Feng Haozhong walked silently at the front of the group, carrying the straw man on his back. The thick white mist surrounded them, eerily quiet.
Ahead was a cart pulling a coffin. The creaking sound grew fainter, eventually fading along with its shadow at a bend in the mountain path. The wind howled in his ears, making it feel like he was the only one in the entire mountain, carrying a corpse and trudging along.
The village chief had warned them not to speak, so even though Feng Haozhong was terrified, he dared not open his mouth.
Cold sweat dripped from his forehead. After walking for so long, his strength was nearly drained. Each step felt noticeably heavier as his foot hit the ground.
Maybe it was just fatigue, but he thought the straw man on his back had grown significantly heavier.
Maybe the straw soaked up moisture from the mist? he thought, trying to reassure himself. Trembling with fear, Feng Haozhong kept moving forward.
His nerves were taut, his mouth dry, and his eyes blurred by the fog. Even his ears felt stuffed with cotton.
The straw man grew heavier and heavier, forcing him to stoop over just to make it slightly easier to carry.
The path up Spirit Mountain was narrow and winding. Feng Haozhong trudged along, head bent. As he finally lifted his gaze, he saw familiar figures ahead—Lin Jing and Blondie walking side by side, chatting as they went. Their words, muffled by the fog, were inaudible.
Driven to the brink of madness by fear and isolation, Feng Haozhong felt a surprising sense of relief upon seeing Lin Jing, despite finding him insufferable. He let out a long breath.
At first, Feng Haozhong had hated Xu Wanzhi, but over time, he realized Xu Wanzhi’s constant drowsiness and indifference made him far less aggravating. Lin Jing, however, was always sharp and commanding, leaving Feng Haozhong—despite being the top scorer—feeling overshadowed. This made him resent Lin Jing even more. Add to that a moment where he stumbled upon something suspicious between Lin Jing and Xu Wanzhi, and his thoughts spiraled further into hostility, interpreting everything through his own bias.
But at the end of the day, it was just a game. As Lin Jing said, there wasn’t any deep-seated hatred. They were still teammates in critical moments. Feng Haozhong scowled, pretending not to notice them as he quickened his pace to catch up.
As he drew nearer, he still couldn’t make out their words. Instead, their voices sounded oddly distorted, carrying a strange rustling quality. Feng Haozhong froze—were these two from the same region?
No, something wasn’t right.
Stopping three steps away, he hunched his back, eyes widening in terror as his pupils filled with fear.
From afar, he could only make out the shapes of Lin Jing and Blondie. Now, as he got closer, he saw clearly: both Lin Jing and Blondie’s faces were pale and stiff, their limbs rigid. They were leaning backward unnaturally, tied with hemp ropes around their waists, being carried forward. The voices weren’t coming from them—it was the “people” carrying them. Two straw men, walking shoulder to shoulder.
Feng Haozhong felt a chill spread through his entire body, his legs as heavy as lead. The mountain air was cold, sticky, and carried a faint metallic scent, all emanating from behind him. The scarecrow on his back, which had only felt slightly heavier earlier, now seemed to weigh as much as a mountain.
Something seemed to wrap around his neck—long, thin arms. They were the scarecrow’s hands, their coarse straw scraping against his fragile throat. Turning his stiff neck slightly, he saw a twisted, eerie smile, button eyes, and a mouth sewn with red thread. The scarecrow’s neck had stretched unnaturally, its arms extending as well, tightening around him.
The suffocating pressure left Feng Haozhong’s mind blank, and he completely broke down.
“Help! Help—!!”
Ignoring the village chief’s warning not to speak, he screamed in terror on the mountain path.
But the world had become a void of white mist. Lin Jing and Blondie stood stiffly in front of him, their vacant gazes fixed on him. The two scarecrows, still talking in those strange voices, did not even turn around. Instead, they disappeared with the cart and ox into a turn in the path, vanishing like shadows.
Feng Haozhong desperately tried to pry the straw hands off his neck, but to no avail.
The scarecrow’s hands were like a knot tightening around his throat, constricting him bit by bit.
“Ahhh—! Ahhhhhh—!”
His screams of despair echoed across the silent Spirit Mountain.
