Half an hour later, the group regrouped — the outcome was plain to see: no one had found Long Ge, not even a single strand of his hair.
“We checked — this place doesn’t seem to have the sort of chaotic illusions like the forest we passed through yesterday. Every tree is right where it should be.” Ge Mingliang brushed the mud from his hands.
If only one person had spotted Long Ge, it might be attributed to nerves stretched too thin producing a hallucination. But an entire group seeing him, with Da Qin actually being physically touched — that required a more careful examination. Ba Yunye felt that the probability of Long Ge deliberately hiding from them or playing a prank was extremely low. The only possibility was that there was some other unknown anomaly at work in this area.
“Where’s Diao Zhuo?” Ba Yunye snapped back to the present after thinking hard. She looked left and right and could not find the person whose presence was always so keenly felt, and for a moment she was a bit bewildered.
“Maybe he walked too far and hasn’t come back yet?” Qi Zi was unconcerned. “Let’s wait a bit longer.”
Xiang’an said with a touch of anticipation: “Is it possible he found Long Ge’s ‘real self’?”
Everyone murmured among themselves, none of them thinking Diao Zhuo’s late return meant something had happened to him — because in their collective understanding, he was the last person anything could happen to. Ba Yunye took out her whistle and blew several times, calling Diao Zhuo back to the group.
“A’Shui isn’t here either,” Pang Hou said quietly to Ge Mingliang.
“Let’s wait.” Ge Mingliang was in no hurry, apparently trusting Diao Zhuo’s personal capabilities completely.
Another ten minutes passed with no sign of Diao Zhuo or A’Shui. The sky grew overcast, and before long a fine drizzle began to fall from above, draping a semi-transparent grey gauze between the sky, the earth, and the forest.
Ba Yunye grew restless and sprang to her feet. “All of you stay here — I’ll go look.”
“Let me come along!” Ge Mingliang stood as well.
Ba Yunye nodded and had just turned around when she spotted a familiar silhouette standing behind a tree in the distance, staring directly toward her — Long Ge! She drew a sharp breath, and because of the others’ previous experiences, she held back from running over right away. Instead she raised a hand and waved.
The “Long Ge” in the distance paid no attention, standing dead still and staring blankly in their direction, his face utterly devoid of the vitality one would expect from a living person.
Ba Yunye could not hold herself back and jogged a few steps forward. The “Long Ge” suddenly turned and walked quickly away, disappearing behind several thick tree trunks.
“Did you all see that?” Ba Yunye asked.
“We all saw it,” everyone confirmed.
Ba Yunye pondered for a moment but could make no sense of it. “Forget it — finding Diao Zhuo is what matters.” She called to Ge Mingliang to get ready to go, when from behind came the sound of measured, unhurried footsteps. Everyone turned to look: Diao Zhuo and A’Shui were walking over, apparently still murmuring something between themselves.
A’Shui looked up, saw Ba Yunye already running toward Diao Zhuo, and silently separated from him, resuming his role as the person of low presence.
“Where did you go! I thought some beautiful fox spirit had lured you away and you’d decided to abandon us!” Ba Yunye ran up to Diao Zhuo and immediately landed a punch on him.
“Are there fox spirits here?” Diao Zhuo asked with great sincerity, then looked genuinely regretful. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”
Ba Yunye gave him a look and couldn’t hold back a laugh. “As a squad leader you’re really something — arriving last of everyone, nearly making us all go looking for you. That is a serious breach of conduct! Comrade Diao Zhuo, I hope you take great care to avoid this in the future.”
Tan Lin snickered and posed a question comparable in difficulty to the classic “if you and your mother both fell in the water” scenario: “Speaking of which — if our Squad Leader Diao really had gone missing out here, would Master Ba prioritize looking for Long Ge or Diao Zhuo first?”
Ba Yunye paused, and then, with arms crossed over her chest, replied: “First, let’s track down the fox spirit.”
The group stopped teasing them and relayed the repeated sightings of “Long Ge” — everyone had their own theory, and it was soon a lively debate.
