Before the Mountain Wakes Up

There were twenty minutes left in the monthly exam, and Zhou Jianchuan's water glass rolled towards the window. At first no one took it seriously. It wasn't until the TV tower slowly moved away from the window frame and the last bus stopped at the increasingly distant platform under the clouds that they discovered: it was not a certain car leaving the city, but the entire mountain at the foot of the school. The road ended outside the school gate, the signal disappeared, and the directions on the map began to lose meaning. That night, a black phone that had been disconnected suddenly rang in an abandoned weather station. The person on the other end of the phone called himself Xuan Heng and seemed to know everything that happened on campus. In order to return home, they set out along the road behind the mountains and met people who delivered messages between the mountains, a market that only opened when the two mountains collided with each other, and an old school that had been closed for eighty-three years. And in the duty records of the old school, Zhou Jianchuan saw the same name—— Xuanheng.