Old people say that Changbai Mountain has eyes.
They are not satellites flying in the sky, but eyes buried in the soil, growing on trees, and floating on water. Before entering the mountain, ginseng pickers have to worship the mountain and shout "Mountain God, open your eyes" to worship these eyes. The owners of the eyes are called mountain patrollers - they are in charge of everything in the mountain, from ginseng dolls to thousand-year-old yellow skins, from cannibalistic old ginseng spirits to cultivating foxes.
Mountain rangers are becoming extinct.
The last generation of mountain rangers abided by the rules of Changbai Mountain and waited to die. Their only descendant is an eighteen-year-old high school student named Lin Yuan. He was kidnapped into the mountains by his grandfather just after the college entrance examination.
Lin Yuan did not believe in mountain gods or evil spirits. He believed in the provincial first prize in the physics competition and the admission notice from Tsinghua and Peking University.
Three days later, he saw with his own eyes a corpse that had been dead for thirty years, standing in front of him and speaking.