Ge Mingliang glanced once more at the scrambled GPS signal. “Is it possible that the magnetic anomaly here is producing some kind of illusion again — only this time it’s not trees and grass, but the old squad leader himself? Taking it one step further: as long as he was once here and left some kind of imprint behind, it could be explained — just like a mirage!”
Xiang’an shuddered and rubbed his arms. “It’s my first time seeing a mirage in the shape of a person. Coming out here has been a real education.”
Strange events had occurred again. Diao Zhuo’s mind remained clouded with doubt — the forest illusions, the carnivorous rabbits, Long Ge appearing and vanishing… Something always felt off, but he couldn’t pinpoint it. It was like a tangled mass of thread right in front of him, but if he could just grab hold of one strand, he could unravel the whole thing.
He had not yet managed to grasp that critical strand.
While everyone was arguing, Ba Yunye nudged Diao Zhuo lightly in the side with her elbow. “What kept you so long?”
“I took a couple extra turns, unwilling to give up,” Diao Zhuo said vaguely, unwilling to elaborate.
Ba Yunye didn’t think too much of it, and before she could, they all heard voices — mixed with heavily accented English. It was the criminals again. Their relentless, unyielding determination only confirmed how valuable Long Ge’s leverage was.
Since Long Ge had left no further markings, the group could only trust their luck and decide to follow the direction the “Long Ge” had retreated into, continuing to search while looking for an area with a normal signal.
Cutting through a dense stretch of mountain forest, they came upon another downed fighter plane. Having been hurled from high altitude, it had buried itself into the earth on impact, its wings shattered to pieces. The fuselage jutting above the ground had rusted to the point where it would crumble at the slightest touch, and the original paint and insignia were indistinguishable. Ferns and vines had multiplied prolifically from within the broken metal, and the entire wreck looked like an elaborate, oversized flowerpot.
The rain intensified, raindrops pattering on their rain gear with a steady sound. The jungle was cold and damp, and the scent of decay rising from the leaf litter filled the air once more. After only a short walk, a large, level stretch of mountain terrain appeared before them. Masses of sulfur-yellow rhododendrons bloomed brilliantly in the grey drizzle, every petal beaded with crystal drops of rain. But no one was moved by the beauty — because behind the rhododendron thickets lay a dense carpet of… grave-cap mushrooms.
Unlike the grave-cap mushrooms they had seen the first two times, these were much smaller, crowded and jostling together in clusters. In the densest spots, mushrooms were pressed so tightly against each other they had deformed, listing and hunching in misshapen lumps — looking uncannily like untended ancient graves in the wilderness. The sight was deeply unsettling.
The group exchanged looks and proceeded cautiously forward, only to discover that above and behind the mushroom cluster, several dried-out skeletal remains hung from the tree branches and trunks. Other remains and fragments of limbs lay bare on the soil and among the rocks — the lower ones blanketed in grey-green moss, the higher ones turned dark brown, nearly merged with the crossing tree limbs. If you didn’t look carefully, you could not tell the difference between branch and bone. Some complete skeletons could be read as the postures of struggle: some appeared to be trying to climb the trees, some were clutching trunks in a death grip, some seemed to be trying to burrow into the ground. Time had long since stripped away any fabric or clothing, worn away by wind and rain. At a rough count, just the skulls hanging in the trees numbered over a hundred — and heaven knows how many more lay buried underground. Surveying the scene, it was as horrifying as any vision of hell on earth.
Were these people, like the two remains found earlier, soldiers of the invading Japanese army? Had they died one by one, or all at once? Why had those who came before not been warned by the sight of so many bones?
The sky seemed to cooperate with the mood, growing ever more overcast. Heavy lead-colored clouds completely smothered the sunlight and pressed low over the mountaintops. In the distance, several muffled rolls of thunder sounded.
“We should… take a detour,” Ba Yunye said with a sense of foreboding. She prided herself on being worldly and unafraid of unexpected or shocking things on the road, but what deserved reverence should be revered, and what deserved a wide berth should be given one. To be frank, ever since they first spotted “Long Ge,” she had felt this place was sinister — harboring hidden dangers more formidable than the criminals with their guns.
