South of the Yunling Mountains lay the boundary between the Eastern Yunnan Plateau and the Hengduan Mountains.
Crustal movements during the Cretaceous period had folded and uplifted this region, forming an unbroken mountain range with an average elevation of over two thousand meters.
The complex terrain and sealed-in thick fog left vast stretches of primeval forest untouched by human footprints.
Mist permeated the forest, and even daylight was blocked by the dense vegetation, leaving behind only deep green shadows and damp silence.
At that moment, a college student emerged from the depths of the dense forest, leaning on an alloy trekking pole. He trudged alone over thick layers of rotting leaves, staggering forward until he stopped on a slightly flatter patch of ground, his face deathly pale.
On the third of last month, news broke that substandard renovation materials at the Linchuan City Orphan Welfare Institute had caused several orphans to develop leukemia.
So the local explorers' club decided to organize a livestreamed trek through an uninhabited zone, intending to use the internet's popularity to raise donations for those children.
Since it happened to be summer vacation, the college student signed up for the event.
At first, their trek had gone fairly smoothly.
After all, most members of the club were exploration experts, and they were fully equipped. They chatted and laughed all the way, without the slightest sense of urgency about entering an uninhabited zone.
But when an eerie mountain fog suddenly descended, everyone in the group became separated.
Before setting out, they had actually mapped out detailed survival and return routes, making a copy of the map for each person. Even if they got separated, they only needed to stay where they were and wait for the fog to clear.
The problem was that once the fog dispersed, the college student discovered that his compass was spinning faster than Doraemon's bamboo copter, while his satellite phone had simply crashed. He had no way of confirming his direction or contacting the outside world.
And this forest—both the ground and the tree trunks were carpeted in moss. Everywhere he looked was a deep, dense green. Forget finding directions; stare at it too long, and even his mind began to grow hazy.
With the thick fog refusing to lift and daylight unable to penetrate, trapping a person to death could not have been easier.
"Throw a shoe..."
Standing amid the dark-green ancient trees, the college student muttered to himself and tossed his trekking pole away.
Throwing a shoe was a "professional technique" in exploration, used to determine direction. But it did not necessarily have to be a shoe—anything would do. It was a secret weapon kept at the bottom of the chest.
As for its scientific principles, no scientist had yet been able to explain them clearly. But its greatest function was perfectly demonstrating the despair of someone who had gotten lost.
At that moment, the mountain fog rose again, and visibility rapidly dropped. The dampness even seeped through his shell jacket and clung to his skin, carrying away what little body heat he had left.
Even stranger, as he walked forward step by step, the thick fog drifting through the forest gradually turned blood-red.
The college student turned a blind eye to it, making his way down the wet slope and passing beneath dangling old vines until he stepped onto a stone-paved road that had no business being in a place like this.
Then he saw a stone-carved offering lamp before him. Blue flames fluttered and danced within it, as though they had not gone out for a thousand years.
"I knew I shouldn't have eaten those cute-colored mushrooms."
"Great. I've somehow made it all the way to Hyrule."
The college student's mouth twitched.
He had already been lost for two days, and the supplies on him were nearly exhausted.
The good news was that this primeval forest had nothing else, but mushrooms grew everywhere. Earlier, he had used his camping stove to cook a pot of mushroom soup, so he attributed everything before his eyes to mushroom poisoning.
But after walking mountain trails for so long, his longing for level ground drove him onward.
He passed through layers upon layers of vines and ancient trees, stepped over fallen leaves drenched with moisture, and, to his surprise, found an even larger expanse of stone pavement ahead, laid remarkably flat and even.
Only, the forest was too damp, and the moss made every foothold slick and greasy.
The stone-paved ground was not empty. All around it stood collapsed walls and ruined structures. He could vaguely make out an arched bridge, blue-tiled roofs, square stone platforms... and all manner of broken bricks and shattered tiles.
Everything was covered in moss, ancient and desolate in appearance. Add a ruined temple, and it would have been no different from the old monastery in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.
Yet the most eye-catching things were the two enormous statues standing behind the ruined walls.
One wore bizarre attire—neither robe nor garment—and sat rooted to the ground, its head lowered. It was neither Buddha nor Daoist master, its expressionless face staring straight at the earth.
The college student stood one meter eighty-three tall, yet he could barely reach the top of its foot. Beneath it, he was like an ant.
Dead leaves had piled thick throughout the primeval forest, but none lay on the statue. Instead, they had accumulated around it, and not even moss had grown upon it.
When he turned to look at the other statue, it was even stranger.
It was not human-shaped, only barely humanoid. It stood upright, enormous as an ancient tree piercing the sky, with a mouth full of sharp teeth and upturned pupils. It seemed to be smiling and crying at once. Its body was gaunt and skeletal, its eight fingers overlapped and twisted; its posture looked like one of extreme agony, yet also boundless joy.
The two statues stood on the left and right, facing off against each other as though they had just fought. By now, the victor had been decided.
By human standards of beauty, beauty was good and ugliness was evil. That meant evil had defeated good.
The college student looked up at the two enormous statues and felt discomfort crawl over his entire body. He tightened his shell jacket around himself, passed between them, and headed straight deeper inside, hoping to find a dry patch of open ground where he could pitch his tent.
Just as he quickened his pace, he did not know what he had kicked, but something shot out from beneath his foot with a "whoosh."
When he caught up and picked it up, he discovered it was a battered, incomplete half-volume of an ancient book.
The thing felt solid in his hand, meaning the book was not a hallucination from eating mushrooms. The college student could not help shuddering.
In such a damp environment, an ancient book surviving so long without rotting was a problem in itself.
Sometimes, human fear did not come from seeing or hearing something, but from sensing something profoundly unreasonable.
And this was deep in a mountain forest rarely touched by human footprints.
He had no idea where he had walked into, and he began to hesitate, wanting to turn back.
But before he could pause for long, the college student discovered a narrow crack between the mountain walls ahead, barely wide enough for a person to pass through. Through it, what lay beyond the cliff face was no longer dense forest, but vast farmlands.
"Did I make it out?"
"So throwing shoes really is technology..."
The college student tucked the book into his pocket, headed forward, and deftly squeezed through the gap in the mountain walls.
People were working in the fields, but when he reached the edge of the farmland, he saw that every one of them was sallow-faced, thin, and hunched over.
They wore coarse hempen brown garments, loose wide trousers without crotches, and long beards, with cloth wrapped around their heads.
The people working the fields noticed him as well. After a brief stunned pause, their faces immediately filled with shock. Chattering in an obscure and incomprehensible dialect, they surged toward him, and one of them even seemed delighted.
Before the college student could react, he suddenly felt the world spin around him. He lost consciousness on the ridge between the fields, utterly unable to control himself.
"Anc... ancient people..."
"How could someone get this lost..."
As he murmured, static crackled from the walkie-talkie on his arm. Then a voice he had never heard before spoke a string of syllables he had never heard before.
(I switched to a hellish track, and now I'm a newbie again. Please bookmark and keep reading!)