Ba Yunye sank into darkness, as though she had fallen into a deep pool, sinking further and further down. At the bottom of that pool, a pair of dried, withered hands seemed to drag her downward. As she descended, she saw many things — all the memories she least wanted to revisit or face.
In early childhood: a classmate’s family of three, warm and complete, while she would never have a father or mother waiting to pick her up after school. Her childhood, though sheltered by Grandmother Ba’s care, had always carried an absence at its core.
In adolescence: her beloved eldest sister Ba Xiye, on whom she had depended and trusted completely, was suddenly killed in a car accident. Grandmother Ba hid away and wept in secret. What use was studying? Her already mediocre grades collapsed entirely, pulling the class down. The homeroom teacher said nothing to her face, but wore contempt plainly enough — she knew that behind her back, she was called “that wild little bastard.”
Grandmother Ba had grown old and, one day, finally left her behind. What remained in her mind was only the image of Grandmother Ba smiling warmly as she walked toward her… and every time that image surfaced, tears came without warning.
Every scene that had ever caused her pain came flooding back one after another, like frames from an old film — every shot in black and white, every line of dialogue a needle in her chest.
There was nothing left.
Ba Xiye, Grandmother Ba, Long Ge, Diao Zhuo… all gone.
She was alone again — with nothing, and no one. What was the point of living? Better to die. She had never felt this low. Yes — to die, like Ba Xiye and Grandmother Ba, to pass into another world and no longer have to contend with all the helplessness of this one.
All right. She decided to sink forever into this suffocating abyss.
So this was what it was like to die.
She could barely feel herself breathing.
So be it.
Then all at once, something crashed through the fog with great force, and a sliver of light broke through. The tip of her nose felt itchy. She wanted to reach up and brush it away, but had no strength. Something shifted at her nostrils — still itchy — and then a rush of coolness flooded in through her nose, carrying the faint smell of a plastic tube.
Gradually, the thick muddle in her head began to clear. She could feel the position of her own body, the placement of her hands and feet. Then the pressure on her chest disappeared, and the creatures that had been pinning her down and draining her into a dried husk seemed to depart one by one.
What was happening?
She didn’t know how long had passed, but eventually she was able to open her eyes. Above her: a canopy of deep green leaves and a grey, overcast sky, with small raindrops landing continuously on her face. She raised a hand with effort and wiped at her face, and discovered that something was covering her nose and mouth — it looked like… a face mask.
With great difficulty she sat up. Her limbs felt atrophied, drained of strength. Her mind was still hazy. In the distance she caught sight of a familiar figure moving — was that… Diao Zhuo?
How was that possible? She looked left and right. Everyone was lying scattered in various positions, faces covered with masks just like hers. The few without masks had portable oxygen canisters. What had happened to the creatures? To the criminals? To the grave-cap mushrooms blanketing the entire mountainside? And hadn’t her companions been turning into dried-out corpses one by one? Looking now, their bodies were completely intact — and more than that… they were all alive.
Where was she? Heaven or hell — or perhaps a dream on the edge of death?
She tried to stand, and then noticed that River Horse was lying not far away. She blinked. “Am I dreaming?” Seeing the oxygen mask over River Horse’s nose and mouth, she instinctively reached down and ripped it off, then stomped on his face for good measure. Hmph! Traitor! Even in a dream, she wasn’t letting him off!
She scratched the back of her head and, to prove to herself this was not a dream, bellowed: “Diao Zhuo——”
Diao Zhuo turned around, still wearing his mask — his expression unreadable — and raised a hand in acknowledgment, then walked quickly toward her.
Ba Yunye recalled having heard somewhere that in dreams, you can’t make a sound. Once Diao Zhuo reached her, she gave his solid arm a firm pinch. The sensation was real enough — unmistakably the same arms that had once held her tightly by the waist. She was about to pull off her mask to speak more easily, when he stopped her.
“Don’t. Not if you don’t want to be led around by hallucinations again.” Diao Zhuo adjusted her mask for her. “Now that you’re awake, take a good look around.”
She surveyed her surroundings. The horrifying ancient skeletal remains were still there, their postures of death bearing witness to the terror they had suffered in their final moments. The dense, seething carpet of ashen-grey grave-cap mushrooms was still there too — thick and vigorous, still as unpleasant to look at as ever. The criminals had all lost consciousness. Diao Zhuo had not given them oxygen or put masks on them — and yet their bodies were perfectly intact, not at all like the dried-out husks they had appeared to be before. Except, of course, for the man with the snake tattoo — he was still howling in pain.
“What is going on?” Ba Yunye frowned.
“We were poisoned.” Diao Zhuo said simply. “I don’t know exactly what kind of toxin causes hallucinations like this, but one thing is certain — we’ve been deceived by hallucinations the entire time.”
“Poisoned? A toxic gas?” Ba Yunye touched her mask. “Breathed in through the air… but can just breathing oxygen and wearing a mask cure it?”
