The group followed the muddy little path into the village. Weeds grew wild along the way, and the winding shrub branches reached out to snag at their clothes.
Jiang Ye looked back and saw Liu Bei deep in the forest, dressed in a red dress, gazing at him from far away.
The village was deathly silent. Not even birdsong could be heard. There was only the squelching crunch of everyone’s footsteps through the mud.
They entered a stilt house. The doors and windows were locked. Huo Ang called out a few times, asking if anyone was there, but no one answered, so he simply broke the door open.
The fire pit was cold and silent. In the corner stood a wooden shrine with its gold paint peeling away, and the incense burner was filled with ashes that had long gone cold.
The stilt house was built entirely of wood. Its walls were made from vertical wooden planks, dotted here and there with black mold spots that looked like sores. They were hideous.
Yilale told everyone to put on masks. “This house has been moldy for too long. Breathing too much of the air in here will poison you.”
Bai Nianci went closer to the shrine. There were more mold spots around it than elsewhere. He took several photos in a row and said, “Look. This shrine is the same as the ones we saw in the forest earlier.”
Jiang Ye crouched down to examine it.
The shrine was still empty.
Huo Ang clicked his tongue. “What exactly do they worship? Air?”
“Have you been to the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests?” Bai Nianci asked. “The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests was where emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties performed sacrifices. It enshrined only one god—the Heavenly Emperor. He was the leader of all gods, the most exalted deity in our native religion, the emperor among gods, so to speak. And yet the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests has no statue of him. Not even a portrait. Only a tablet with his name written on it. Even a roadside earth god has a clay statue, but as the highest-ranking god, he has only a tablet.”
Huo Ang played along. “Why?”
Bai Nianci stared at the shrine on the ground and said, “In truth, it isn’t only the Heavenly Emperor who has no image. Many things in our native classics and legends have no image either. Laozi described the ‘Dao’ as: ‘As a thing, the Dao is dim and indistinct. Indistinct, dim, within it there are images; dim, indistinct, within it there are things; deep and obscure, within it there is essence.’ Put simply, the Dao is vague and indistinct, formless and shapeless. Even he did not know what the Dao looked like. He also mentioned the concept of the ‘Great Beginning’: ‘In the Great Beginning there was nonbeing; there was no being and no name. When the One arose, there was One but no form.’ It indicates a chaotic state without physical shape. These all share one common trait: they have no form. They cannot be felt out, cannot be grasped, cannot be clearly understood.
“Little Ye, your mother said in her paper that Taisui Village’s mysterious faith can be traced back more than two thousand years. That means it is much older than the Heavenly Emperor, the Dao, and the Great Beginning. The faith in the Heavenly Emperor and the concept of the Dao may very well be variations of it. If that is true, then it was not that people refused to build the Heavenly Emperor a golden incarnate statue. Rather, he had no image to begin with. By the same logic, this shrine may be the same. Perhaps it enshrines a formless god.”
“After saying all that, what god does Taisui Village actually worship?” Huo Ang asked. “Even if it has no appearance, it should at least have a name. Don’t tell me it’s called the Air God.”
Yilale looked at him as if he were an idiot. “Taisui Village. Obviously, Taisui.”
Huo Ang bowed before the shrine. “Taisui, oh Taisui, please let me get rich overnight!”
Yilale kicked him. “Stop embarrassing yourself.”
Jiang Ye looked around and suddenly realized Jin Feize was gone.
He called, “Jin Feize!”
Jin Feize leaned out from upstairs. “I’m here.”
Jiang Ye frowned. “Don’t run around. Stay with everyone.”
Jin Feize tilted his head. “Does going upstairs count as running around?”
Huo Ang patted Jiang Ye. “It’s fine. I checked upstairs and downstairs. There’s nothing strange.”
Jiang Ye climbed the stairs. Upstairs was very dark. The lattice windows were all boarded shut. Pots, bowls, ladles, and basins sat in the cupboards, sealed over with spiderwebs.
Jiang Ye pushed open a wooden door. Inside seemed to be a bedroom. Against the wall stood a small wooden bunk bed. Many children’s simple drawings were pasted on the wall, each showing two children holding pistols.
Jiang Ye pulled open a bookcase drawer. Inside were a box of crayons, two worn toy wooden pistols, some military-equipment magazines, a password notebook, and a diary.
