Notes on Finding Corpses

The Chengdu zombies, the Lop Nur undead, and the Rakshasas of the Daba Mountains, all the strange tales that later went viral on Tianya Forum, were just lurid stories to pass the time. Nobody bothered to investigate where the rumors began, and nobody knew that back in the late 1980s, a directive stamped TOP SECRET had already sent a team straight into the heart of them all.

That year, I had just graduated from the biology department of a university in the south when an order transferred me from my old post. I joined the team as we ventured into a frozen ravine in the Daba Mountains. Officially, we were a geological research expedition. But when I retrieved the first tissue sample from beneath the ice, its vitality disturbingly intact, I understood that the “walking corpses” we were searching for were far more than a simple biological mutation.

Those legends dismissed as ghost stories were merely the tip of an enormous secret. And we were the ones sent to break through the ice.