The wind gusted from every direction with no predictability, and a single misstep could send you lurching sideways, thrown off balance. Fortunately, after several practice hikes, everyone gripped their trekking poles firmly, adjusting their center of gravity in response to each shift of wind, moving at a steady, unhurried pace.

Diao Zhuo walked and kept glancing back. Ba Yunye assumed he was looking at her, but when she followed the direction of his gaze, it seemed to be pointed toward the mountain below. “Hey, what are you looking at? Don’t tell me there’s a naked woman walking behind me.”

He shook his head. After a long while, something seemed to catch his eye. He walked a little further, then suddenly stopped, looked back, took a few more steps, turned around — and after a few seconds, said to Ba Yunye: “It’s here.”

Ba Yunye had been entirely preoccupied with thoughts of Fu Yingtao, and hearing this out of nowhere, she had no idea what he meant.

“The location where the photograph was taken. It’s here.” He said it again.

“What?! It was taken on the path from base camp to C1?!” Ba Yunye quickly pulled out her phone, pointing at the screen. “Are you certain?”

“Look at the background.” He pointed down toward the vast, open wilderness below. “…Looking down from my position here.”

The photograph had been taken from above, looking down. The background was mostly loose rocks behind the subject, with perhaps one-fifth showing the distant wilderness beyond — and to top it all off, it was in black and white, with limited clarity. To an ordinary person’s eye, it would have been virtually impossible to determine the exact location.

Hearing the certainty in his voice, Ba Yunye jogged over and stood beside him, looking down. At the far edge of the brown wilderness, a continuous range of mountains stretched into the distance. Two rivers — one wide, one narrow — meandered across the plain. The terrain was uneven, and under the sunlight, the undulations cast shadows and light across the landscape. Ba Yunye studied the photograph carefully. Where a person stood would shift the angle of the view looking down, and only Diao Zhuo could have made such a precise determination of bearing.

“Is it… is it really here?!” she said in astonishment.

Hema was standing a little higher up the slope. He spotted their movements with a glance and quickly descended a few steps, arriving just in time to see Diao Zhuo pinpointing the coordinates of the location. Quick as a flash, he pulled out his own phone to check the current coordinates, took a screenshot, and let out a long breath of relief. He looked up to find Ba Yunye staring straight at him.

He said happily: “You’ve found the location where the photograph was taken?”

“Found it.” Ba Yunye stamped her foot and said, “Right here where we’re standing. Come down and have a look?”

“Since it’s confirmed, why would I go down?” Hema switched to his camera function. “Such a meaningful spot — let me take a photo of you two.”

“Fair enough.” Ba Yunye said, rummaging in her pack for a mirrorless camera, which she handed to Hema. “Take several.”

Hema took it with a cheerful grin. “You really should have brought a wedding dress this time!”

“Wearing that thing, I’d end up blown to the bottom of the mountain…” Ba Yunye, who rarely posed for photos, threw up a carefree victory sign. Noticing that Diao Zhuo hadn’t moved, she nudged him with her elbow. “If you’re going to take a photo with me, at least act like it — give me a ‘peace’ sign at minimum.”

Diao Zhuo suddenly bent down and swept her up horizontally in his arms. “How about this?”

Ba Yunye didn’t know where to put her hands and could only wrap them around his neck. “No good — I want to sit on your shoulders.”

“Come on then.” He set her back down. She raised her leg and swung it over his shoulder. He braced both hands on her calves, took a long slow breath, gathered his strength, and stood up in one motion. “Whoa~!” Her vantage point suddenly soared. She let out a delighted shriek, threw both arms into the air. “I! AM! THE! TALLEST!”

Hema quickly snapped the shot, then gave Diao Zhuo a thumbs-up. “Hey! You’re the only one willing to go along with her nonsense! Indulge her too much and she’ll be tearing the roof off the house!”

