Meng Qianzi was startled.

Jiang Lian looked at his hand that was holding the door. He had moved too quickly, reaching out before he had thought of what to say.

After a moment, he looked down at Meng Qianzi and said, “Stay, join us.”

Meng Qianzi was somewhat confused by his action, her hand hidden behind the door still unconsciously scratching the surface, “I am… recently, too busy.”

Jiang Lian wanted to laugh: she was indeed busy—busy warming up that door panel with her hand.

He said, “Qianzi, you need to come out, you’ve been inside for too long.”

Meng Qianzi was completely bewildered: where had she been for so long? The guest room? She had only just checked in tonight.

Jiang Lian continued, “You need to get out more, breathe some fresh air, and also…”

He lowered his head, curled his left hand, and used his thumb to press against the curved palm. “I’ve calculated, and you should stay this time.”

Meng Qianzi stared at his left hand: did he know fortune-telling? Nonsense.

Born in a Mountain Spirit family, she had encountered various practitioners of different arts since childhood and was familiar with certain methods. Ancient fortune-tellers would often extend their hand to calculate by pinching their fingers. The fingers naturally had joints with horizontal creases. When the palm was slightly curved with the index, middle, and ring fingers aligned, the connecting creases formed a natural nine-palace grid. The thumb moving across the grid represented calculating the flight pattern of the nine stars, also known as the Mountain-Arranging Palm Technique.

Jiang Lian knew this? That seemed unlikely.

Full of doubts, Meng Qianzi watched as Jiang Lian made a show of pinching and calculating, making affirmative sounds, and even raising his hand to make a virtual grabbing motion near her forehead, saying, “Raise your head.”

Meng Qianzi suspected he was playing tricks, but instinctively raised her head slightly.

He carefully “grabbed” again, then lowered his head and opened his palm. Though empty, he carefully examined it as if studying seeds ready for planting, his expression solemn. Meng Qianzi grew suspicious and leaned in to look as well.

After a pause, Jiang Lian made an affirmative sound, “That’s right. The divination shows you should stay. And I guarantee that all the problems you’re worried about won’t be problems. Trust me.”

Meng Qianzi stared at him for a long time. “Are you making this up? You don’t know fortune-telling at all, do you?”

Jiang Lian replied, “How can you be so distrustful? I’m full of talents, just usually low-key and don’t show off much.”

Goodness, “full of talents” indeed. Meng Qianzi burst out laughing.

Jiang Lian said, “So it’s settled then. That’s that.”

He smiled, walking backward, but after two steps, he suddenly remembered something and came forward again, taking out his phone. “Let’s exchange contact information, so we don’t lose touch again.”

Meng Qianzi hesitated for a moment, then went back to her room to get her phone and pulled up her QR code for adding friends.

She felt strangely conflicted: even though she knew she should turn left, she couldn’t help but drift right, like the green plants on Xuandan Peak Forest competing to grow toward the light, unconsciously, instinctively leaning that way.

Jiang Lian finished scanning, looked at the profile information displayed. Her ID was actually “×2,” and even her profile picture was a black and white “×2.”

He asked, “Why are you called ‘Times Two’?”

Meng Qianzi muttered, “What’s it to you?”

Jiang Lian smiled, first changing the contact name, then adding her. Meng Qianzi lowered her head, waiting for his friend request to come through so she could accept it, when suddenly she heard Jiang Lian call her, “Qianzi.”

Meng Qianzi looked up.

Jiang Lian said, “I wasn’t joking. I meant it. All the problems you’re worried about won’t be problems.”

After saying this, he smiled again and turned to leave.

Meng Qianzi watched his retreating figure and suddenly realized that Jiang Lian had changed how he addressed her.

Previously, he had always called her “Miss Meng.”

She called after him, “Jiang Lian.”

Jiang Lian turned around. Meng Qianzi leaned against the doorframe, not knowing what to say. After a pause, she smiled mischievously and asked, “You met my Sixth Aunt today. Is my Sixth Aunt… beautiful?”

Jiang Lian slightly lowered his eyelids, somewhat helpless yet amused. When Meng Qianzi held grudges, she held them.

He replied, “It was late at night, dark all around. I couldn’t see clearly.”

Another blatant lie. Meng Qianzi suppressed a smile. “And at the theater, with such bright lights, you didn’t see either?”

“At the theater? She was wearing makeup, wasn’t she? That Cantonese opera white powder makeup—how could anyone see the real person?”

Meng Qianzi gritted her teeth, refusing to believe him.

“And then?”

“Then we had a late-night snack.”

