The mist gradually dispersed.
In the expanding Western Hunan Mountains, everyone filed into the mountains like sleepwalkers.
Once they entered the mountains, there were no more paved roads.
Fortunately, the path was still fairly easy to walk. But every tree beside it had withered and died, as though drained of all vitality, their gaunt branches like hands reaching toward the heavens.
A stockade appeared faintly in the mountains a short distance away.
At the sight of it, Doctor Xie's head hurt even worse, as though something had burrowed into his brain and was sucking out his brain matter.
He walked numbly to the stockade entrance. Looking at the broken bowl and cracked gong by the gate, he vaguely sensed something was wrong.
As for what was wrong...
He could not say.
He looked up.
There seemed to be a name above the stockade, but the mist shrouded it, preventing him from making it out.
Fortunately, a large piece of timber stood beside the gate.
Someone had written [Clear Spring Stockade] on it in bold, sweeping strokes.
A line of smaller characters lay beneath.
[In the autumn of the twentieth year of Hongwu, Zhang Zhuoen erected this here to suppress demons and fiends.]
Seeing the timber, Doctor Xie instinctively read the inscription aloud. When he reached Zhang Zhuoen's name, his mind suddenly cleared.
He shuddered.
With that shudder, everything came back to him in an instant.
He remembered everything!
He was Nuo Village's doctor, a local who had grown up as a left-behind child. He had attended school here, then entered an honors class in the County Seat before finally earning admission to a university in the provincial capital as a medical student sponsored for an assigned posting. After graduating, he had been assigned to the township Clinic. His laid-back nature