There are two types of mountaineers in Changbai Mountain.
One is driving up the mountain, digging for ginseng and looking for treasure.
The other is to drive the mountains, to drive away the "things" in the mountains.
My family belongs to the second type, the whip bearers who have been guarding the Five Immortals Temple for three hundred years.
When I was seven years old, my father went into the mountains and disappeared, leaving behind half a frozen pear and a mountain whip wrapped with thirteen red ropes. Before he died, he left a message: The descendants of the Lin family will not be allowed to enter the back mountains until they die.
Nineteen years later, five traveling friends went missing in the mountains. On the day policewoman Su Qingyan came to find them, people began to die in the village.
The old lady lying in the snow, her body frozen for three days, clutched in her hand the old military badge my father wore nineteen years ago.
I didn't want to care.
Until I saw the series of footprints at the entrance of the Five Immortals Temple - there were only shoe prints on the snow, no depressions of footprints, as if someone was floating past.
They were exactly the same as the footprints on the doorstep of my father's house on the day he disappeared.
What is it that my ancestors sealed under the temple three hundred years ago?
Who has my father sharpened his knife for these nineteen years in the mountains every day?
The three do's and don'ts passed down from our ancestors: don't touch the red coffin, don't save people who turn around, and don't accept things from the immortal family. Why is it that every time I break one of them, I get closer to the cause of my father's death?
The day I went into the mountains with the mountain whip, Old Man Zhou stood at the entrance of the village and smoked three bags of cigarettes, and finally said only one sentence:
"Don't look back.
As soon as you turn around, it follows you. "
That night I realized that the snow in Changbai Mountain is never white.
It's red.
