Chapter 1

Jiang Shan opened the thin red-covered booklet in her hand—just a few pages. The front desk had given it to her along with the room key when she checked in. Most people hadn’t paid attention, thinking it was another travel brochure; some had tossed it straight into the trash.
She turned to the first page. At the top it read: Hotel Stay—Notes and Rules.
Rule one: No going outside after 5 p.m.; activity is limited to the hotel.
She glanced at the wall clock without thinking. It had just passed five—5:01 now.
The guide was still talking with gusto: “Look, everyone! Those grooves in the cave walls were formed by natural oxidation. They’re at least a thousand years old… Until a mysterious tycoon took over last century and turned the place into a cave hotel.”
Many were seeing a cave hotel for the first time and eagerly raised their cameras. Amid the clicks, someone reached out to touch the pitted holes and found the inside surprisingly smooth, like pebbles.
People marvelled: water wears through stone over a thousand years—this cave must have been here forever.
After a month of intense travel—crossing the desert in off-road vehicles, skydiving from ten thousand meters, surfing, bungee jumping—this last stop, the cave hotel, was just as unusual.
Guide Xiao Chen saw how reluctant everyone was to leave and his eyes lit up. He said suddenly, “Have you heard what happened to the last tour group?”
Everyone except Jiang Shan, who was still reading the booklet, looked at him.
“The last tour group?”
Xiao Chen blinked with a sly look: “I heard it from the last tour leader. Someone in their group sneaked out at night and went up the mountain behind. He didn’t come back until just before the flight the next day. They said he looked completely broken.”
Someone looked through the man-made window cut in the cave at the rolling hills outside.
“Why—monsters on the mountain?” someone joked.
Xiao Chen paused for a few seconds on purpose, building suspense. “Who knows. They just said that not long after he got back… he suddenly came into a huge fortune.”
Everyone’s jaws dropped.
Xiao Chen’s mouth curved. These days plain ghost stories didn’t cut it; you had to add something like that to grab attention.
“So people guessed he’d dug up antiques or something on the mountain and sold them.”
Someone sniffed. “Really?”
Xiao Chen went on mysteriously: “If you don’t believe me, ask anyone from the last group. You’ll see I’m telling the truth.”
A doubtful voice spoke up: “I remember when we checked in, didn’t the staff say the back mountain is off limits?”
They had also seen, when they arrived, that the cave hotel was surrounded by a wire fence.
At that, many faces showed interest.
Xiao Chen grinned: “I heard they stopped digging the cave right here. The tycoon who bought it is supposed to be enormously rich—spent hundreds of millions just converting this place. The plan was to go through the whole mountain and make a ring-shaped hotel… But for some reason they stopped suddenly, fenced off the back mountain, and no one’s allowed in.”
The more he said, the more curious they got. What made travel compelling was often not the sights but the strange, mysterious stories behind them.
“So there’s really something buried on that mountain?” Gold? Antiques? Treasure?
Jiang Shan frowned. She had just read rule two: The back mountain is a restricted area. Guests are not allowed to visit.
But quite a few people were already hooked.
Xiao Chen said, “No one knows what. No one’s ever seen it with their own eyes.”