The search and rescue expedition in Niu Tou Mountain ended after three weeks. The ending was deplorable: the 24-year-old named Ji Yuan was unable to be rescued. The main cause of death was dehydration.

According to the two search and rescue team members who discovered Ji Yuan, although it had been a bit dark at the time and they could not see him clearly, he could still speak when they first encountered him. After fainting, he was sent to the hospital as soon as possible, but he died en-route and ultimately could not be rescued.

This incident had a big impact on Niu Tou Mountain and Ji Yuan’s company, but it was Ji Yuan’s parents and relatives who were hit the hardest.

But the fates of all of these people can no longer be observed.

. . .

‘My whole body is so sore… I can’t move…’

Pain was the first thing Ji Yuan felt after his consciousness awoke.

His mind was cloudy, his thoughts were dull, and his mind was filled with the needle-like pain that spread all over his body.

He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t see, and even his sense of the outside world was very vague. He only felt increasingly intense pain.

He didn’t know how long had passed before the excruciating pain finally subsided.

After the torment had finished, Ji Yuan lay paralyzed on the ground like a puddle of mud, panting. After catching his breath, Ji Yuan felt that something was wrong.

The surface under his body was hard, cold and relatively flat. He was definitely not lying on a bed, but rather lying on the floor. The surrounding temperature was a bit low, and there was a slight cold wind blowing from time to time, making him shiver.

But his body could only shiver instinctively; Ji Yuan found that he still couldn’t move. He couldn’t even open his eyes, only breathe. This feeling was a bit like the legendary “ghost pressing on the bed,”¹ but there were some differences: he didn’t feel any supernatural pressure on his body, at the very least.

After collecting his scattered thoughts and regaining his sense of touch, Ji Yuan started to panic.

He was obviously not at home nor in the hospital, and there were no human voices to be heard. The only sounds around him were from insects and the occasional bird call, and he could smell a faint musty scent.

Ji Yuan couldn’t help but wonder if he was lying on some wild road, or perhaps somewhere worse.

It was even possible that he had been kidnapped, injected with drugs, and dumped in a desolate warehouse.

He didn’t know how much time he had passed in uneasiness. No one came or went and there were no cars, just unchanging silence.

Slowly, Ji Yuan found that his hearing sharpened drastically, and the different sounds of insects and bird calls became very clear.

Every so often, when Ji Yuan ignored the distractions and anxiety in his heart, he could more accurately feel where the sounds were coming from, and even vaguely guess at how far away they were.

However, although his outstanding hearing was amazing, Ji Yuan’s heart grew more and more flustered and irritable.

Ji Yuan couldn’t measure the passing of time, but he felt that it was a very long time. Still, during this period, no one had approached, not even his potential kidnappers!

In addition, his body still could not move and his eyes would not open, which was even more frightening than being locked in a small, dark room. In order to prevent himself from being driven crazy, Ji Yuan focused on his current problem, trying to recall what had happened.

Skipping the time when he was unconscious, his last memory was of meeting those two people by the creek. He heard their shouts when he fainted.

The two people had said that they were looking for a missing person, and that it had been more than half a month, so, judging from their uniforms, they might have been search and rescue team members. But why were they here instead of the hospital?

Did something really happen, or was there something wrong with the two search and rescue team members themselves?

He could do no more than guess at the answers to these questions, and soon his thoughts turned to other places.

Before that, the most important thing that could not be ignored was the weird chess game. Without that chess game, none of this would have happened.

If the previous Ji Yuan was an atheist, then the current Ji Yuan had obviously changed his opinion.

Whether it was the disappearance of the company’s campsite after he came out of the forest, or the words of the two search and rescue team members, or the previous changes in his body in a short period of time, these were all facts derived from personal experience. It was all real.

In other words, at that time, in the eyes of outsiders, he had indeed been missing for more than half a month, despite him only feeling that a few minutes had passed.

Ji Yuan couldn’t help but be reminded of a story he had heard from his grandfather when he was a child:

It is said that in ancient times there was a woodcutter who went up the mountain one day to chop firewood and encountered two old men playing chess.

So the woodcutter put the firewood and the axe beside the tree, and stood by to watch the game between the two old men for a while. One of the old men laughed and gave him half a peach to quench his thirst.

After watching the game for a long time, one of the old men suddenly turned his head and said to the woodcutter, “It’s time for you to go home.”

Only then did the woodcutter realize that it was getting late, so he reached for the wood pole and the axe, but suddenly found that the dry wood was long gone, and the wooden axe handle had rotted away, leaving only a rusted axe head.

The somewhat amazed and confused woodcutter hurried home along the familiar, but strangely unfamiliar, mountain road. The appearance of the village had changed a lot, and he couldn’t find any familiar faces.

After inquiring carefully, the woodcutter realized that he had been in the mountains for 60 years. His family thought that he had been killed by a wild animal, and his parents and elders had long since passed away…

²

This story was one of Ji Yuan’s favorite stories when he was a child.³ The old men in the story were said to have been immortals, and the place where the story originated boasted a famous mountain named Lanke Mountain.

Naturally, Ji Yuan and his colleagues went camping not at Lanke Mountain but Niu Tou Mountain. But the ancient trees, chess game, and rusty axe that Ji Yuan saw all matched the legend.

With the legend in mind, it would make sense why Ji Yuan felt that only a short time had passed, but it had already been over half a month outside.

Moreover, Ji Yuan’s luck was both better and worse than that of the woodcutter. On one hand, it was good that he came out rather quickly; it had only been less than half a month outside, so his life would not have been affected much. Unfortunately, he did not have an immortal who could give him a panacea like that peach to eat. So effectively, he didn’t eat or drink for more than half a month. It was already a miracle that he hadn’t immediately died.

Ji Yuan, whose thoughts were in this direction at that moment, didn’t know that he had actually died a long time ago.

But even so, it didn’t take him long to come to his conclusions. Ji Yuan was soon overwhelmed by loneliness, fear, and irritability. Even if he forced himself to think up more and more questions, the feeling of depression was still becoming stronger and more intense.

No one spoke, there were no footsteps, and no one was coming…

It had been so long, there was no one, still no one…

As he became more and more anxious, Ji Yuan lost all concept of time. He didn’t know whether it had been an hour or a day. Soon enough, he could no longer force himself to calm down.

It was no wonder that solitary confinement was a serious punishment in some Western prisons. It was mental torture.

Ji Yuan was no longer concerned about who kidnapped him, but was rather hoping that his kidnappers would soon arrive, even if he had to suffer through their curses or kicks.

Still, no one came!

‘Come on, someone! Come on! It can be anyone!’

Ji Yuan shouted in his heart countless times. He was most afraid of the possibility that there weren’t any robbers at all. That there would be no one coming except for wild beasts, snakes, and insects…

1. Older term for sleep paralysis ↩︎
2. This is a synopsis of the myth of Lanke/Ranka, which you are welcome to look up on Wikipedia if you’re curious. ↩︎
3. T/n: buddy… Really??? This is your favorite story??? It’s almost on the level of German fairytales in terms of how depressing it is ↩︎

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by Aunomay Read