“An overseas infrastructure job paying 500,000 a year.” Twenty-eight-year-old Yang Wei thought he’d found a shortcut in life. But after his plane landed, he was drugged. When he woke, he was stranded in Kalu Village, a remote settlement in West Africa. There were no roads or power lines, only cassava too tough to chew, muddy river water that gave you diarrhea, and the annual “vanishing curse”: outsiders mysteriously disappeared around the full-moon ritual, and the villagers only dared whisper, “The spirit of the earth took them.”
The white mist in the rainforest swallowed every sense of direction. Strange sound waves in the dead of night brought splitting headaches, and the black stones at the villagers’ waists glowed in the dark. The action camera Yang Wei had hidden in his jacket lining became his only hope. Through its lens, he captured the dark-red bloodstains on the ritual pottery, tire tracks outside a cave, and the secret code for “ore” that Old Chen carved before he vanished.
