The story begins in November 2018.
That year, winter came earlier and colder than usual.
I was preparing to cross the Qinling Mountains with my university professor, Li Gangdan, for a research project.
At first, I thought it would be just another ordinary hiking expedition.
But what happened later went far beyond anything I could have imagined.
Even now, I still can’t tell—
was it me who stumbled into a strange world,
or had that world been waiting for me all along?