Chapter 5

The trail of footprints pointed the way clearly. Jiang Shan picked up a thick branch from the ground to use as a walking stick.
The lush grass had been trampled flat—Xiao Chen’s crowd again, no respect for the place.
Her motto had always been: respect the rules, value your life. In other words—don’t court death and you won’t die.
For people who were born healthy and could have lived to a ripe old age but insisted on tempting fate, Jiang Shan would never understand.
…
She took out her phone and checked the signal bar every few steps, hoping for a miracle.
The moon rose to the zenith. No miracle came.
The higher she climbed, the more her skin crawled. The whole mountain was too quiet.
Such a big mountain, and not a single bird or insect?
As if she were the only living thing moving on it.
She took a deep breath, hummed a few lines of a nursery rhyme, and kept walking… Then she stepped on something hard.
She slowly moved her foot and shone the flashlight down.
A camera.
The angle was odd—lens tilted upward, as if it had been taking a picture when it fell.
She recognized it: it belonged to that student couple from the tour group.
They’d chattered non-stop the whole trip, impossible to miss. She remembered them proudly showing off this camera—bought at auction, they said, special film, the world’s first vintage model.
They’d treasured it. So why was it lying here in the dirt?
She picked it up, brushed off the dust, and put it in her backpack.
Then, one after another, she found more “things”: a parasol, sunglasses, a wallet… all belonging to people from the tour. Everything scattered on the ground. It made her heart pound.
There was even clothing.
She stopped dead.
She rubbed her eyes. The footprints ahead were gone.
Just—gone. As if they’d never been. All those messy, overlapping prints had stopped in a clean line, as if everyone had vanished or evaporated from the ground in an instant.
She was lost. Completely lost.
Like a fly with no sense of direction, drowning in confusion.
What had happened? You could drop your things—but could human footprints just disappear?
She could hear her own heartbeat and breathing, louder and louder, pounding in her ears.
What now? She was asking herself.
The gathering darkness seemed to swallow the last of her hope. She couldn’t help looking back at the hotel, already far behind.
Where to go?
Just then, in the moonlight, she saw a tent.
Her eyes lit up. In her condition she shouldn’t run, but she hurried over in a few steps, half thinking the tour group had left it.
The moment she got close, her face froze. Her hope crashed.
The tent was covered in thick cobwebs, with holes in several places. It looked as if it had been abandoned there for years.