Up ahead, the village chief sat on the slow-moving ox, seemingly unaffected, holding a bell in his hand and muttering something under his breath. As the bell’s spiritual chime echoed, the entire mountain glowed faintly red. The bell was ancient and rusted, with a red string threaded through it, tied to a Buddhist bead.
The bell’s ethereal sound resonated across the quiet mountain.
Hearing the bell, the scarecrows that had killed their victims obediently hoisted their loads and followed the ox’s footprints step by step up the mountain.
At the mountain’s summit, the mist finally cleared, though the sky remained gloomy with steady rain.
The world was hushed, the mountain ridges and peaks cloaked in silence, their verdant hues subdued in the rain. The village chief tied the ox to a tree at the edge of the forest and shook the bell again. From within the coffins came sounds of movement. One by one, elderly figures dressed in tall hats and burial robes climbed out with blank expressions.
“Six this time, huh? Quite a lot. This burial will take a while.”
The village chief muttered to himself as the funeral specters dragged the coffins toward the cliffside.
Shaking the bell, the village chief reflected on recent events. A strange, disdainful smirk crossed his face.
At the cliff’s edge, seven coffins stood open in a neat row, waiting for the scarecrows to bring their loads.
The village chief sat down and began cutting the red string—oxen pulling coffins, men carrying corpses, red shoes binding feet. Just as his scissors made the first snip, footsteps finally echoed through the forest.
“I’ll cut your intestines first before burying you.” The village chief’s withered hands gripped the scissors tightly, his face flushing with excitement at the thought of gutting someone open. “Then I’ll dig out your eyes and smash your skull to pieces.”
Lost in his world of revenge, he mumbled to himself. Suddenly, his ears twitched sharply.
Along with the sound of footsteps, voices drifted through the woods.
“D*mn, Brother Lin, is this the little grove where you had your secret rendezvous last time?”
“Say ‘secret rendezvous’ one more time, and I’ll kill you.”
“Hey, not my fault—blame Feng Haozhong! But seriously, that guy’s all bark and no bite. One trip up the mountain, and he ends up like this. If it weren’t for the two kind-hearted girls in our team helping him, he’d probably be dead by now. Hmph! Serves him right for not listening to you.”
Rip.
The village chief froze. His scissors, which had just cut through red fabric, snipped into his own finger. Black blood slowly oozed out.
He lifted his head, his cloudy, triangular eyes filled with disbelief and terror as he stared at the approaching figures.
Lin Jing ignored Blondie, untied the rope around his waist, and lifted the scarecrow that had behaved itself throughout the journey.
“Scarecrow, we brought it up. Time for you to keep your promise.”
The village chief: “……”
He gritted his teeth in fury, but before he could explode, his eyes darted toward Xu Wanzhi.
However, Xu Wanzhi looked exhausted, pressing his temples with his eyes closed, as if he had just woken up.
A flicker of confusion and hesitation crossed the village chief’s face. His mouth fell open but refused to close.
Lin Jing casually sat cross-legged beside him with a smile. “You’re not thinking of backing out, are you?” His gaze drifted past the village chief, landing on the row of standing corpses behind him. He let out a whistle and grinned. “Looks like today’s batch of burial brothers is in pretty good shape.”
The village chief: “……..”
The others: “……..”
Seven scarecrows were casually tossed onto the ground.
Lin Jing didn’t bother keeping up the suspense any longer. “You’ve been hiding things from us for days. All the trouble you went through to prepare our funeral? Wasted. Let’s get to the point.”
Blondie gawked. “What? All this cr*p he’s been doing these past few days was for our funeral?”
The village chief’s glare was so intense it nearly made his eyes pop out.
Lin Jing met his gaze calmly and chuckled. “Where is the Door of Life and Death? Speak up. Lying isn’t a good habit, you know.”
The village chief let out a long breath, placed the scissors down among the pile of red fabric, and fell silent for a while. When he finally spoke, his voice was laced with an odd tone.
“I don’t know.”
Feng Haozhong, who had just been scared half to death, instantly erupted in fury. “You don’t know?! After all the cr*p you put us through?!”
The village chief replied, “I didn’t lie to you. I do know where the cave is. But there’s nothing inside.”
Xiao Xu was stunned. “Wasn’t there supposed to be flowers and herbs that grant immortality?”
