Prologue: Crossroads

South of the Yunling Mountains, at the dividing point between the Eastern Yunnan Plateau and the Hengduan Mountains.

Tectonic activity during the Cretaceous period caused this area to buckle and rise, forming continuous mountain ranges with an average elevation exceeding two thousand meters.

Due to the complex geographical environment and the dense, sealed fog, large areas of primeval forest here are untouched by human presence.

The air in the forest is thick with moisture, and even the daylight is obscured by the dense vegetation, leaving only a deep green gloom and a damp tranquility.

At this moment, a university student, leaning on a metal trekking pole, emerged from the depths of the dense forest. He walked unsteadily, stepping on thick layers of decaying leaves, and stopped in a relatively flat area, his face deathly pale.

On the third of last month, news broke that the Linchuan City Orphanage had used substandard materials during renovations, causing multiple orphans to contract leukemia.

As a result, the local explorer's club decided to organize a live broadcast of a trek through the no-man's-land, intending to leverage internet popularity to raise funds for these children.

Since it was the summer vacation, the university student signed up for the event.

Initially, their trek went smoothly.

After all, most of the club members were exploration experts and were fully equipped, so they chatted and laughed along the way, feeling no sense of urgency about entering the no-man's-land.

But then, a strange mountain fog suddenly descended, and everyone in the group got separated.

In fact, before setting out, they had meticulously planned survival and return routes, creating maps for each person. Even if they got separated, they just needed to stay put and wait for the fog to dissipate.

The problem, however, was that after the fog cleared, the university student found his compass spinning faster than Doraemon's bamboo copter, and his satellite phone had completely frozen. He couldn't determine his direction or contact the outside world at all.

Furthermore, this part of the forest was covered in moss, both on the ground and on the tree trunks. Everywhere he looked was a dense, deep green. Not only could he not find his direction, but looking at it for too long made him feel disoriented.

Coupled with the persistent dense fog that blocked out the daylight, it would be incredibly easy to trap and kill someone.

"Let's throw a shoe..."

The university student murmured amidst the dark green ancient trees and tossed his trekking pole.

Throwing a shoe is a "professional technique" in exploration activities used for determining direction. It doesn't have to be a shoe; anything will do. It's a last-resort skill.

The scientific principle behind it is something no scientist can clearly explain yet, but its greatest effect is perfectly demonstrating the despair of someone who is lost.

At this moment, the mountain fog rolled in again, rapidly reducing visibility. The dampness even seeped through his jacket, clinging to his skin and draining away the little body heat he had left.

Even more bizarrely, as he walked forward step by step, the dense fog floating in the forest gradually turned blood red.

The university student paid no attention to this, continuing down the wet, sloping ground. He pushed through hanging old vines and branches until his foot landed on a stone path that shouldn't have been there.

Then, he saw a stone sculpture of an oil lamp before him. In the lamp, blue flames flickered, seemingly unextinguished for a thousand years.

"I knew I shouldn't have eaten those brightly colored mushrooms."

"Now look where I am, all the way in Hyrule."

The corners of the university student's mouth twitched.

He had been lost for two days, and his supplies were almost depleted.

The good news was that if there was one thing this primeval forest had in abundance, it was mushrooms. He had previously cooked a pot of mushroom soup on his stove and now attributed everything he was seeing to mushroom poisoning.

However, after walking for so long on the mountain path, the desire for flat ground drove him forward.

Pushing through layers of vines and ancient trees, treading over the damp, decaying leaves covering the ground, he unexpectedly found a larger area of stone paving ahead, and it was very smoothly constructed.

But the moisture in the forest was too great, and combined with the moss, the footing was very slippery.

This stone-paved area was not empty. There were some collapsed ruins around it, where one could vaguely make out arched bridges, tiled roofs, square stone platforms... and various broken bricks and tiles.

Everything was covered in moss, looking ancient and dilapidated. If you added a ruined temple, it would be indistinguishable from an ancient temple in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.

However, the most striking things were the two colossal statues standing behind the ruins.

One was dressed in strange clothing, neither robe nor coat, sitting motionless, its head bowed. It was neither a Buddha nor a Daoist priest, and it stared blankly at the ground.

The university student, who was one meter eighty-three tall, could barely reach its feet. Beneath it, he felt like an ant.

The fallen leaves in the primeval forest piled up thickly, but only on the statue was there none. Instead, they accumulated around it, and even moss did not grow on the statue.

Turning to look at the other statue, it was even stranger.

It was not human-shaped, only vaguely humanoid, standing erect like a towering ancient tree. It had a mouth full of sharp teeth, its pupils rolled upwards, looking like it was laughing or crying. It was gaunt and skeletal, with eight fingers twisted together, its posture suggesting extreme pain or extreme joy.

These two statues stood left and right, confronting each other, as if they had just fought and a winner had emerged.

If viewed from a human aesthetic perspective, where beauty is good and ugliness is evil, then evil had triumphed over good.

The university student looked up at the two giant statues, feeling an overwhelming sense of unease. He tightened his jacket and walked past them, heading deeper in, hoping to find a dry open space to pitch his tent.

As he quickened his pace, he kicked something, and it flew out from under his foot with a "whoosh."

When he caught up and picked it up, he discovered it was a tattered, incomplete half-scroll of an ancient book.

Because the object in his hand felt real, indicating it wasn't a hallucination from eating mushrooms, the university student shivered involuntarily.

In such a damp environment, a scroll that had survived for so long without rotting was inherently problematic.

A person's fear sometimes stems not from what they see or hear, but from a sense of extreme irrationality.

Moreover, this was a deep mountain forest untouched by human hands.

He didn't know where he had ended up and began to hesitate.

But before he could pause for too long, the university student noticed a narrow crevice between the mountain walls ahead, just wide enough for a person to pass through. Through this crevice, what was revealed behind the mountain wall was no longer dense forest, but a large expanse of farmland.

"You're out?"

"So throwing shoes really is a science..."

The college student stuffed his book into his pocket and walked forward, nimbly squeezing through a gap in the mountain wall.

The fields were being worked by people, but when he reached the edge of the farmland, he found them all sallow and hunched over.

They were dressed in coarse hempen clothes, with wide, crotchless trousers, and all of them had long beards, their heads wrapped in cloth scarves.

The farmers in the field noticed him at this moment. After a brief pause, their faces immediately showed astonishment, and they surged towards him, chattering in a dialect that was obscure and difficult to understand. One of them seemed even a little pleased.

Before the college student could react, he suddenly felt the world spin and collapsed uncontrollably onto the ridge of the field.

"Anci... ancient people..."

"How could someone get so lost..."

As he mumbled, the walkie-talkie on the college student's arm crackled, and then an unfamiliar voice spoke a string of syllables he had never heard before.

(Switched to a hellish track, back to being a newbie again, please collect, please follow!)