Chapter 199: A Mountain Suspended, A River Submerged (13)
When Zhao Zhen realized that his own memory might be experiencing the same abnormalities as the notebook’s owner, it felt like a bitter, howling wind had pierced through his chest, chilling him to the bone and freezing him stiff.
He forced himself to pull out of the chaotic, fear-stricken thoughts swirling in his mind. Steadying his breath, he frantically flipped back through the notebook like a madman, skipping the normally written pages to focus only on the ones filled with messy, deeply-etched scribbles.
Zhao Zhen understood that, if what the notebook’s owner claimed was true—if he had truly forgotten all the strange and unnatural memories—then the disordered, half-finished entries cut off mid-sentence were the real thoughts the person had desperately tried to preserve.
Which meant… he could piece together what the person had forgotten from these deranged, jumbled notes!
Under the cold, glaring light of his flashlight, Zhao Zhen flipped through the pages with fingers stiff from the cold, softly muttering the fragmented sentences to himself.
It was obvious that the writer’s mind had already begun to unravel at that point—the notes were chaotic and disordered. Zhao Zhen had to put in a great deal of effort to decipher what those scrawled lines were supposed to say and to untangle the truths hidden within the madness.
Two days before the hiking team entered Longevity Village, everything had still seemed normal. They had leisurely enjoyed the sunshine, fresh air, and beautiful scenery in this paradise-like village.
But then, one day, a team member saw something while drawing water from the river—a corpse submerged at the river’s bottom.
—And that corpse was one of their fellow teammates.
Its eyes were wide open, as if dying with unresolved hatred. The irises were blood-red and unnatural, staring straight up toward the world above the water, filled with what seemed to be a heavy resentment.
The teammate screamed in terror and stumbled back to the cabin, rushing to find the notebook’s owner—who was also the team’s leader—to report what he had seen.
But as soon as he began to speak, the teammate forgot what he was trying to say.
He stood there in front of the leader, face full of confusion.
The leader found it odd, but didn’t think much of it. During his routine journaling, he tried to record the incident.
Yet he only managed to write a few lines—then nothing more.
—The leader had also forgotten.
After that, the group continued their peaceful lives in the village, as if they were completely unaware that someone among them had gone missing.
However, the leader began to notice that his room was often soaked with water.
Puzzled, he decided one morning to stay behind instead of leaving with the others. He hid inside the wardrobe, wanting to see what was actually happening in the room.
What he saw stunned him: a teammate he had completely forgotten about pushed open the door and stepped inside, reeking of rot and walking stiffly, like a corpse.
Water dripped from the decaying body, soaking the furniture and fabrics in the room. The person’s body was swollen, with rotting flesh and sagging, loose skin swaying as he moved.
The moment the leader saw the teammate’s face, he finally remembered who he was.
Right! He was my friend—part of my team. Why didn’t I notice he had been gone for so long? Why does he look like this now? What on earth happened?
The leader trembled with fear, but also felt a pang of concern and sorrow.
In his panic, he accidentally made a sound inside the wardrobe.
The rotting corpse heard the noise and slowly turned its head to look toward the wardrobe, then staggered over.
The leader was nearly knocked unconscious by the overwhelming stench of decay. The corpse was so close he could clearly see the bloated chunks of flesh on his former friend’s body. His heart was pounding wildly.
But what happened next—the leader forgot. He hadn’t written it down either.
Even though he couldn’t remember the event, his brain had etched the terror into his bones.
That fear led him to start looking at Longevity Village through a different lens.
And through that, he began to notice many strange things.
For instance, there were no young people or children in the village—not a single one.
Although the elders explained that the young folks had gone out to work and that’s why they weren’t around, the leader had stayed in the village for quite some time and never once saw any belongings that might belong to young people. There were no small cabins or rooms either.
Another oddity: the chrysanthemums in the village seemed to bloom all year round.
When the leader first arrived in the mountains, he met other people at a guesthouse—those who were planning to leave the mountains temporarily before returning to live in seclusion. They all said the chrysanthemums had been in bloom for two or three months already. The leader himself stayed in the village for several more months, yet he never saw the flowers wither.
It was as if the chrysanthemums bloomed in full all year long.
Also, while every household in the village had a well, they were all abandoned. Everyone drank river water instead.
During the day, when sunlight touched the river, the water was crystal clear—sweet and refreshing, without a trace of impurity. But once the sun set, the water would turn blood-red.