“During the snack, you still didn’t see?”

Jiang Lian replied with a straight face, “When eating a late-night snack, aren’t your eyes only on the food? Who has time to look at people?”

Meng Qianzi had no comeback and glared at him resentfully, “You’re full of nonsense.”

After speaking, she slammed the door shut with a bang, then leaned against it, nearly doubled over with laughter.

After laughing, she felt somewhat melancholic.

She stood for a while, kicked off her slippers, and walked barefoot into the room. The room was a mess, with overturned chairs and tables—all her earlier “handiwork.” Along the way were toppled tissue boxes, overturned teapots, ashtrays, and pens. She pushed them aside one by one with her feet.

She also saw some broken ceramic pieces from the teacup she had shattered. She stepped on them, and beneath her foot came a very soft crunching sound with slight pain, which felt somewhat like a moth sensing its wings singed by fire—it could have been more painful, but she didn’t care.

She cleared a space for herself and lay down next to the overturned tea table, looking at her slightly blurred reflection on the marble surface. A voice inside her said, “Stay.”

Not because of Jiang Lian’s dubious “fortune-telling.”

Just for herself, she wanted to stay.

Jiang Lian walked back to his door, thought for a moment, then changed direction and knocked on Shen Gun’s door.

With his current mood, which was hard to describe, he didn’t want to be alone. Having someone to chat with, even aimlessly, would be good.

After pressing the doorbell for a while with no response, Jiang Lian was puzzled. Just as he was about to press again, the door suddenly opened.

Shen Gun answered, wrapped in a large bath towel. Most men usually wrap towels around their waist, but perhaps Shen Gun wasn’t accustomed to this, as he awkwardly wrapped it across his chest, with another towel wrapped around his head, making him look like an Arab. He appeared to have just climbed out of the bathtub, with water still dripping from his body.

Seeing Jiang Lian, he heaved a sigh of relief, “Oh, it’s you.”

Since it was a friend, there was no need for formalities. He darted back to the bathroom, and the sound of splashing water suggested he had gotten back in the tub.

Jiang Lian closed the door and, passing by the bathroom, glanced inside: it was indeed a large bathtub, with Shen Gun sitting in it, extremely excited.

He recommended, “Little Lian Lian, have you tried their bathtub? It has a massage jet function. I didn’t notice at first, but when I pressed it, whoosh, it’s so comfortable.”

He sighed with contentment, “The Mountain Spirits are truly rich, and being rich is… so comfortable.”

Good grief. Jiang Lian could almost see a soul being corrupted by luxury rising from the bathtub. Shen Gun, who had come from among the common people, might find it difficult to return to them after experiencing this.

The bed and floor were still covered with mountain chronicles, documents, and photo albums, leaving no place to step. Jiang Lian cleared a spot for himself and sat cross-legged on the floor beside the bed. He casually picked up a photo album to look at. It was indeed very old; when he opened it, his fingers became dusty. The photos were black and white, some with scalloped edges, and each page had a thin piece of glassine paper to protect the photographs.

Jiang Lian flipped through it absent-mindedly. He had wanted to chat with Shen Gun about Meng Qianzi, but couldn’t find a suitable starting point. After turning a few more pages, his attention was drawn to the photographs.

One was taken from a high angle. The terrain was strange—layer upon layer of low mountains, their number comparable to a peak forest, but unlike it: peak forests typically consist of towering peaks, but these mountains were short and squat, looking somewhat like randomly scattered stone rice dumplings, one to the left, one to the right.

Turning further, the photos were mainly landscapes, with some houses and residents. Judging by their clothing, they were from the 1960s or 1970s.

Jiang Lian had never seen such terrain before. “These photo albums by your bed leg, where were they taken?”

Shen Gun answered, “Guangxi, all from Guangxi. I haven’t looked at those in detail, just skimmed through them. No Grandmother Duan in them.”

Great, if there were no Grandmother Duan, he wouldn’t look. Some research, this was—more like celebrity stalking.

Jiang Lian said irritably, “Then what’s with this terrain?”

On this topic, Shen Gun was professional. He splashed water excitedly, “This is something you probably don’t know about.”

It turned out this was a township with an area of only a hundred square kilometers but with over three thousand stone hills scattered like triangular rice dumplings. The small flat areas between the stone hills were called “nong” in the Zhuang language, which translates to “stone mountain corners.” How small were these “nong”? Sometimes planting thirty to fifty corn stalks could fill an entire “nong.” Local people named mountains according to the number of “nong,” so the township in the photo was called Five Hundred Nong Township.