A trace of mockery and sorrow appeared on the village chief’s face. “There are flowers and herbs, but they’re fake—just ordinary medicinal plants. The first group of people who found the cave two hundred years ago already figured that out. In folk tales, there’s the concept of the Door of Life and Death. The ‘Door of Life and Death’ you speak of is actually what our ancestors called the ‘Eye of Spirit Mountain.’ Passing through the Spirit Mountain Eye is said to grant eternal life. But just like the Gates of H*ll have the Ten Kings of the Underworld guarding them—do you really think the Spirit Mountain Eye would be left unguarded?”
“It’s a massive creature. The ‘Mountain Eye’ is constantly shifting; only it knows the precise location, standing guard motionless nearby.”
“I can tell you where the cave is—it used to be the creature’s lair. But now it’s gone. Whether you can find the ‘Spirit Mountain Eye’ depends entirely on your luck.”
Everyone’s expressions turned grim instantly. Luck? On such a vast mountain, relying on luck was as good as having no clue at all.
Lin Jing furrowed his brows and asked, “So, your ancestors just relied on luck too?”
The village chief’s face stiffened. After grinding his teeth for a long while, he reluctantly revealed the long-buried history of the village.
“Two hundred years ago, it was a pair of brothers from the Xu family who stumbled upon the cave while chopping wood and hunting. They were ecstatic to find it matched the legends. They began looting the items inside and selling them at high prices to wealthy outsiders. But the herbs were fake. When the rich men conducted human experiments and found them useless, they were furious and came to the mountain with armed guards. In such an isolated area, killing a few people wouldn’t draw any attention. Terrified, the Xu brothers begged for more time, believing the ‘Mountain Eye’ guardian must have consumed all the potent herbs, leaving only ordinary ones. They speculated the guardian’s flesh and blood might be the true source of immortality.”
“The Xu brothers mobilized their entire clan to scour the cave and eventually found the creature. They used torches to burn it and hoes to hack it, killing it piece by piece. After the creature’s death, however, the cave’s enchantment was triggered. Golden characters appeared on the walls, describing the ‘Spirit Mountain Eye.’ It turned out passing through the Mountain Eye granted eternal life. At the time, the creature was near a deep pool—the ‘Mountain Eye’ of the time. The brothers, greedy for wealth, were the first to jump in. They emerged unharmed, and the villagers rejoiced.”
The village chief’s face grew sullen. His murky eyes stared vacantly into the distance. “They thought they’d discovered the path to wealth and immortality, but it was actually a curse.”
“What is immortality? Even if someone loses all reason, feeds on human flesh, and remains able to speak and breathe, they’re still technically “immortal.””
“Those who jumped into the pool were long drowned, and those who emerged alive were no longer truly human. At first, no one noticed anything amiss. But then their blood turned black. They began craving human flesh. People started attacking and killing their spouses in the dead of night. The villagers finally realized those who emerged from the pool were no longer human but monsters wearing human skins. The normal villagers worked together to subdue them, but they discovered these creatures couldn’t be killed—fire wouldn’t burn them, burial was ineffective, and even when their bodies were hacked to pieces, they would regenerate. In the isolated Qinghe Village, with no way to escape or call for help, the people had no choice but to pray to gods and Buddhas daily.”
“Perhaps their prayers were heard, as a wandering monk with extraordinary powers arrived. He revealed that the legends of celestial ascension were fabrications. The Spirit Mountain Eye had always been guarded by an evil spirit, and the current chaos was its revenge. The monk instructed the villagers to burn the creature’s remains and blood, scatter the ashes across the mountain, and perform rituals to pacify the mountain’s wrath.”
The village chief pointed a crooked finger toward the cliff edge. “Here, this is where the ashes were scattered.”
“As for the undead, the monk taught us how to suppress them. Innocent children with shallow sins could be buried under trees, and when the tree aged and withered, they would die and be reborn into the cycle of reincarnation. But adults with heavy sins couldn’t be forgiven. They had to carry the dead, summon spirits, and be bound by blackened blood-stained cloth. They were buried at this cliff, sealed in coffins for eternity, fully conscious, to endure endless sun, wind, and rain—all to placate the mountain spirit’s fury.”