Diao Zhuo thought for a moment, as if organizing his thoughts. “Here is my understanding of it. After we entered this area, what we saw and felt was a mix of real and false. First: the magnetic field. The magnetic anomaly here is genuine — that’s why our electronic devices malfunctioned, signals were disrupted, and why certain aircraft crashed here. All of that is real. It caused us to lose our sense of direction, and created a degree of psychological pressure and anxiety. Second: the forest illusions. In fact, from that point onward, we had already begun experiencing mild hallucinations. But because the degree of poisoning was relatively light, and because the illusions could be explained by the effects of the magnetic field and water vapor, we collectively dismissed them. After the forest began showing illusions, things got progressively stranger.”
Ba Yunye nodded. “And then we encountered the carnivorous rabbits… were those real?”
“The rabbits were real. But the carnivorous part was a hallucination — ours and theirs alike.” Diao Zhuo spread his hands open. His hands and wrists, which had appeared badly wounded before, now showed only scrapes and bruises. Ba Yunye glanced at them, then checked her own hands and feet — places she had been certain the rabbits had bitten multiple times now showed only minor abrasions.
“How can this be…” The absence of serious wounds was a relief, but she was still baffled. “How did you figure that out?”
“When the carnivorous rabbits appeared, I already had doubts. The violation of natural law was one thing — but there was another issue: if a colony that large were truly carnivorous, how much would they need to consume in a single day? In a month? Could the other animals in this area reproduce fast enough to keep up with the rabbits’ rate of breeding and consumption? Without a sufficient food supply, the colony’s numbers would decline and stabilize at some sustainable level. Yet the rabbits that attacked us that day were enormous in number and fed voraciously — all the animals on this mountain combined might not sustain them for a month. Those rabbits appeared too suddenly, but individual ones weren’t particularly aggressive, and showed no signs of having evolved any new traits suited to eating meat. So I kept wondering: were the carnivorous rabbits real or not? Do you remember what Kong Gan warned us about, and the story he told of the village ‘madman’? A group of young people went into the mountain, and only one came back — raving and senseless, saying he was in pain, yet with no serious wounds on his body.” Diao Zhuo’s thoughts branched in many directions, and he was working to lay them out one by one.
At this point, Ge Mingliang, Pang Hou, Tan Lin, and the others began to wake in turn, all equally bewildered.
Diao Zhuo continued: “If the rabbits, like us, were hallucinating due to poisoning — and that caused them to exhibit aggressive behavior toward humans — then the logic holds. So the most likely reality is this: only a handful of rabbits actually attacked us, while our hallucination showed us a massive horde of man-eating rabbits savaging us from head to toe. By that stage, our poisoning had deepened and the hallucinations had escalated — from the visual to the tactile. The fact that we don’t have nearly as many wounds on our bodies now is the best proof of that.”
The others who had been waking up one by one listened to this, then looked down at their own hands with a bewildered expression. When they looked up again, their eyes held a measure of clarity and relief.
“So the people who were ‘eaten’ by the rabbits…” Ba Yunye asked tentatively. “They didn’t actually die?”
“Exactly. They may only have fainted. Everyone was poisoned. When the rabbits appeared, we shared the same hallucination, and the panic spreading from person to person amplified everything — they frightened themselves into unconsciousness.”
She pursed her lips. “Lucky them.”
“Next: the Long Ge who appeared and vanished — that was a sign of our poisoning growing deeper. Because the rabbits were real, our hallucinations had been reworking actual events. But Long Ge had not yet appeared at all, and yet we conjured up a version of him that came and went without a trace. By that point, our hallucinations no longer required any real stimulus. They could take something that existed only in our minds and render it directly into a ‘vision.'” Diao Zhuo spoke as he helped Da Qin, who had just come around, lean against a tree. He pressed a few anti-inflammatory tablets into Da Qin’s hand and reminded him not to breathe while taking them.
Ba Yunye helped pass the water. “By your account, then, those foul creatures that crawled up from underground were all conjured by our own minds. But… why did it feel so real? I genuinely believed I was dying.”
“Dying…” Diao Zhuo repeated her word. “What is the endpoint of a hallucination? I eventually made a bold hypothesis: the final stage of this poisoning is hallucinating one’s own death. The toxin itself is not as potent as an ordinary poisonous mushroom — it isn’t strong enough to kill directly. But it induces terrifying hallucinations, and through the compounding of negative emotion and psychological fear, it generates a longing for death and a passive acceptance of one’s own dying.”
“This poison is… that strange?” Da Qin asked weakly.
“What do you mean by ‘a longing for death’?” Ba Yunye asked.