The leader once asked a villager about this, but the answer he got was strange: “You won’t remember anyway. Just think of it as some dead animal upstream.”
…
All these bizarre phenomena began to terrify the leader.
He wanted to leave the village, but every time the thought entered his mind, he would forget it moments later.
So he began to mark tally lines in the notebook—each time he remembered that he had forgotten something, he made a mark.
In the end, there were over a hundred.
And eventually, the leader remembered what it was that he had forgotten.
—He had forgotten the abnormalities of the village. Even more terrifying, he had forgotten that he was forgetting them.
No matter how desperately he tried to hold on to the memories, they slipped away too quickly for him to even write them down completely.
Even though the captain tried to record everything in his notebook, there was always one thing he could never manage to write down—every time he began, he would forget what he was originally thinking.
In the end, the leader was nearly driven to a mental breakdown by the powerlessness of his memory loss and the increasingly strange occurrences in the village.
A person trapped in desperation could still rely on their willpower to seek a way out.
But what if that willpower never existed in the first place?
What if even your brain betrayed you—if your eyes could no longer see what they should, your ears couldn’t hear the real sounds around you, and even your memories, which could serve as evidence, were completely gone?
When you wanted to act and looked around, all that remained was confusion.
Then—
How would you escape despair?
If the only person you could rely on—yourself—had already betrayed you…
The further into the notebook, the more illegible and chaotic the handwriting became. Even the thoughts grew increasingly muddled, and the phrasing more deranged.
If it weren’t for the first few pages clearly stating the author’s identity, Zhao Zhen would have almost thought he was reading the diary of someone mentally ill.
With every page Zhao Zhen turned, he felt a growing sense of dread.
Many things hadn’t been successfully recorded by the notebook’s owner. Instead, Zhao Zhen had to piece them together with great difficulty, using the fragmented narrative from different pages and the faint traces of pen strokes that remained.
Zhao Zhen felt like even his breathing was starting to quicken.
Even though the author had written these things down, he never remembered having done so. It was as if the despair within those words caused such distress that an invisible hand erased the memories completely, preventing any potential unhappiness from taking root.
And because of that forgetting, whenever the leader remembered to write in the notebook again, he would calmly flip to the next page, writing praises about Longevity Village with the serene air of someone untouched by hardship.
Yet, on the very next page, his struggle continued.
Like a student in class so tired he could no longer control his mind, but still trying to force his eyes open and take notes along with the teacher.
But his brain and consciousness could no longer support such effort. All that remained was a final, desperate obsession, forcing him to scrawl one last messy cluster of strokes.
Words overlapped, sentences lost all logic, narration became a struggle—the brain had betrayed the will.
Just looking at the ink blots and tangled lines of writing, Zhao Zhen could practically feel the leader’s despair and helplessness as if he had experienced it himself.
After flipping through the entire notebook, Zhao Zhen sat frozen on the sofa, unable to recover for a while.
It was as though the leader’s emotions from back then had reached across time and seized Zhao Zhen’s heart, dragging him into the same helpless, suffocating hopelessness.
He had to… he had to show this notebook to Brother Yan. Longevity Village—there was something wrong with it!
It couldn’t be left alone.
That thought completely consumed Zhao Zhen’s mind.
When he stood up, his legs nearly gave out and he almost collapsed to the floor. He barely managed to steady himself by grabbing onto a nearby cabinet.
He had no idea how long he had been sitting there. In the darkness where there was no sense of time, even his legs had gone numb.
Clutching the cabinet, he unsteadily stood upright on his trembling, numb legs. As his gaze casually swept across the cabinet, he suddenly remembered something recorded in the notebook.
The leader’s entry ended just as he was hiding in a cabinet, about to be discovered.
Zhao Zhen couldn’t deduce what had happened next.
But now, looking at the cabinet, it dawned on him belatedly—since the notebook had been found in this room, that meant the leader had also been here.
…And the place where the leader had hidden to escape the decaying corpses of his teammates—was this very cabinet.
Zhao Zhen’s hand on the cabinet immediately froze.
He didn’t know if it was just his mind playing tricks on him, but he suddenly felt a cold aura emanating from behind the cabinet door, right beneath his palm.
He swallowed hard, eyes fixed intently on the wardrobe for a long time before he finally summoned the courage to reach out and open the door.