Their voices were too loud — Fu Xingyue and Jiang Ao’hang both turned to look, exchanging a glance. Then Fu Xingyue laughed lightly, as if talking to herself: “Ha. Diao Zhuo seems so steady, and yet he’s willing to go this wild with Ba Yunye. I actually envy her.”

Jiang Ao’hang hesitated slightly. “Xingyue, why such a wistful feeling all of a sudden? No matter how good they are together, they’re not even married yet — no one knows what the future holds. I heard from Hema that Ba Yunye dashes around between Yunnan, Sichuan, and Tibet, while that Diao Zhuo is doing some kind of project near Kashgar — thousands of miles apart, a long-distance relationship! In my experience, long-distance ones never end well. Aren’t we… aren’t we better off than them?”

Long-distance ones never end well.

That sentence pierced into Fu Xingyue’s heart like an awl. She had heard that Jiang Ao’hang had dated two girls before. His first ex, Mao Ruirui, had drifted apart from him after graduating because of the distance — though, more importantly, it was because Mao Ruirui had stepped out of the ivory tower of university and realized that apartments and cars mattered more than vows of eternal devotion.

Jiang Ao’hang was not a man who could afford to buy a car or an apartment. Yet he had always believed he had a convenient shortcut to obtaining those things: find an only daughter from a comfortable family background in the city.

His scheme had not gone unnoticed by Fu Xingyue, long before he ever began pursuing her. She was not the only only-daughter of a company executive, but she was the most easily breached — or so it appeared.

Jiang Ao’hang was a strangely self-assured man, one easily swayed by others’ encouragement. He trusted every one of his own judgments and believed his own cleverness could deliver him to his goals. He was like a male praying mantis with eyes only for the cicada — brandishing both serrated forelegs, hiding behind the leaves, convinced no one could see him.

But he seemed to have forgotten that a male praying mantis, whether he meets a female praying mantis or a sparrow, becomes food either way.

“…Of course we’re better off than those two.” Fu Xingyue smiled.

“Let’s get moving — they’re in good shape, they’ll catch up to us before long.” Jiang Ao’hang rolled his shoulders and called out ahead.

Fu Xingyue watched his retreating back, her gaze turning gradually colder, until it held no warmth at all.

Ba Yunye had finished her antics and flipped down from Diao Zhuo’s shoulders, laughing loudly and gasping for breath, waving her hands repeatedly. “I can’t take it anymore… hahaha! I’m always telling everyone else not to run around, and here I can’t restrain myself at all — I’ll definitely get altitude sickness from this in a bit!”

Diao Zhuo moved around with the camera, photographing as if he wanted to capture every single thing in the landscape. Hema, deciding there was no need to keep playing the third wheel, quickened his steps and rejoined the group.

Ba Yunye stood in place for a while, and after her breathing steadied, said: “Even if we know this is where the photograph was taken, there’s nothing here to tell us which year it was taken. Apart from Professor Rao, whom you recognized, the faces of the other people in the photo are too blurry to make out — there’s no way of knowing who they are. Did Professor Rao write anything about it in his journal?”

“He came to Qinghai five times. The visit he made in the 1990s can be ruled out — color photography was already widespread by then. The other four times, his records are not very detailed. He gave no specific years or months — only that they were in the 70s or 80s. His main focus clearly wasn’t Qinghai.” Something seemed to be taking shape in Diao Zhuo’s mind. “The river channels in the photograph look somewhat different from how they are now. And something seems to be missing — I think it might be a lake…”

“Hey, you two, keep up!!” Lu Jianyi called from higher up the slope.

Diao Zhuo raised his hand to signal they were coming, then turned to look at Ba Yunye. “We’ll talk more when we get back.”

She pressed him anxiously: “Are you confident?”

He was silent for a few seconds. “Yes.”

