Chapter 8

The families were the most desperate. The first to report were the parents of the student couple—two soon-to-graduate seniors who had left without telling their families for a “graduation trip” and never returned.
More and more people filed reports. When the story broke, the police tracked down the travel company that had kept the incident under wraps for almost a month. The manager stammered that they had been doing their best to find everyone—maybe it was just a communications failure.
The police detained the manager and obtained all the passengers’ details.
The families demanded a full-scale search. Their loved ones had to still be there.
The police started with drones—safer when the situation was unknown.
They sent more than a dozen. Every one lost signal as soon as it reached the cave hotel area. They tried to pull up GPS and satellite imagery. The whole zone showed up as an abnormal, dead grey on the map.
Soon it was clear: any aircraft over that area failed. The mountain and the cave hotel seemed to form a natural barrier, blocking all electronic communication.
Local police offered large rewards for anyone who would go in.
People went in. No one came back.
Even with the best equipment and survival guides, not a single person sent back so much as a message.
Silence on the mountain. Silence outside it.
In the end no one would go near the area. No amount of money could tempt anyone.
Rumours and conspiracy theories spread. The wildest claimed the cave hotel was a gateway to another dimension—when in doubt, blame quantum mechanics.
But not even the world’s leading physicists could explain it.
This wasn’t physics. This was the supernatural.
In a high-rise in Jingang, someone pushed open a pair of heavy wooden doors. Inside, everything was antique and traditional, at odds with the modern building. The office belonged to one man—someone who seemed to love everything old and traditional.
“Dr. Wei.” The person at the door addressed the figure by the window. “The lab has delivered the protective suits you requested.”
The figure turned—in his chair. The motion sensor lit the room. Only then was it clear: Dr. Wei was in a wheelchair.
Dr. Wei wheeled himself forward. “Thank you.”
He looked no more than thirty, still young. But his legs hung limp in his trousers. A doctor in a wheelchair.
“You’re really going there?” Secretary Xiao Xu couldn’t help asking. The whole institute had been shocked when they heard Wei Yuan had requested the latest protective gear.
Only the grieving families still refused to give up. “One parent chartered a private plane. Neither the plane nor the person came back.”
It was a desperate, tragic gesture.
But Xiao Xu couldn’t call it foolish. If his own family had gone missing, would he do the same?
The projection screen in the office flickered. A cross-section of a mountain appeared.
Wei Yuan held a small remote, controlling the image. “This is from the satellite imagery we had before.”
Unlike the current total blackout, the mountain and cave hotel had still appeared normally in those shots. Those old satellite images were all they had left to study.
Over a thousand images. The experts had gone through them again and again. And they had all noticed something.
“These black spots.”
Xiao Xu saw it at once: around the mountain, a ring of something black and faint, like a “crop circle.”
That ring showed up in every image—every day—around the mountain.
At first researchers thought there might be some rare mineral under the mountain. The cave hotel had been running for half a century with no incidents; even with that mysterious black ring on the satellite images, no one had paid it much mind.
There were too many things on Earth we still couldn’t explain.