In the entertainment industry, when people mentioned Zhao Zhen, they often praised him not only as a dedicated actor, but also as a responsible and courageous man. Many directors would give a thumbs-up when talking about Zhao Zhen’s work ethic.
But now, Zhao Zhen felt his heart trembling violently, blood surging through his veins, and his heartbeat pounding in his ears like a war drum.
A distance of just a few dozen centimeters felt as long as years to Zhao Zhen.
His outstretched fingers trembled as they gripped the wardrobe handle. He tried several times, but every attempt made him want to retreat.
Clenching his jaw, Zhao Zhen finally yanked the door open with a sudden burst of strength.
“Creak!”
The rusty hinges of the door let out a harsh grinding sound, a result of the damp weather.
The flashlight’s beam illuminated the inside of the cabinet.
The wardrobe, long coated with dust, had a puddle of water trickling down from inside, seeping out through the gap of the open door. A faint dripping sound echoed through the dark and deathly still space.
Zhao Zhen trembled as he slowly raised his head, his gaze following the trail of water upward.
Then, he met a swollen, hideously twisted face staring back at him.
The corpse still had remnants of fluorescent fabric on it, resembling hiking gear.
But the body, bloated from prolonged soaking, had already burst through the clothing. Rotten flesh clung to it in strips like sliced fish, barely hanging on, as if it could fall off at any moment.
Its ghostly pale skin had already peeled away from the underlying flesh. Under the flashlight’s glare, it was nearly translucent—one could even see the decaying chunks of meat and darkened tendons beneath.
—At some unknown point, a horrifying corpse had been hiding inside the wardrobe.
A chill crept steadily up Zhao Zhen’s spine.
He couldn’t help but wonder: when the staff had been sleeping in this room, organizing belongings, or simply working… had that corpse been silently peering through the wardrobe door, watching them with those dull, lifeless eyes?
Even if someone had sensed something off and turned around, they wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual. They’d probably just mutter in confusion, scratch their head, and then get back to work.
And after Zhao Zhen had entered the room—whether he was moving the unconscious staff or focused on reading the notebook—that corpse… had been watching him the whole time with those cold, vacant eyes from the shadows.
The moment this realization hit him, Zhao Zhen gasped sharply.
He instinctively let go of the wardrobe door and staggered backward, trying to put some distance between himself and the corpse.
After all, the notebook said that the team member had walked into the room after dying.
Which meant—the corpse in front of him…
Could rise at any moment!
And just as Zhao Zhen had this thought, the body crammed inside the small wardrobe—its back grotesquely hunched—slowly began to lift its head, turning its rotted, disfigured face directly toward him.
The way it had been stuffed into the wardrobe was unnatural, its posture pushing the limits of what human bones could endure.
It was as if this thing had no bones at all, just a lump of pliable, boneless flesh.
Now, it was inching its way out of the wardrobe, slowly but deliberately, step by step, moving toward Zhao Zhen.
Zhao Zhen felt his calves trembling. He spun around immediately, trying to flee the room.
But then his eyes caught sight of the unconscious staff members. His running posture froze instantly.
If he ran—who would protect them?
He could still move and think for himself, but those people were completely defenseless. The moment he left, the corpse could kill them.
Zhao Zhen clenched his jaw and turned back, preparing to rush over and drag them away.
But just then, the staff member Zhao Zhen had tied to the chair slowly regained consciousness.
A pair of blood-red eyes reflected the eerie beam of the flashlight.
Zhao Zhen’s pupils contracted.
…….
After returning to her room, Bai Shuang immediately locked the door.
She had originally been sharing the room with several female staff members, but during the power outage, they had all been elsewhere—either downstairs or scattered around, busy with their tasks.
So, Bai Shuang had been left alone in the room.
She sat stiffly on the bed, muscles tense, not daring to relax even a little. Her gaze kept drifting toward the door, anxiously waiting.
Waiting for Yan Shixun to come back and protect them—or waiting for the danger to arrive.
Right now, Bai Shuang felt as though she were standing directly beneath a sword suspended in midair.
She didn’t know when the sword would fall and bring death, or whether it would fall at all.
But the anticipation of death… was far more excruciating than death itself.
As time passed, Bai Shuang started to feel a wave of drowsiness.
It seemed that the cold and the tension had drained a lot of her energy and strength. The stillness of the dark surroundings, with no changes to the scene, and the sense that time was passing without her noticing, all numbed Bai Shuang’s nerves and made her slowly lose focus. The physical effect of the darkness made her naturally grow sleepy.