Shen Gun sighed, “Now such places can be developed for tourism, but in the old days, people would have starved to death. In that place, no three feet of flat land, no three inches of soil on the mountains. Without soil, trees couldn’t grow; only sparse weeds could. No rivers around, and rain couldn’t be stored—you understand karst topography, right? The ground permeability is too good, like a funnel. When it rains, not only does it wash away the pitiful soil on the mountains, but it also seeps into the funnel holes. And those stone mountains had no minerals. How could people live there? What could they live on?”

Jiang Lian sighed, but felt something wasn’t quite right. He flipped through several photos, “That’s not right. I see houses and residents in these photos.”

Shen Gun said, “Yes, isn’t that why we say the Chinese people have always been great and resilient? Even in such living conditions, which the locals themselves described as ‘a place cursed by the devil,’ generations of people still lived there.”

“See those rice dumpling hills? They could carve houses into the mountains. They say it’s cold in winter and hot in summer—imagine the suffering! And since the ground had too many funnel holes and couldn’t store water, they carved stone containers to store water. According to Route Connection, viewed from above, those water containers of various sizes are scattered like stars or chess pieces.”

After this educational explanation, Jiang Lian looked at the people in the photos more carefully and with more admiration. He slowly turned the pages and couldn’t help asking, “With such harsh living conditions, why didn’t these people leave?”

Shen Gun snorted, “Little Lian Lian, saying that shows your privilege, like asking ‘why don’t they eat meat?’ Of course, you can leave whenever you want and survive anywhere—but think about them, illiterate, without any skills. Was it so easy for them to leave?”

After a pause, he added, “But now, they have truly left. I asked Route Connection, and he said that in the 1970s and 1980s, there were still scattered residents, but now there are none. One after another, they all left.”

“People have left the mountains, and the mountains have become desolate. Let me tell you, a mountain plus a person makes the character for ‘immortal.’ If mountains have no people, how can one become an immortal?”

Jiang Lian smiled and continued flipping through the album. As he turned the pages, his heart suddenly jolted, and a strange feeling welled up inside him.

He swallowed dryly and slowly turned back, finally finding what he was looking for.

The photo was ordinary—a man in his fifties, hands behind his back, neck craned as if watching something interesting. The photo wasn’t focused on him; it was mainly capturing the scenery, and he had inadvertently entered the frame at the edge. In modern times, such a photo would be immediately deleted after taking, but in that era of film cameras, without the ability to check immediately, it was preserved.

Jiang Lian’s throat went dry. He looked at it again and again, then tore out the photo and strode toward the bathroom.

Shen Gun was soaking contentedly with his eyes half-closed when he suddenly sensed a change in light, followed by approaching footsteps. He immediately panicked, grabbing the nearby towel to cover himself, shouting, “What are you doing? What do you want?!”

The white bath towel, soaked in the bathtub water, inflated and floated. Jiang Lian didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, “We’re both men. What could I possibly do?”

He handed the photo to Shen Gun, “Look at this person. Is this Lord Yama?”

Lord Yama?

Shen Gun was stunned for a moment, quickly took the photo, and hurriedly put on his water-streaked glasses. The photo was black and white and showed a side profile, so at first glance, nothing seemed unusual, but with Jiang Lian’s prior suggestion…

He hesitantly said, “It does look a bit like him, but from just this one photo, I can’t be certain…”

Jiang Lian interrupted, “How many albums are there of Grandmother Duan visiting Five Hundred Nong Township? This one just happened to capture him. What about other photos? Might they have captured him too? You only looked for photos with Grandmother Duan, but what about other people in the photos? Did you pay attention to them?”

Unable to contain his impatience, he returned to the bedside to continue searching. Shen Gun sat stunned in the bathtub for a moment, then suddenly reacted, quickly drying himself and hastily putting on a tank top and shorts, rushing out to help.

All the albums related to Five Hundred Nong Township were spread out, and they searched photo by photo. In the end, they found something.

There was one photo showing Grandmother Duan chatting with someone, with many people around, either watching or going about their business. Among the onlookers was Lord Yama. Although he appeared as a background figure, the photo captured him from the front, making him clearly visible.

Shen Gun held the photo, stunned for a long time, “How… how is Lord Yama everywhere?”

Before Jiang Lian could answer, his phone rang. Checking the caller ID, he saw it was the young man who was his contact at Wan Fenghuo.

He smiled at Shen Gun, “He’s everywhere… and this isn’t the end of it. I suspect there’s more to come.”

He pressed the answer button and put it on speaker.

