Period: I Quit the Factory for the Murderous Mountains, Making Paper Effigies to Command the World

In the winter of 1979, Lu Zhen, an educated youth without a job, was pressured by his biased mother, Lin Sufen, into signing a severance-of-family-ties agreement and giving up the factory job his father had left him at the steel mill. He gave up city life and volunteered to become a forest ranger in Heixiazigou, in the Greater Khingan Mountains. The tattered paper-effigy manual and yellow wooden box left behind by his grandfather allow him to craft paper children, paper armor gods, and paper soldiers using merit. But he must earn that merit by suppressing evil spirits, protecting the mountains, and saving people, and the paper figures can be destroyed by extremely yang fire. Lu Zhen uses paper effigies to break through a ghostly maze, hunts a flying dragon, and gains freedom from want for the first time, but he also rouses the mountain's fox immortal and the seal hidden within. In the city, Lu Yao is badly injured after taking over a machine tool tainted with baleful energy. Lin Sufen brings people into the mountains to demand game, and the conflict between mother and son gradually exposes the source of the machine tool's baleful energy, old family debts, and a disaster stirring to life in the mountains. Lu Zhen had hoped to avoid everyone, but in the end he must choose between living alone in the deep mountains and taking responsibility for the lives of all who dwell there.