“Every human being has instincts. One of the most fundamental is survival. In situations where life is threatened, humans can summon extraordinary force — running several times faster than normal, exerting several times their usual strength, and so on. If that instinct is ‘switched off,’ the opposite effect may occur: a desire to die, and to die quickly. The loss of the will to survive is what I mean by a longing for death. The toxin we ingested was capable of producing hallucinations — which means it was affecting the brain. The brain is the most mysterious organ in the human body. At present, humanity’s understanding of the brain may account for only about thirty percent of it — the other seventy percent remains unknown. I believe the will to survive is an emergency response driven by the brain. Is it possible that this toxin directly blocked the brain’s initiation and transmission of survival signals, producing a kind of counter-response?” Diao Zhuo’s expression was grave. “I won’t hide it from you — that longing for death appeared in me as well. The compounded physical and psychological pain generated a desire for rapid death. In ordinary life, when confronting tremendous setbacks or physical suffering, that impulse crosses the mind and passes. This toxin undoubtedly amplified it — using the medium of terrifying hallucinations to make a person fixate on dying, until finally they accepted themselves as already dead: unable to move, unwilling to call for help.”
Da Qin took his medicine and exhaled roughly. “I felt exactly like sleep paralysis — wanting to move but completely unable. At the time I thought: I’m injured, I can’t protect myself, and I’ll only slow everyone down. So when the ‘creature’ knocked me down, I didn’t even struggle.”
Ba Yunye recalled the memories that had flooded back as she sank into unconsciousness — every one of them radiating a kind of toxically negative weight, pressing her mood into a dark place where not the smallest impulse to resist could be kindled. All she had wanted was to give up entirely. That must have been what Diao Zhuo was describing — the longing for death.
Xiang’an, having come around, glanced at Ba Yunye. “I saw Master Ba die, and then… I just felt like there was no point in living.”
“Much obliged.” Ba Yunye clasped her hands together toward him in a mock salute.
Tan Lin glanced at Diao Zhuo, then patted Xiang’an’s shoulder with an expression of mild exasperation. “I think you’re still talking nonsense from the last of the poison.”
Xiang’an gave a sheepish laugh. “As long as Master Ba is healthy and happy, I’m glad to be her eternal backup option!”
Diao Zhuo gave Ba Yunye a sideways look, silently expressing his complete bafflement at her seemingly endless collection of admirers.
She deliberately ignored his gaze. “Kong Gan’s ‘madman’ — he went out of his mind when his companions died one by one. But perhaps his companions hadn’t actually died at all. Perhaps they had been poisoned just like us and had entered a near-death state. Only the ‘madman,’ by some stroke of luck, escaped and found his way back. Which means: everything we went through, someone had already gone through long before us!”
Diao Zhuo nodded. “I believe everyone who has ever entered these mountains has inevitably experienced hallucinations. Some died; some lost their minds. That’s why this place became what the local elders call a ‘forbidden zone.'”
Ge Mingliang, having steadied himself, kept rubbing his chest as though trying to ease his breathing, and couldn’t help asking: “This is almost too incredible. You were in the middle of the hallucination too — how did you manage to determine that what you were seeing was a hallucination?”
“Because his behavior was different from ours.” Diao Zhuo jerked his chin toward the tattooed-snake man, who lay half-dead nearby. “He had been poisoned by a toxic mushroom, yet the ‘creatures’ never attacked him. And I realized: he simply could not see those ‘creatures’ at all. My thinking is that the poison he ingested happened to produce some neutralizing reaction with ours — or perhaps the toxin already in his system was more potent and dominated. As for why he was never attacked — that was actually a blind spot in our hallucination. Everyone’s subconscious had already written him off as a dead man. So in our collective vision, the creatures never went near him.”
At that, everyone nodded —
“I only saw you all being knocked down and dying one by one. I was too stricken with grief to notice him.”
“Wait — he’s not dead? I assumed all that vomiting and retching had finished him off long ago.”
“Lucky for him he got poisoned — serves him right!”
Ba Yunye rubbed her eyes. “But why were all our hallucinations the same?”
“People influence one another. Add to that the environmental stimuli and the legend of tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers perishing here — our hallucinations were bound to be broadly similar, if not identical.”
Xiang’an: “I saw a mass of Japanese soldiers crawling up from the earth — every one of them drenched in blood, and absolutely reeking!”
Tan Lin: “I saw clay figurines — like the ones Nüwa used to create humanity — soft and squishy. Hit one and your fist came away covered in mud.”
Ge Mingliang: “I also saw Japanese soldiers!”
Pang Hou: “What came after me was a horde of zombies — all my colleagues, carrying machine guns and dressed in police uniforms…”
Ba Yunye shuddered at the memory. “I saw a crowd of faceless creatures — fleshless, boneless rotting cadavers… And you, Diao Zhuo?”
“The same as you. That’s probably connected to the fact that we both handled Zou Kaigui’s remains.” Diao Zhuo said. “In truth, all our hallucinations were rooted in this environment and then shaped by our individual past experiences — each one, to some degree, a mirror of the deepest fears hidden in the subconscious.”
“And you were all afraid of Japanese soldiers…” Ba Yunye couldn’t resist teasing.
Ge Mingliang felt the jab keenly and hastened to change the subject: “Where did the toxic gas come from in the first place? If it was man-made, this is an outright crime!”