Chapter 1: Prologue: The Crossroads

South of the Yunling Mountains, at the boundary point between the Dian-Dong Plateau and the Hengduan Mountains.

Crustal movements during the Cretaceous period caused the land here to fold and rise, forming a continuous mountain range with an average elevation of over two thousand meters.

Due to the complex geographical environment and the dense, pervasive fog, there are vast stretches of primitive mountain forests here that are rarely visited by humans.

The forest is filled with thick, swirling mist, and even the daylight is blocked by the dense vegetation, leaving only a deep, dark green and a humid silence.

At this moment, a college student leaning on an alloy trekking pole emerges from the depths of the dense forest, stepping on thick layers of rotting fallen leaves, walking alone with a stumbling gait; he stops at a slightly flatter spot, his face deathly pale.

On the third of last month, news broke that the Lin Chuan City Orphanage and Disabled Welfare Home had used substandard renovation materials, causing multiple orphans to suffer from leukemia.

Consequently, the local adventure club decided to organize a live-streamed trek through the no-man's-land, intending to use the internet's popularity to raise funds for these children.

Because it happened to be summer vacation, the college student signed up for the activity.

At first, their trek was quite smooth.

After all, most of the people in the club were adventure experts, and they were fully equipped, so they chatted and laughed along the way, without any sense of urgency about entering a no-man's-land.

But as a strange mountain fog suddenly struck, everyone in the team got separated.

In fact, before setting off, they had already formulated detailed survival and return routes, and had made maps for everyone; even if they got separated, they just needed to stay in place and wait for the fog to clear.

But the problem was that after the fog cleared, the college student found that his compass was spinning faster than Doraemon's bamboo-copter, and his satellite phone had crashed completely, making it impossible to confirm his direction or contact the outside world.

And this mountain forest—whether it was the ground or the tree trunks, everything was covered in moss. Looking around, it was all a deep, dense green, thick and packed; never mind the direction, after looking at it for a long time, even one's mind would become dazed.

Added to the fact that the thick fog wouldn't clear and the daylight couldn't penetrate, it was incredibly easy to get trapped to death.

"Let's throw a shoe..."

The college student muttered among the dark green ancient trees and threw his trekking pole away.

Throwing a shoe is a "professional technique" in adventure activities used to determine direction, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a shoe; anything will do. It belongs to the category of ultimate last-resort skills.

What its scientific principle is, no scientist has been able to explain clearly yet, but its greatest effect is that it can perfectly embody the despair of a person who is lost.

At this moment, a thick fog rose again in the mountains, visibility dropped rapidly, and the dampness even penetrated his windbreaker, clinging to his skin and stealing away the little body heat he had left.

Even more bizarrely, as he took steps forward, the thick fog floating in the mountain forest gradually turned blood-red.

The college student turned a blind eye to this, moving forward along the wet slope, passing through hanging old vines and tendrils, until he stepped onto a stone slab path that shouldn't have appeared in this place.

Then he saw a stone-carved offering lamp in front of him, with a fluttering blue flame jumping inside, which seemed to have not been extinguished for a thousand years.

"I knew it, I shouldn't have eaten those cute-colored mushrooms."

"Now it's great, I've even made it to Hyrule."

The corners of the college student's mouth twitched.

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

The good news was that there was nothing else in this primitive mountain forest, but mushrooms grew everywhere. He had previously boiled a pot of mushroom soup with his stove, so at this moment, he attributed everything before his eyes to mushroom poisoning.

However, after walking such a long mountain road, the desire for flat ground drove him to continue forward.

Passing through layers of vines and ancient trees, stepping over the damp, rotting leaves covering the ground, unexpectedly, a larger area of stone slab ground appeared ahead, and it was paved very flatly.

It was just that the moisture in the forest was too great, coupled with the effect of the moss, making the footing very slippery.

This stone slab area was not empty; there were some collapsed broken walls and ruins around, where one could vaguely identify an arched bridge, a blue-tiled roof, a square stone platform... and all kinds of broken bricks and rotten tiles.

Everything was covered in moss, looking ancient and desolate. If one added a ruined temple, it would be exactly like the ancient temples in *Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio*.

However, the most eye-catching things were the two huge divine statues standing behind the broken walls and ruins.

One was wearing strange attire—the robe was not like a robe, the clothing not like clothing—sitting on the ground, head hanging low. It was not a Buddha, and even less a Daoist master, looking at the ground with an expressionless face.

The college student was one meter eighty-three tall, but he could barely reach its feet; beneath it, he was like an ant.

The fallen leaves in the primitive mountain forest were very thick, but only on the divine statues were there none; instead, they were piled up all around, and even the moss did not grow on the statues.

Turning his head to look at the other statue, it was even more bizarre.

It was not human-shaped, and could barely be considered humanoid. It stood upright, as huge as an ancient tree reaching the sky, with a mouth full of sharp teeth, pupils rolled upward, seemingly laughing and crying, and it was gaunt and bony, with eight fingers intertwined and twisted, in a posture that looked like extreme pain, yet also like extreme joy.

These two divine statues stood left and right, confronting each other, as if they had just had a fight, and now the winner had been decided.

If viewed from a human aesthetic perspective—where beauty is good and ugliness is evil—then evil had defeated good.

The college student looked up at these two huge divine statues, feeling only extreme discomfort, so he wrapped his windbreaker tightly and crossed them, walking straight into the depths, wanting to see if there was any dry open space ahead to pitch his tent.

And just as he quickened his pace, not knowing what he had kicked, he saw something fly out from under his feet with a "whoosh."

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

Because the object had a physical feel in his hand, meaning this book was not a hallucination from eating mushrooms, the college student couldn't help but shiver.

In such a humid environment, for an ancient book to exist for so long without rotting, this in itself was a problem.

Sometimes, the source of human fear is not because of what one sees or hears, but because one senses an extreme irrationality.

What's more, this was a deep, old mountain forest rarely visited by humans.

He didn't know where he had walked to, so he began to feel a bit hesitant.

But before he could pause for too long, the college student discovered a gap between the mountain walls ahead that was barely wide enough for a person to pass through. Through this gap, what was revealed behind the mountain wall was no longer the dense mountain forest, but vast stretches of farmland.

"I walked out?"

"So throwing a shoe really is technology..."

The college student tucked the book into his pocket, walked toward the front, and nimbly squeezed out of the gap in the mountain wall.

There were people farming in the fields, but when he walked to the edge of the field, he discovered that those people were all sallow and emaciated, with hunched figures.

Moreover, they were wearing coarse hemp brown clothes, with wide, baggy trousers without crotches, and all of them had long beards, wrapping their heads with cloth towels.

The people farming in the fields also discovered him at this moment. After a slight pause, they immediately showed astonishment, shouting in an obscure and difficult-to-understand dialect as they swarmed over, one of whom even seemed somewhat happy.

Before the college student could react, he suddenly felt the world spinning, and uncontrollably fainted on the ridge of the field.

"An... ancient person..."

"How can a person get so lost..."

While muttering, a crackling sound came from the walkie-talkie on the college student's arm, and then a voice he had never heard before appeared, speaking a string of syllables he had never heard before.

(Switched to a hell-mode track, became a newbie again, please add to your library, please keep reading!)

(End of chapter) ===== CHAPTER 2 =====