Seeing Ghosts with My Left Eye, Delighting in Chaos Within

For years, clouds and mist have shrouded Fengqi Sleeping Mountain, home to an ancient prophecy: "When the mountain god opens its eyes, the mountain awakens; when the mountain god falls asleep, the world is at peace." Chen Yanliu, a researcher of ancient texts, enters this forbidden place with a yellowed chronicle of the mountain on her back, searching for her missing grandfather.

Along a winding mountain trail, she discovers rocks oozing a cinnabar-like liquid on moonlit nights, and repeated Morse code hidden in the sound of a stream. Even stranger, time flows erratically in the mountain. After a brief nap in a bamboo grove, three days have passed below; yet after spending the whole night in a cave carved with star charts, she emerges to find it is still dusk.

Among the pages of her grandfather's diary is half of a bronze mask, its patterns matching the reliefs on the altar at the mountain's summit exactly. When Chen Yanliu fits the mask into a groove in the altar, the entire mountain suddenly resonates. The moss-covered boulders slowly turn, revealing the entrance to an underground cavern.

Deep in the cavern, the sleeping mountain god lies with a body of ice crystals. Red light, like veins, pulses in its palm in response to the severity of disasters in the outside world. The final page of her grandfather's notes reads: "Sleeping Mountain is no mountain. It is the eyelid of the earth." And now, between the cracks in that crystalline eyelid, the first thread of blood is seeping out.