[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"origin-watching-the-immortals-fall":3,"chapter-watching-the-immortals-fall-watching-the-immortals-fall-chapter-1":6},{"origin":4,"title":5},"chinese","Watching the Immortals Fall",{"chapter":7,"nextChapterSlug":18,"prevChapterSlug":19,"totalChapters":20,"novelImage":21},{"id":8,"novel_id":9,"title":10,"slug":11,"index":12,"content":13,"wordcount":14,"created_at":15,"updated_at":15,"volume":12,"translator":16,"content_hash":17},2259874,4410,"Chapter 1: Prologue: The Forked Path","watching-the-immortals-fall-chapter-1",1,"\u003Cp>South of Yunling, the boundary between the Yunnan-Eastern Plateau and the Hengduan Mountains.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Crustal movements during the Cretaceous period caused this region to fold and uplift, forming a continuous mountain range with an average elevation exceeding two thousand meters.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Due to its complex geography and dense fog, vast stretches of pristine forest here remain untouched by human presence.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The air within the forest is thick with moisture; sunlight is entirely blocked by the dense vegetation, leaving only a deep, lush green silence saturated with dampness.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>At this moment, a college student carrying an alloy hiking pole emerged from deep within the dense woods, stepping heavily over thick layers of decaying leaves, his gait unsteady as he walked alone, stopping briefly on a slightly flatter patch, his face pale as ash.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Last month on the third, news broke that the Linchuan City Orphanage had used substandard renovation materials, causing multiple orphans to develop leukemia.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As a result, the local adventure club decided to organize a live-streamed trek through the uninhabited region, hoping to leverage internet attention to raise funds for these children.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Since it was summer vacation, the college student signed up for the activity.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Initially, their crossing went smoothly.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>After all, most club members were experienced explorers, fully equipped, and along the way they chatted and laughed, feeling no urgency about entering the uninhabited region.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But when a strange mountain fog suddenly rolled in, the entire group became scattered.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In fact, before departure, they had already mapped out detailed survival and return routes, distributing a copy to each member; even if separated, all they needed to do was stay put until the fog cleared.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But when the fog finally lifted, the student discovered his compass spun faster than Doraemon’s bamboo-copter, and his satellite phone had completely crashed—no way to confirm direction or contact the outside world.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>And this forest: every surface, every tree trunk, was entirely covered in moss; as far as the eye could see, nothing but deep green, densely packed, so thick that staring too long made his mind grow hazy.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Added to this, the fog refused to dissipate, and daylight could not penetrate—making it absurdly easy to trap someone to die here.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Just throw a shoe…”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The student murmured amid the towering green trees, tossing his pole away.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Throwing a shoe is an “expert technique” in exploration, used to determine direction—but it doesn’t have to be a shoe; anything will do, a last-resort trick.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>No scientist has yet explained its scientific principle, but its greatest function is to perfectly embody the despair of being lost.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>At this moment, thick mountain fog rose again, visibility plummeting; the dampness seeped through his jacket, clinging to his skin and sapping his remaining body heat.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Even stranger: as he stepped forward, the floating fog gradually turned blood-red.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The student ignored it, descending the wet slope, pushing through hanging vines and ancient branches, until his foot struck a stone path that should not exist here.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Then he saw before him a stone-carved offering lamp, its flame flickering a steady blue, as if unextinguished for a thousand years.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“I knew it—I shouldn’t have eaten those colorful mushrooms.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Now I’ve wandered all the way to Hyrule.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The student’s mouth twitched.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He had been lost for two days; his supplies were nearly exhausted.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The good news was that, though this primeval forest had nothing else, mushrooms grew everywhere—he’d boiled a pot of mushroom soup earlier, and now he attributed everything he saw to mushroom poisoning.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Yet after walking so long on mountain trails, his longing for flat ground drove him onward.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Pushing through layers of vines and ancient trees, stepping over damp, rotting leaves, he unexpectedly found ahead a much larger expanse of stone slabs, meticulously laid and level.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But the forest’s moisture, combined with moss, made every step treacherously slippery.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The stone pavement was not empty; around it stood collapsed walls and ruins, faintly recognizable as arched bridges, green-tiled roofs, square stone platforms… and broken bricks and shattered tiles.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>All were entirely coated in moss, ancient and desolate—add a ruined temple, and it would be indistinguishable from the ancient monasteries of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Yet the most striking sight was the two colossal statues standing behind the ruins.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>One wore strange attire—neither robe nor garment—seated on the ground, head bowed, neither Buddha nor Daoist master, expressionless as it gazed at the earth.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The student stood one meter eighty-three tall, yet barely reached its feet; beneath it, he felt like an ant.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Though leaf litter piled thickly in the primeval forest, none accumulated on the statue—only around it; even moss refused to grow upon it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Turning to the other statue, it was even stranger.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Not human-shaped—barely humanoid—standing upright like a towering ancient tree, its mouth full of sharp teeth, eyes rolled upward, half-smiling, half-crying, emaciated to the bone, eight fingers twisted and interlocked in a posture of extreme agony—or extreme joy.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The two statues stood left and right, facing each other, as if they had just fought a battle, and the outcome was decided.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>From a human aesthetic perspective—beauty as good, ugliness as evil—the evil had triumphed over the good.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The student gazed up at the two colossal statues, feeling a deep unease; he pulled his jacket tighter and walked past them, heading straight into the depths, hoping to find a dry patch to pitch his tent.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As he quickened his pace, he somehow kicked something, and an object shot away from beneath his foot with a “whoosh.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>When he chased after it and picked it up, he found it was a fragmentary, badly damaged half-scroll of an ancient book.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Because the object felt solid in his hand, it was clearly not a hallucination from the mushrooms—the student shuddered.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In such a damp environment, a scroll of ancient text surviving this long without rotting was itself impossible.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Sometimes human fear does not stem from what one sees or hears, but from sensing profound irrationality.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Especially here, in this remote, uninhabited deep forest.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He did not know where he had wandered to, and began to hesitate.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But before he could pause long, the student noticed a narrow gap between the mountain walls ahead—through it, what lay beyond was no longer dense forest, but vast fields of farmland.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“I got out?”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“So throwing shoes really is science…”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The student slipped the book into his pocket and walked forward, slipping nimbly through the gap in the mountain wall.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>People were working in the fields—but when he reached the edge, he saw they were all yellow-skinned, emaciated, hunched over.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>They wore coarse hemp robes, loose trousers without crotches, and all had long beards, their heads wrapped in cloth.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The farmers, noticing him, paused in surprise, then surged forward, shouting in a thick, incomprehensible dialect; one of them even seemed delighted.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Before the student could react, he suddenly felt the world spin violently, and collapsed unconscious onto the ridge.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Ancient… people…”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“How could someone get this lost…”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As he murmured, the walkie-talkie on his arm crackled with static, then a voice he’d never heard before spoke a string of syllables he’d never encountered.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>(Switched to a hell difficulty lane, now a total newbie—please like and follow!)\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>(End of Chapter)\u003C\u002Fp>",1202,"2026-06-19T15:28:39.995Z","Qwen3-Next 80B","0dd9a8d4450b31f6a44290a120abf9aea778704e661e00be0e98b28215cd0516","watching-the-immortals-fall-chapter-2",null,430,"https:\u002F\u002Fnovelzhen.com\u002Fimages\u002Fcovers\u002Fwatching-the-immortals-fall-cover.jpg"]