Her body instinctively told her that it was dark outside, and it was time to sleep.
No, she couldn’t.
Bai Shuang shook her head, trying to keep herself awake.
She couldn’t sleep yet. She had to wait. Wait for… What was she waiting for again?
A moment of confusion flashed in Bai Shuang’s eyes.
She felt like she was waiting for something, but at that moment when drowsiness overtook her, she suddenly couldn’t remember what exactly it was she was supposed to wait for.
Even when she tried to recall the events that had led up to now, her mind felt foggy and blank. She couldn’t bring back the memories from before.
It was as though her brain had fallen asleep before her.
Bai Shuang struggled to open her eyes, but her body instinctively wanted to seek warmth and comfort, and the bed suddenly seemed incredibly inviting.
After a brief internal battle, with her mind almost frozen and unable to function, Bai Shuang gave in to the desire for warmth and sleep, wrapping herself up in the blanket.
When she fell into the not-so-soft bed, Bai Shuang let out a satisfied sigh. Her tired muscles, after a long day, could finally relax.
The exhaustion from climbing mountains and crossing rivers, combined with the psychological fatigue of being on edge for so long, soon overtook her. Bai Shuang, originally intending to sleep just five minutes, quickly fell into a deep sleep.
Her face was serene, her brow relaxed, as if the sleep she had after all the fatigue was the greatest happiness in the world.
But just a few minutes after Bai Shuang had fallen asleep, a rustling sound came from under the bed.
It was like skin and flesh had detached from a body, hanging loosely and swaying as it crawled, gently tapping the floor, making a faint noise.
The bedframe also sounded, struck from underneath, as if something was hiding beneath it.
However, Bai Shuang, deeply asleep, had lost all perception of the world around her. She still wore a blissful smile on her face, completely unaware as she slept soundly.
In the faint light, a swollen, pale hand suddenly reached out from beneath the bed.
The thing grabbed the bedframe and slowly, clumsily, pulled its “bloated” body from underneath.
Then, it stood by the bed, lowered its head, and with blood-red eyes, stared at Bai Shuang, who was deep in sleep.
The smell of decay filled the room, a damp, musty scent mixed with the moisture in the air.
Bai Shuang frowned slightly. In her sleep, she suddenly felt a sense of unease, as if a monster was watching her. She shifted her body uneasily.
In the once peaceful, blissful dream, a decaying corpse barged in. Its entire body was rotting, with maggots wriggling through exposed flesh, and its face, unrecognizable, bore no trace of its original features.
Still lost in the warmth and comfort of sleep, Bai Shuang’s heart raced. She wanted to turn and run, but in her dream, her legs wouldn’t move, leaving her helpless as the creature drew nearer and nearer…
Desperate, Bai Shuang almost wanted to cry. She desperately told herself, This is just a dream, it’s just a dream! I just need to wake up, and I won’t have to face this anymore.
Wake up! Wake up!!
Bai Shuang suddenly opened her eyes, gasping for air, her heart still racing. Even though the room wasn’t very warm, beads of sweat appeared on her forehead.
It took her a while to recover from the shock.
She let out a bitter laugh, thinking to herself that she must have been overthinking before sleep, which led to such a terrifying dream.
With this thought, Bai Shuang absentmindedly lifted her head, her gaze wandering aimlessly around the room.
The room was completely dark, all light swallowed by the blackness, making it impossible to distinguish anything.
But when she glanced at the darkness next to her, her eyes suddenly paused.
Why did she feel… that the darkness next to her was different from the rest?
The other parts of the darkness were smooth and even, with no fluctuations.
But the small patch of darkness next to her seemed to have some kind of movement.
If she looked a little closer…
Bai Shuang squinted, trying to see better, but then froze.
It looked like a human shape!
Her heart skipped a beat. The sleepy fog she had been in instantly vanished, and her back broke out in cold sweat.
Like a malfunctioning robot, Bai Shuang slowly lifted her head, torn between fear and the desire for clarity, wanting to see what was beside her.
However, what she met was a pair of blood-red eyes.
Snap!
A chunk of rotten flesh fell from above.
It landed directly on Bai Shuang’s palm.
The sticky, cold sensation immediately traveled from her hand all the way to her brain.
Her entire body seemed to stiffen like a stone.
