The Person Outside

On the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, Zong Yu returned to the county town he had not visited in years.

His old friend Cheng Chuan suddenly showed up and asked him just one question:

"Do you remember that hole we found beneath the old bridge when we were kids?"

They had thought it was nothing more than a childhood memory.

But as they began to investigate, a vanished old road, an engineering record sealed away for years, a group of people gradually disappearing from the archives, and warnings not to go any further all began to point to the same place.

They discovered that some things in the county town had not been demolished.

They had simply been hidden away.

And those who disappeared from the surface might not have left this world at all.

Starting at an old bridge, Zong Yu, Cheng Chuan, Lin Lu, and Fatty followed traces buried by time, making their way ever deeper.

At first, all they wanted to know was what lay beneath the bridge.

Only later did they realize that what they truly had to face was a civilization that had long existed alongside the surface world, yet had never been acknowledged.

Some people live in places we can see.

Others have always lived in places we thought did not exist.

If one day you discovered that the place you lived was only "outside the house," would you still want to go back?

Theme: We think we possess the world, perhaps only because we have never seen its other side.