had earlier streamed on Bilibili from 21 June 2016 in 18 episodes, presenting the same premise of the gifted teenager Li Cu waking with a strange scar on his back and entering Wu Xie's scheme of revenge.¹⁷ A feature film based on the novel was announced as launched in August 2022.¹⁸

The series also marked a shift in how the source novels reached the screen. Nanpai Sanshu said earlier adaptations had been led by production companies seeking controversy, whereas Sand Sea was led by the original author, with fidelity to the plot and the characters' states as the first priority.¹⁹ Trade coverage described it as the first well-received screen work of the franchise, while noting that the broader "tomb-raiding universe" was still at an early stage.²⁰