Bai Shuang tried to move her mouth, but her tongue felt as stiff as though it was paralyzed. She could only make choking sounds, her instinctive scream trapped in her throat, causing pain that spread through her chest. Tears welled up at the corners of her eyes.
Meanwhile, the corpse slowly stretched out its bloated, pale hand, reaching for her head.
In her mind, Bai Shuang desperately ordered her limbs to move, screaming inside: Move! Move, now!!
Just as she watched that hand approaching her face, with the stench and moisture already suffocating her, she finally regained control of her body in a moment of struggle. She flung the blanket off and scrambled backward, desperate to distance herself from the thing.
“Get away!! Get away!! Brother Yan!! Ahhh—!”
A heart-wrenching scream echoed through the cottage.
……..
After leaving the cottage, Yan Shixun headed straight to the cottage of the elderly man who had greeted the program crew earlier.
Before dark, the guide had mentioned that he didn’t have a house in the village and always stayed at the old man’s home when visiting.
But Yan Shixun had barely taken a few steps when he suddenly heard faint sounds coming from the neighboring small wooden cottage.
It sounded like a rope rubbing against wood, producing a creaking noise.
No, a more accurate description would be the sound of a heavy object hanging from a rope, rubbing against the wood.
It was as if…. something suspended from the beam was slowly swaying with the wind.
Yan Shixun halted in his tracks, his gaze darkened as he turned to look at the small building next door.
In his memory, there seemed to be a vague, almost disappearing impression urging him to check the neighboring small cottage again.
What was there next door?
In his memory, there was only a chaotic mess of colors, and abstract lines that barely resembled anything, with whites and yellows interwoven in a blend of warm and eerie impressions.
All these conflicting sensations had merged in Yan Shixun’s mind into a pot of indiscernible mush, leaving him unable to distinguish anything clearly.
Yan Shixun gritted his teeth and clenched his fists, trying to force himself to remember.
But suddenly, his fingertip brushed against a half-curved mark.
A scratch made by a nail, and from the angle and curvature, it seemed to be a mark he had made on the palm of his hand.
Yan Shixun froze for a moment, still puzzled. He had never been the type to stew in anger and hurt himself to cope, so why would there be such a scratch?
But as he delved deeper into his memories, it was like a door that had been forcibly shut suddenly creaked open, and the memories that had been sealed rushed out all at once.
He remembered now.
The reason he felt oddly cautious about the neighboring small wooden cottage was because, earlier in the afternoon, he had met an elderly woman there who was completely different from the villagers.
She was disabled from the waist down but had a genuine, caring kindness. She had told him, “Just being alive is enough.”
But when he sensed something was off and tried to go back to the small wooden cottage to find the old woman, he discovered that she seemed to have left, as if she had gone out.
What kind of person says something like, “Just being alive is enough”?
Someone who has struggled between life and death, or perhaps someone who is already dead.
Yan Shixun steadied himself, turned around, and headed directly toward the old woman’s small wooden cottage.
He paused at the edge of the fence and observed the house for a moment.
There was no light, no sound.
Apart from the creaking noise, there was nothing coming from inside.
Just an eerie, empty silence.
This time, Yan Shixun didn’t knock on the door. Instead, he gripped the fence with one hand, pushed himself up, and leapt into the yard.
He moved like a large cat, sleek and full of strength, the top predator approaching its prey without making a sound as his padded feet hit the ground.
Yan Shixun gently pushed open the door of the small wooden cottage, entering the place he had already visited twice, both times with no success.
As soon as he pushed the door open, he suddenly came face to face with a pair of feet.
Yan Shixun’s pupils contracted, and he immediately looked up along the line of sight to see where those feet led.
The old woman, who was still alive and calm when they met in the afternoon, was now looking down at him from above.
The rope was tightly tied around her neck, and the knot had been tied in such a way that there was no chance for her to escape.
It seemed that she had suffocated, her eyes wide open, filled with blood, and her eyeballs were nearly popping out of their sockets.
Yet, even in death, the old woman’s face still held a kind and peaceful expression. She hadn’t stuck out her tongue from being hanged, nor had her face turned into a grotesque grimace.
It was as if, even in death, she had remained kind, unwilling to frighten others.
Yan Shixun looked up, meeting the gaze of the now-deceased old woman. He couldn’t believe that the kind old woman, who had gently advised him in the afternoon to “just stay alive,” had, just a few hours later, gone from a lively person to a stiff corpse.