After roughly three hours of hiking, the group arrived at the C1 camp just before evening. C1 was situated at the saddle where Yuzhu Peak’s southwest ridge met the southern slope — a wide, open expanse of flat ground. Standing at the C1 camp and looking down, the mysterious and bewitching great wilderness of the Hoh Xil stretched out below. Not far away, the summit route of Yuzhu Peak was clearly visible, looking as though it were only a few steps away. The pure white ice and snow completely blanketed the slope above C1. The angle between the ice face and the flat ground was about thirty degrees or so — indeed very gradual, like a gentle low hill with no difficulty to speak of.

With no mountains or boulders to block it, a fierce wind ran rampant, and clouds drifted straight through the camp. At close to 5,600 meters above sea level, it was far colder than base camp. The moment you stopped moving, a bone-deep cold began creeping inward from the outside, and even wearing thick gloves, one’s fingers would go numb in no time.

The combination of cold and altitude sickness meant that almost everyone, the moment they reached C1, crawled into their tents and refused to come out. Even sleeping bags rated for minus twenty degrees struggled to make their bodies feel warm. The hard, unrelenting cold of high altitude is something only those who have been there can understand. The wind did not ease its harassment of the outsiders — it beat violently against the tent fabric, producing tremendous cracking sounds, like something racing up and repeatedly smashing into it, as though the entire tent might be flipped over at any moment.

The headaches and nausea that come with rising altitude tormented nearly every first-time climber on Yuzhu Peak. Even Ba Yunye, who had spent years traveling every kind of route into Tibet, couldn’t avoid the persistent sense of something pressing against her stomach, and a faint, dull ache in her head. The mystery Lu Jianyi had teased them about earlier was now clear to everyone — previous climbers had indeed left behind a great deal of food: instant cup noodles, bread, compressed biscuits, even self-heating hot pots. The catch was that you had to be able to eat. At such altitude, everyone’s stomach had effectively shut down and seemed to have entered a dormant state. Even someone as robust as Diao Zhuo could barely manage to finish a single carton of warm milk.

C1 had no running water. The water supply depended entirely on the inexhaustible snowfall nearby. Pu Lan collected several buckets of snow and used the portable gas stove she had brought along to heat it for everyone.

When the insulated water flasks were collected all at once, Fu Xingyue had a brief moment of distraction. Lu Jianyi, following Ba Yunye’s instructions, carefully rinsed out the inside of each person’s flask with water before filling them with freshly boiled water. For Fu Yingtao’s flask and the other two’s, he rinsed inside and out three times before pouring in the hot water.

Pu Lan distributed warm glucose water to everyone, and took the opportunity to encourage them: if you can manage to sleep, try to get some rest, because the summit push begins at three in the morning.

Fu Yingtao remained particular as ever. “Can we actually drink melted snow? What if people have been trudging through it and you’re using that to boil water?”

Pu Lan explained: “We know which snow is relatively clean.”

“Didn’t you bring a few bottles of mineral water?”

“Water is too heavy to carry, and after coming up here it freezes solid — impossible to drink and hard to heat.” Pu Lan said.

“Dad, just make do.” Jiang Ao’hang urged him, and he finally relented.

Fu Xingyue was also being tormented by altitude sickness. Something seemed lodged in her throat — impossible to cough out or swallow down — and even though she took deep breaths every so often, she always felt short of breath. Compared to her, Jiang Ao’hang was faring considerably better; he went to fetch more hot water for the two of them.

“What will the weather be like tomorrow?” he called out loudly from outside the tent to Lu Jianyi, but his voice was swallowed by the howling wind.

“Good weather!” the person inside said. “Perfect for the summit — don’t worry!”

“Woof woof!” Huzi echoed his owner, still full of energy as ever.

Jiang Ao’hang had a thoughtful look, then smiled. The wind distorted his expression slightly, making his smile look a little unsettling. He called out his thanks, then returned to the tent and continued fussing attentively over his father-in-law and wife.

The camp provided individual tents. Hema came out to relieve himself and, on his way back, noticed that the three of them were crammed into one tent. Somewhat concerned, he quietly mentioned it to Lu Jianyi. Lu Jianyi immediately reminded the husband and wife to go to separate tents, leaving Fu Yingtao on his own.