When the mountain mist swallowed the last woodcutter's trail, the uncanny beings hidden in its folds opened their eyes.
With the vast mountain ranges as its canvas, this work paints a collection of strange tales from the deep mountains, steeped in wildness and taboo: beneath the gnarled roots of ancient trees lies a blood pact born of a feud between tree spirits; in a cave on a sheer cliff, a snake demon is imprisoned after failing in its cultivation; through the deep woods on moonlit nights wanders a headless general with disheveled hair; and in an old shrine in an abandoned village, a clay idol of a mountain god, half man and half beast, is worshiped... These were once warnings hunters hardly dared to speak aloud, tales that herb gatherers left unfinished beside their campfires, and a broken ax wrapped in red cord, lost by a woodcutter in a deep ravine. Moving between fragments of county gazetteers and oral tales from the countryside, the author weaves scattered legends from game trails, abandoned kilns, charity burial grounds, and mass graves into a dark epic of mountain folk living alongside spirits and monsters.
The uncanny events in this book twist together like the vines strangling a century-old pine, their roots sinking into the very fabric of Eastern mountain culture: beneath a fox spirit temple split by lightning lies the skeleton of a bride who died for love; the "ghost child" that weeps day and night in a cave is in fact the embodiment of the resentment of child laborers killed in a mining disaster; and the ghost soldiers that appear whenever torrential rain falls turn out to be tied to the brutal history of Ming Dynasty mountain folk resisting taxes... As cable cars cut through the clouds and GPS signals drown out the cries of wild beasts, these ancient secrets, bound to the mountain mists and miasma, are sinking inch by inch into the ravine, along with the sparks from the tobacco pipe tucked into the folds of the mountain guardian's clothes.
Mountain Tales of the Uncanny is more than a collection of strange stories. It is a bone knife that cuts open the soul of the mountains, using legend as its blade to carve out the light and darkness of humanity buried beneath the rocks, as animal nature and divinity, fear and compassion, meet in the blood-rust-scented mountain wind