Yan Shixun even wondered if, when he arrived at the small building the second time, the old woman had already passed away.
He stood silently for a while, gazing up at her, before finally pulling his gaze away and taking a step forward.
He approached the body, showing no signs of revulsion or fear despite her death. Instead, he lifted the old woman’s legs and carefully brought her down from the hanging rope. Then, with gentleness, he placed her now-stiff body on the sofa.
Yan Shixun grabbed a nearby blanket and, with one final glance at the old woman’s still-kind face, he sighed silently. Then, he draped the blanket over her.
Even though he hadn’t eaten the meal she had prepared for him earlier that afternoon, he felt her kindness towards him, and he acknowledged it.
As an exorcist who didn’t carelessly entangle himself in others’ fates, he still had his own softness, and he was willing to take on a karma that wasn’t originally his.
Yan Shixun lowered his gaze and swiftly whispered the prayer for the deceased.
If you have no sins… then go on to your next life.
No matter what you’ve done in this life, the underworld will judge your sins and weigh your merits.
If you are a pure soul, you will naturally proceed to your next life.
Yan Shixun stood in front of the sofa for a few seconds. When he lifted his gaze again, he had regained his usual calm and sharpness.
Since he knew the truth and the old woman had already passed away, there was nothing left here for him except the chrysanthemums in the garden, the dry well, and perhaps some meaning left to explore.
But just as Yan Shixun was about to step out of the small wooden cottage, his ears suddenly twitched, and he keenly heard a sound coming from upstairs.
It was like the final breath of an animal before it died, the heavy breathing thick with blood and foam, each breath more labored than the last, as if words were trapped in the throat and unable to escape.
Every movement forward seemed like a struggle, each slight sound almost undetectable, as if it were the last thing a life could leave behind before death.
Yan Shixun turned decisively and ascended the stairs.
Then he saw that the guide he had been seeking from the village elders had collapsed on the wooden stairs of the old woman’s house.
The guide’s throat had been slit by a sharp blade, and blood poured out continuously from the wound, flowing down the stairs in a winding river of blood.
No matter how desperately the guide pressed his hands to his neck, trying to stop the bleeding, it was futile.
He had fallen headfirst, his body stiffened to the point that his eyes could barely turn, but he caught sight of Yan Shixun as soon as he saw him.
The guide opened his mouth, seemingly trying to say something to Yan Shixun, but when he spoke, only wheezing sounds escaped, his mouth filled with blood and foam, and blood dripped from the corners of his mouth, staining his face.
The guide’s eyes were filled with helpless despair, a far cry from the arrogance he had shown when they first met in the village.
It seemed he was silently begging for help, but he couldn’t even say a single word properly.
Yan Shixun didn’t need to think. He immediately rushed to the guide’s side, squatting down and lifting the guide’s head with his long arm. With his other hand, he swiftly pressed his fingers together in a sword-like motion, quickly brushing them across the guide’s wound.
As his lips parted, the incantation to stop the bleeding was spoken into the air.
“…Three chants to halt the flowing river, stop the blood from the veins.”
The blood from the guide’s neck wound ceased to flow immediately.
However, the guide’s condition didn’t improve.
His face grew even paler than before, turning grey in an instant, and the darkness between his brows signaled that he was near death.
The guide watched Yan Shixun’s actions with his fading vision.
He struggled to pull the corners of his mouth into a bitter smile, then raised the hand that had been pressed against his neck wound and grabbed Yan Shixun’s sleeve.
“It’s useless.”
The guide’s voice was hoarse and weak, as if a candle about to be extinguished by the wind: “He offered me to the gods. I am destined to die tonight, no matter what you do.”
He gave a wretched smile, his once-innocent face now showing despair, helplessness, and insignificance.
“Humans… can never fight against gods.”
“The god gave life, and now, the god wants to take it back. I can’t stop it, I can’t…”
The guide clung tightly to Yan Shixun’s sleeve, his pupils gradually losing focus.
Yan Shixun realized that the guide must have known some of the secrets of Longevity Village. He immediately grabbed the guide and urgently asked, “Longevity Village! What is really going on there? Is there some kind of ghost or monster causing trouble?”
The guide struggled to lift his head and look at Yan Shixun.
As one nears death, their words become kind.
The guide hadn’t intended to reveal what he knew to anyone from outside the village. In fact, he had taken a malicious pleasure in seeing outsiders step into hell, watching from above as they struggled in their final moments.
