Old Tales from the Mountains

Ten years ago, I was twenty years old, 185 centimeters tall, and a fitter at Jiyuan Steelworks. On weekends, I went hiking along the Taihang backcountry trails with a group of people, climbing undeveloped wild mountains, cooking meat in an iron pot, and rappelling down cliffs.

That day, we camped at the bottom of a valley. Ancient patterns on the cliff face lit up. When we woke the next morning, fog blanketed the mountains and every compass had stopped working. The place where we stood was no longer the place we had come from.

Following a thousand-year-old road, we came to a crossroads where a broken stone tablet stood. Three words were carved on it: Taihang Boundary Forbidden.

A village, a well, a village headman. His first question to us was: "Did you come down from the sky, or up from underground?"