He opened the diary. The pages had yellowed, and the handwriting was crooked.
—“Little Brother has been lying in bed. He hasn’t spoken for a long time. I used to bully him all the time and force him to wash my moldy dirty clothes and pants. Now I need to be nicer to him so he can get better sooner. Maybe I really have to find a way to leave the village. There are no good doctors here.”
—“More and more things are getting moldy. I hate moldy things.”
—“Little Brother’s body has become hard. Mom says he is one of Taisui’s people and will wake up sooner or later. Mom is so superstitious. Little Brother must be sick. I’m going to wait until Mom and Dad go find the shaman, then secretly take Little Brother away and find a doctor outside the mountains.”
—“Tonight is the night! I’m not scared at all. I have a gun. I can protect Little Brother!”
Jiang Ye flipped further back.
The pages were blank. There was no more diary after that.
Jin Feize walked to his side. “Find anything?”
“A pair of brothers lived in this room. Mold disease swept through the village. The younger brother died, and the older brother took his corpse and escaped the mountain village.” Jiang Ye stroked the diary. “I don’t know whether they succeeded.”
“They failed,” Jin Feize said.
“How do you know?”
Jin Feize picked up the toy pistol from the drawer. “The gun is still here. A child running away from home wouldn’t leave behind the most important thing he owned.”
“Maybe he had more than one gun.”
After Jiang Ye said that, he fell silent too.
In the drawings, each brother had a pistol. Now both pistols were sitting in the drawer, covered in spiderwebs. Perhaps they really had failed.
He guessed that they might have had more than one gun only because he did not want to believe two boys had died in these lonely mountains.
They went up to the fourth floor. There was a locked room there. Jin Feize broke the lock, and the two of them went inside to look.
The room was piled with miscellaneous things and filled with the smell of rotting wood.
They went to check another stilt house. Bai Nianci kept taking photos everywhere, so he walked slowly. Jiang Ye still had not found any trace of his mother, and agitation gradually built in his heart.
He clearly remembered that after he had been injected with the black water, he had seen his mother walk into this village.
And it had not only been his mother. There had also been many unfamiliar, fully armed men.
Where were those men?
Huo Ang kicked open the fifth stilt house and shouted, “Found something!”
Jiang Ye rushed over and saw six backpacks placed against the wall inside the building.
Huo Ang was opening one to inspect it. Inside were compressed biscuits, a water bottle, blankets, and some unwashed dirty underwear. Dust had settled on the backpacks. They looked as if they had been here for some time.
“Why would they abandon their backpacks?” Yilale guessed. “Did they run into the kind of monster we saw in the forest? They couldn’t beat it, so they chose to run, and threw away their bags to reduce the load?”
“No.” Huo Ang shook his head. “These backpacks are arranged very neatly. They don’t look like they were dumped to lighten the load during an escape.”
“The dry rations were only eaten for two days. From Mojiang Village to here, that’s about two days’ travel.” Jiang Ye’s expression was grave. “As soon as they entered Taisui Village, they abandoned their bags here, took nothing with them, and went somewhere else.”
“There’s no first-aid kit in the bags.” Yilale’s expression darkened too. “If these bags were abandoned here, there’s an eighty percent chance it’s because their owners are already dead.”
Bai Nianci called to them. “Come look. Are these bullet marks?”
Everyone walked over.
He pointed at a plank wall. There were several small black pits on it.
“They are bullet marks,” Yilale said. “Our guess was right. Jiang Ye’s mother’s group probably encountered something.”
“No, no.” Huo Ang shook his head and took out a magnifying glass to examine them closely. “These bullet marks aren’t recent. They’re at least several years old. Look, there are signs of wood decay over the marks, and the degree of decay is about the same as the surrounding area. That only happens after some time has passed since the bullet marks formed.”
After finding this bullet mark, they found other old bullet marks in many other places. Some stilt houses even bore traces of shotgun damage.
Judging by the distribution of the bullet marks, a brutal battle must have taken place here.
But they did not find a single corpse.
The longer they stayed, the stranger this place felt.
Jiang Ye followed Huo Ang and Yilale as they searched inside and outside for a long while, but they did not find half a footprint.
The roads all around were mud. If anyone had passed through here, they should have left at least some trace.
And yet whether it was Jiang Ruochu or Shen Duo, those people seemed to have vanished into thin air, leaving not the slightest clue behind.