But he never expected that one day, he would find himself in the same position as those he had seen sacrificed.
He had thought of himself as one of the villagers, but in the eyes of the villagers, he was just another outsider, a life not worth mentioning.
After losing his temper at the old man’s house that afternoon, the guide had stormed off, planning to stay at another villager’s house.
However, the old man had kindly found him and told him, “Xiao Ju has died. Go handle her body as usual,” and he even smiled at him, apologizing and saying many kind words.
The guide’s pride was greatly satisfied, and he happily agreed. Later that evening, he made his way to the old woman’s house.
But what awaited him was the smell of rotting corpses filling the small wooden cottage.
Outmatched, the guide eventually fell to the corpses, feeling his blood slowly draining away, and with it, the warmth of life itself.
He lay back on the stairs in despair, suddenly realizing that everything he had strived for had been a joke.
The so-called perfect life, the so-called life free of pain… Ha, ha ha!
In the eyes of those people, he was no different from the other outsiders.
He was just another pig to be sacrificed.
It was just too late for him to understand.
It was all too late.
As the guide thought death was closing in on him, he unexpectedly saw Yan Shixun—the one he disliked the most—appear before him, seemingly wanting to save him.
The guide found it ridiculous, believing Yan Shixun to be hypocritical. Yet, he couldn’t help but be moved by the warmth of the care being offered.
So, he clung to Yan Shixun’s sleeve with all his remaining strength and struggled to push words from his throat, mixed with blood, “Leave… Longevity Village.”
“The river, upstream, chrysanthemums, sacrifice to the gods…”
The guide’s voice grew weaker, and by the time he spoke his last words, they had turned into a breathless whisper, dissipating in the air.
His hand, still holding onto Yan Shixun’s sleeve, slipped away and fell to the stairs.
Yan Shixun’s face flashed with surprise, followed by deep thought.
The guide’s final words were clearly a genuine attempt to warn him.
The river’s upstream…
Yan Shixun gently lowered the guide’s body and casually pulled down a curtain nearby. He shook it open neatly, and it flew through the air, landing on the guide’s body to cover him.
This was the guide’s final dignity.
Without sparing another glance at the small wooden cottage, Yan Shixun stepped out, walking with long strides.
If what the guide had said was true, he would have to go upstream to the river and see for himself what lay there.
If the abnormalities of Longevity Village were coming from upstream, then to root it out, he would have to make that journey.
Yan Shixun’s gaze grew dark, and he had already made up his mind.
He stood at the door of the cottage, his eyes heavy as he looked into the darkness.
But in the yard, the white and yellow chrysanthemums still bloomed unnaturally, their petals stretching open and swaying gently in the breeze.
The familiar surroundings stirred up memories in Yan Shixun, memories that had already faded into the background. While in the small wooden cottage, he suddenly recalled the strange details he had desperately tried to remember earlier. All the suspicions he had once pushed aside resurfaced in his mind.
Why could he see chrysanthemums everywhere in the village? Even before the guide’s death, he had mentioned chrysanthemums as a final clue.
What was so unusual about them?
Yan Shixun furrowed his brows tightly.
He slowly remembered that when he had left the small building earlier, he had taken a chrysanthemum petal with him.
And that petal… it should now be in his pocket.
Suddenly, Yan Shixun recalled something he had forgotten. He casually reached into his pocket and his fingers brushed against something cool and soft.
It was the chrysanthemum petal.
In that instant, Yan Shixun felt as though the entire world before him had become clear again.
It was as though the frosted glass that had blocked his view of the world had been removed. What had once been blurry and unclear was now sharp, and the white noise in his ears was replaced by normal sounds.
The false world around him suddenly became real.
Everything became clear.
The thin veil that had enveloped Yan Shixun since he entered the mountain was violently torn away, revealing the true face of the world. Even his mind became clearer.
Yan Shixun could feel that his previously sluggish and forgetful thoughts were now like gears greased and turning smoothly, finally able to function properly again.
The truth of everything before him suddenly became within reach, and forgotten memories flooded back into his mind.
All the details he had previously overlooked now came together into a complete picture in his quickly working mind.
Yan Shixun’s fingers gently pinched the chrysanthemum petal in his pocket, and a faint smile curved his lips.
The river upstream, and the sacrifices the guide had mentioned…
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