The young man spoke politely, “Mr. Jiang, is it convenient for you to take a call?”

Jiang Lian replied, “I’ve already answered, so just speak directly.”

The young man cleared his throat, “It’s like this. I’ve contacted my colleague from the Northwest. He said it was around 1975 or 1976, when he was seven or eight years old, that he saw Lord Yama in the Kunlun Mountains area.”

Kunlun Mountains?

Shen Gun’s heart tightened, and despite being able to hear clearly, he leaned in closer.

Jiang Lian, on the contrary, became calmer, “Are you sure? Could it be that your colleague was young then and misremembered?”

The young man was very certain, “Absolutely not, for several reasons.”

“First, Lord Yama’s appearance was quite… distinctive. That face would leave a deep impression on most people. Second, when Lord Yama entered the mountains, he wasn’t alone. He was with an elderly woman. Few people visited the mountains, so the sudden appearance of two outsiders drew attention. They said the elderly woman had a dignified bearing, and her attire was unusual. When my colleague approached them to chat, the elderly woman gave him a piece of candy with foreign writing on the wrapper—imported candy!”

“My colleague thought he had encountered foreign spies. In those days, class struggle was emphasized, and everyone was vigilant. He ran home to find adults, but his family feared trouble and suppressed the matter, not daring to spread it. How could he misremember such an event?”

“More importantly, after those two entered the mountains, they were never seen coming out. A few days later, there was an avalanche on the mountain. My colleague even thought those two might have been buried by the avalanche.”

Hearing the word “avalanche,” Jiang Lian suddenly shuddered, remembering that he had heard Meng Qianzi mention that Duan Wenxi had ultimately died in an avalanche.

He said, “I’ll send you a photo. Please ask your colleague to identify if this is the elderly woman he saw back then.”

He found a relatively clear front-facing portrait of Duan Wenxi from the albums at hand, took a picture of it, and sent it to the young man.

Shen Gun’s heart was pounding like a drum, with an ominous thought gradually taking shape in his mind. He looked at Jiang Lian and said softly, “It can’t be, right?”

Jiang Lian said, “Whether it is or not, we’ll know soon.”

He dialed the internal room line and asked Meng Qianzi to come over.

Meng Qianzi arrived quickly. She hadn’t been sleeping and, upon receiving the message, had thrown a coat over her nightgown and come right away. As soon as she entered the room, she first complained about the mess, “It looks like it’s been ransacked—there’s nowhere to step.”

Strangely, both men in the room had an unusual expression. Meng Qianzi smiled, “What’s wrong?”

Jiang Lian said, “Qianzi, I want to ask you something about Grandmother Duan.”

Hearing it was related to Duan Wenxi, Meng Qianzi was momentarily stunned.

“Did Grandmother Duan ultimately pass away in the Kunlun Mountains?”

Meng Qianzi nodded, “Yes, in an avalanche. Her body… was never recovered.”

“Do you remember what year that was?”

Meng Qianzi frowned, “For details, you’d have to ask my Grand Aunt. But I remember it should have been around 1975 or 1976.”

Jiang Lian checked the dates on the album. Duan Wenxi had come to Guangxi in late summer or early autumn of 1974.

“I recall you mentioned that Grandmother Duan went to Kunlun… to find dragon bones?”

That’s right. Even though much time had passed, Meng Qianzi still found it hard to accept, “I heard Grand Aunt say that Grandmother Duan suddenly had this idea…”

“Meaning, before that, she had never mentioned dragon bones?”

Meng Qianzi looked at Jiang Lian inquiringly, “No, she hadn’t. What’s the matter?”

Her gaze swept across the mess on the bed and floor, and she had a vague understanding, “Have you discovered that as you investigated, things suddenly became related to Grandmother Duan again?”

The phone rang. It was a text from the young man—just one line:

Identified her. It’s her.

Jiang Lian was silent for a long time. He put away his phone, took a deep breath, and carefully chose his words, “Grandmother Duan’s search for dragon bones wasn’t sudden. She must have met Lord Yama in Guangxi and learned about the dragon bones, which is why she went to the Kunlun Mountains to search. Her guide into Kunlun was Lord Yama.”

“But after the avalanche, Grandmother Duan disappeared, while Lord Yama didn’t disappear with her. As you know, he was still working as a sanitation worker here until 1993.”

Meng Qianzi stared at him, her heart beating faster and faster. She stammered, “So that means…”

Jiang Lian said softly, “So that means, whatever happened to Grandmother Duan back then, whether she died in the avalanche or from something else… Lord Yama was the last witness.”