Her suggestion met with general agreement. After having dug up two Japanese corpses from beneath grave-cap mushrooms, no one wanted to court that sort of bad luck. Just as everyone was about to turn around and find another way, Xiang’an — who habitually pulled out his phone to check the screen — suddenly called out: “Wait — there’s a signal here!”
“Really?!” Everyone’s eyes lit up. They pulled out their navigation devices and phones and discovered with delight that there was indeed a signal here, though very weak and intermittent. Diao Zhuo watched the small 2G signal indicator “E” appear and disappear on his phone screen, his brow easing slightly.
“What about the GPS?” he asked Ge Mingliang.
“Still loading, but at least it’s showing our general area now.” Ge Mingliang also exhaled with relief and tried to mark their coordinates. The handheld GPS carried by the rescue team was also generating a map, but due to the unstable signal, the process was painfully slow. Diao Zhuo paced back and forth, glanced at Da Qin whose complexion had grown increasingly pale, and said: “Establish our position as quickly as possible and call in medical rescue.”
“The signal here is weak — the magnetic interference must still be very strong.” After multiple failed call attempts on the Beidou satellite phone, Ge Mingliang sighed.
Diao Zhuo kept his eyes on the GPS, but the screen remained stubbornly frozen on the empty broad map of the Gongshan region. He looked at the dense cluster of grave-cap mushrooms and the strangely posed skeletal remains, then at his teammates scrambling for a signal, and felt once more that something was not right.
Magnetic fields could vary with altitude and terrain, but they couldn’t be entirely without pattern. Why was it here — of all places, the very place one should not linger — that the magnetic interference had vanished? Diao Zhuo refused to believe this was “a gift from nature.” Even a few cow-dung patties falling from the sky that could start a fire would be more believable than this.
Sure enough, Xiang’an tried walking a few steps toward the dense mushroom cluster and cried out that the signal had grown stronger. Everyone swarmed over, holding up their phones, Beidou satellite phones, and GPS units, all reporting the signal had improved.
The closer to the densest mushrooms, the stronger the signal?
That was deeply abnormal — as if something was deliberately preventing people from being frightened away by the mass of skeletal remains, forcing them to stay.
As Diao Zhuo was still thinking, Xiang’an had already run into the middle of the mushroom cluster, his face breaking into a smile. “I got through! I got through!”
The Beidou satellite phone in his hands was transmitting a clear signal.
From where the group had first spotted the mushrooms to where Xiang’an now stood was barely over a hundred meters — and the signal had gone from barely there to strong enough to place a call.
Diao Zhuo’s mind raced — a bog? Impossible; this altitude and climate couldn’t produce one. A giant carnivorous plant? Impossible; those only existed as movie special effects. A predator? That didn’t seem connected to signal strength.
What, then?
Seeing Xiang’an growing completely absorbed, Diao Zhuo called out loudly: “Xiang’an! Come back!”
“It connected! There’s someone on the line!” Xiang’an momentarily forgot where he was and pressed the satellite phone tightly to his ear. “Hello! We’re the Beidou Rescue Team! We’re deep in the Gongshan wilderness! Someone has been shot! We’ve also encountered armed foreigners! Our situation is very dangerous! Please immediately send—”
Ba Yunye had also moved forward about ten meters to look for a signal, delighted to find her phone signal growing stronger, when out of the corner of her eye she spotted something hanging limp among the mass of white grave-cap mushrooms — a broken string of beads. She moved a few steps closer, eyes going slightly wide, and turned to shout back: “That’s Long Ge’s bracelet!!”
Once again Diao Zhuo noticed it — the dense cluster of grave-cap mushrooms, while radiating an air of terror, seemed at the same time to possess a powerful allure drawing people toward it.
“Stay where you are — don’t move!” Diao Zhuo tried to call everyone back, and as he attempted to recall all the rescue team members and mountaineering association volunteers, he heard an eruption of chaotic footsteps behind him.