Huo Ang reminded everyone, “Everyone had better move together and stay within one another’s sight.”
He had barely finished speaking when Jin Feize went up to the third floor by himself.
Huo Ang: “…”
Yilale patted Jiang Ye, pointed upstairs, then spread his hands with a very helpless expression.
Jiang Ye immediately understood that Jin Feize, that bastard, had gone off alone again. He had always done whatever he wanted, however he pleased. Jiang Ye was speechless too.
Jiang Ye went upstairs and said, “Don’t leave everyone’s line of sight. Yilale and Huo Ang are nice people, so they won’t say it. You need to have some self-awareness.”
“Moving as a group is so troublesome,” Jin Feize said with a smile. “Why don’t we act on our own?”
Jiang Ye refused outright. “No.”
“But I don’t want to listen to them.” Jin Feize looked resentful. “Why should I follow the orders of a bunch of idiots?”
Jiang Ye: “…”
He instinctively glanced toward the staircase. Thankfully, the others had not come up yet and could not hear this guy’s vicious words.
He knew this guy’s true nature. On the surface, Jin Feize looked gentle, refined, and polite. In reality, he was mentally ill and malicious to the core.
Jiang Ye took a deep breath and asked, “What will make you cooperate?”
Jin Feize smiled tenderly. “You know how to make me behave.”
He stopped there, but Jiang Ye instantly understood what filthy thoughts he was hiding in his head.
Jiang Ye’s eyes turned cold in an instant, as if frost had spread through them. He said coldly, “I’m telling you to obey instructions for your own safety. Since you’re determined to court death, I won’t stop you.”
After saying that, he turned to inspect this floor, then suddenly froze.
This place seemed to be an altar. In the middle stood a life-size headless wooden puppet.
The wooden puppet was tied to a wooden pillar in a posture of punishment. Its body was carved all over with complicated patterns, along with some extremely ancient-looking writing.
Bai Nianci climbed up and saw the altar. His expression became extremely excited.
“It seems this is the sacrifice your mother mentioned in her paper. Look at these symbols. This is writing used by the ancient Yi people.”
Yilale came up too. The moment he saw the wooden puppet, his face turned pale.
Huo Ang cursed, “Fuck, it’s this evil thing again. Yilale and I ran into one before in Myanmar. Professor Bai, stop fucking taking pictures. This thing is evil.”
“Tell me about it,” Bai Nianci said, very curious.
“Back then, Yilale and I went into the Savage Mountains in northern Myanmar. To avoid leeches and ants, we happened to run into a small wooden house and spent the night there. There was this same kind of wooden puppet inside. People like us who walk around with our heads tied to our belts don’t have many taboos, so we took it down and burned it as firewood.
“Who knew that when we got up the next morning, the wooden puppet had turned into a real person, hanging bloody from the pillar. Fuck, it scared the shit out of us. I burned the house down on the spot, corpse and all.”
Huo Ang’s account differed slightly from what Yilale had said.
Jiang Ye frowned and looked at Yilale. Yilale’s face was pale, and his amber eyes stared at the headless wooden puppet with an extremely complicated expression.
Jin Feize stood by the window, shading his eyes with one hand as he gazed into the distance. Suddenly, he spoke.
“Isn’t that the scarecrow we saw earlier?”
Jiang Ye looked in the direction he was pointing.
In the stilt house not far away, behind the window, there was the human-shaped silhouette of a scarecrow.
Jiang Ye nodded. “It’s that one.”
“How strange.” Jin Feize blinked. “I clearly remember it was on the third floor earlier. How did it get to the second floor?”
Jiang Ye paused. “Was it on the third floor earlier?”
Bai Nianci came over holding the camera and also saw the scarecrow not far away. “Little Jin must have remembered wrong.”
Jin Feize shrugged and said indifferently, “Maybe I remembered wrong.”
Everyone crowded beside the window board and stared across the distance at that scarecrow.
Huo Ang patted Jin Feize on the shoulder and said, “All right. These stilt houses all look the same. There isn’t much difference between the second and third floor either. The drone was in flight, and judging height through the screen can be off. I remember it was on the second floor to begin with. Don’t scare yourself.”
He had just finished speaking when everyone saw the scarecrow slowly leave the window and disappear into the darkness of the stilt house.
Everyone fell silent.
Jin Feize blinked again. “Ah. Did I see wrong again? It looked like it just moved.”