The mountain wind howled from the bottom of the cliff. The old man’s eyes were dull as he spoke: “After the incident calmed down, many people left Qinghe Village. We thought everything had returned to normal. But it didn’t. The curse continued. Men, women, children, the elderly—anyone could suddenly be cursed one day. Their blood would start turning black. And once it turned completely black, they would become a monster through and through.”
Lin Jing listened to everything and then asked, “So… we are the descendants of those who escaped Qinghe Village, the cursed ones?”
The village chief’s voice was low and ancient: “Yes. Your parents sent you here… for a funeral.”
As his words landed, silence fell over everyone.
Xiao Xu’s face was deathly pale. It took her a long while to snap out of the shock of attending her own funeral. She finally spoke: “The villagers don’t know about the curse?”
The village chief replied, “They don’t need to know. If they realized that their blood turning black wasn’t a terminal illness, but rather ‘immortality,’ who would willingly allow themselves to be buried? Take the old man his son sent here last time—he knew about the curse. He knew he was still alive. That’s why, even after I warned him countless times, he still tried to run down the mountain. But he was caught and brought back.”
Life and death had always been strange concepts—who gets to define the boundary between them? And who has the right to bury someone who cannot die?
The village chief let out a sigh, glancing at Lin Jing with resentment. He muttered, “Seven days. I will give you seven days. That’s all the time you have. If I can’t bury you within these seven days, your blood will turn completely black, and once you go entirely mad, you will also fall under my control.”
He shook the bell in his hand again. A group of elderly people in funeral robes, their faces blank, silently dragged the coffins away.
No one spoke. There was no need—the rules of The Door of Life and Death had always stated that the time limit was seven days. Now, there were less than three days left.
Blondie shrank his neck and muttered, “How do we even start? If the Spirit Mountain Eye is unpredictable, then we should at least find the monster guarding it first, right?”
Liu Cheng was startled. “Didn’t the monster die?”
For once, Feng Haozhong looked serious. “It’s not dead. The entire cliffside full of undead was sacrificed to appease its fury—how could it be dead? It may have just changed form and still exists somewhere on Spirit Mountain.”
Everyone exchanged glances, completely at a loss.
After a moment of thought, Lin Jing said, “Let’s follow the village chief and check out that cave first.”
Without a concrete solution, the group could only take things one step at a time.
The cave was at the base of the mountain. As if the village chief’s bell had dispersed the mist, the gloomy weather quietly shifted, and the sun peeked through.
After passing through bushes and slopes, they stopped in front of an overgrown cave. The entrance was dark and foreboding, with a small mountain spring glistening nearby under the sunlight.
The village chief, clearly annoyed, snapped, “If you want to go in, go in yourselves.”
He then rode off on his cow, dragging the cart of coffins back to the village in a huff.
Lin Jing turned on his flashlight and muttered, “Let’s take a look.”
The cave was deep. As soon as they entered, Lin Jing stepped onto a patch of slippery moss. Unlike the rest of the mountain, which was devoid of much wildlife, the cave was teeming with life. Leeches squirmed on the moss, venomous snakes slept in corners, and bats hung in rows from the ceiling. Yet none of these creatures seemed disturbed by their presence. Xiao Xu and Xixi, the two girls, didn’t dare make a sound.
Feng Haozhong, after their earlier trek up the mountain, had complicated feelings toward Lin Jing and quietly followed behind him.
Lin Jing shone his flashlight ahead and murmured, “Who could ever mistake a creepy place like this for a celestial haven?”
Xu Wanzhi, who had been drowsy, seemed more awake now and responded coolly.
Lin Jing chuckled. “What they believed to be the ‘Spirit Mountain Eye’—a path to fortune and wealth—was actually Pandora’s Box.”
Xu Wanzhi replied, “You think it’s all a curse and revenge, too?”
Lin Jing was taken aback. “What?”
Xu Wanzhi’s gaze lingered ahead before he wearily lowered his eyes. He said flatly, “Death and aging are biological evolutions—millions of years of self-selected paths. If anything, it’s not a curse but the result of humans seeking their own doom.”
Lin Jing froze, suddenly reminded of the first time he was locked in the police station, asking about the meaning of life and death, and Xu Wanzhi had countered with his own question.
Lin Jing wasn’t sure if he agreed or disagreed with Xu Wanzhi’s perspective.
In a sense, he was right, but there was something unsettling about his tone—almost…. too indifferent.
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