The morning mist had yet to clear, and the air in Wuyin Village was as cold and sharp as a thin blade. Lin Yu-ching had barely slept in the side room the night before. Then, at dawn, a dull bronze gong rang out over the village, followed by the hurried, rhythmic clacking of wooden clogs outside. Several expressionless women coldly pushed open the door and motioned for her to follow.
By the time she reached the ancestral hall plaza in the center of the village, young men and women of all ages were gradually converging from every alley. Among the crowd, several people around her age stood in small groups, whispering to one another. The air was thick with a restless tension caught somewhere between defiance and fear.
"Why drag everyone out here first thing in the morning? It's not like we're being led to the execution grounds. What the hell is the village chief trying to pull?" A young man named A-Biao, his hair dyed bright yellow and apparently just recently returned from outside the village, kicked a pebble at his feet and complained under his breath.
A girl with a ponytail tugged at his sleeve, looking uneasy. "Keep your voice down! I heard the elders say an outsider broke the rules yesterday, and the people above are furious. Besides, the village chief gives a talk about the mountain god around this time every year. Just listen. It's not going to kill you."
"Oh, spare me." Another boy, broad-shouldered and muscular, snorted and folded his arms. His voice was full of contempt. "The mountain god, ancestral vows—what century are we living in? If my parents hadn't insisted I stay in the village these few days, I'd already be back in Taichung running the mountain roads with my friends. Why are there so many ghost stories and superstitious rules? As far as I can tell, the old men in the village just want to keep us here as cheap labor!"
"Hey, don't tempt fate..." someone nearby urged in a low voice. "Are there really that few cases of people turning twenty-five and 'accidentally' falling into the river, or dying of some strange illness? My older cousin wanted to sneak off to work in another county two years ago, but he got into a car accident on the way there—on his birthday, of all days. Creepy as hell. We can't afford not to believe."
As soon as he said that, the murmurs around them fell silent for several seconds. The invisible pressure weighing on the air grew heavier.
Lin Yu-ching silently followed along the edge of the crowd, listening to the half-believing whispers of her peers as they tried to bolster one another's courage while trembling with fear. Her emotions were a tangled mess. These young people were like frogs raised in slowly warming water. Some tried to struggle. Others chose blind obedience. But whether they believed or not, that invisible shackle remained tightly cinched around every person's throat.
Just as the crowd was whispering among themselves, the wooden door high above the ancestral hall creaked open. The village chief slowly emerged, carrying a wooden dragon-headed staff. The commotion in the plaza instantly died down. Everyone was forced to lower their heads and face the morning indoctrination, a ritual steeped in lies and brainwashing.
The village chief was an old man nearing seventy, his back slightly hunched. He slowly climbed the steps, holding a dragon-headed wooden staff that smoldered with incense smoke. His voice was not loud, yet it reverberated across the empty plaza with an unsettling resonance.
"Children, I've gathered you here today to remind you: what is it that has allowed Wuyin Village to remain untouched by the storms of the outside world for more than a century?" The village chief's gaze swept over one youthful face after another before pausing briefly on Lin Yu-ching. Then he looked away. "A hundred years ago, a plague swept through every surrounding county and city, leaving corpses strewn everywhere. It was the great mountain god who delivered an oracle and brought that calamity to an end. But the gods demand a price. In exchange for food, clothing, and peace away from the world for the entire village, our ancestors swore an oath: every person of our bloodline must return to the village before reaching adulthood, and devote the rest of their life to this place in service to the gods."
His words were impassioned, but the young people below showed no reaction whatsoever. They simply lowered their heads in perfect unison and replied with one voice, "We give thanks to the mountain god. We will protect our homeland with our lives."
Lin Yu-ching stood at the back of the line, a powerful wave of nausea rising inside her. This wasn't gratitude for divine grace. It was a meticulously engineered operation of human trafficking and brainwashing. She looked at the young neighbors around her. They were clearly only eighteen or nineteen, yet there was no anticipation of the future left in their eyes—only a dead, stagnant calm.
"Young people, don't be afraid." The village chief gave Lin Yu-ching a meaningful look and raised his voice. "As long as you obediently return to this great family, this will be your safest harbor. You will never be troubled by the contamination of the outside world."
Lin Yu-ching lowered her head and clutched the notebook in her pocket so tightly that her fingertips turned white. This was no harbor. It was a living altar, carefully dressed up to look like one.
Act Two: A Rotten Clue in the Archives
Fifty kilometers from Wuyin Village, in the archives of the Taichung City Police Department, a tedious search was beginning to uncover an astonishing coincidence.
Senior detective Old Li chewed on a rice ball that had already gone cold while sorting and filing a mountain of old unsolved-case records. He had been responsible for household registration and missing-person statistics in this mountainous region for more than twenty years.
"Strange... Why have the numbers of unidentified-body cases stayed so steady over the past few decades?" Old Li muttered as he spread out several different autopsy reports.
They concerned several bodies recovered in recent years from the mouth of the Tamsui River, Keelung Port, and the edges of mountainous areas in central and southern Taiwan. Because the decomposition was so advanced, the time of death could not be determined precisely, and even the sex of the victims was difficult to confirm. Yet under the "Estimated Physical Characteristics" section of every report, the forensic pathologists had written the same words: "The deceased was approximately twenty-five years old. Unknown vegetation and mineral components remained in the body. Cause of death determined to be drowning and asphyxiation, but the characteristics of water accumulation in the lungs are severely inconsistent with the geographic environment."
Old Li furrowed his brow and used a red pen to circle the reports together.
"They're all twenty-five. How can that be a coincidence?"
He casually opened even older files, attempting to compare the missing-person records with these unidentified bodies. However, when he tried to access the victims' household-registration data from before their deaths, red warnings repeatedly flashed across the screen: "Insufficient permissions" or "Data deleted."
"This isn't administrative negligence. Someone deliberately erased these people's traces." Old Li's heart jolted. His years of investigative instinct told him that an enormous and terrifying network lay behind the deaths of these young people.
Old Li frowned, reached for a cigarette, and discovered that the pack was empty. Irritated, he threw the empty pack into the trash and turned toward the criminal-investigation office.
"Old Chen, come here for a second." Old Li patted the shoulder of the senior detective at the neighboring desk and pointed to the unidentified-body data in the file. "The number of twenty-five-year-old bodies pulled from the mountain areas and ports over the past few years has been unnaturally consistent. I asked the household-registration division. Every one of those people's identities was marked 'No such person found,' or their files were destroyed along with the records of the village relocations. I asked a few village officials I know about it. Want to know what they said?"
Old Chen stopped typing and leaned over to take a look. He gave a cold laugh. "What else would they say? Probably the usual crap about 'divine punishment' and 'the mountain god is angry.' There are plenty of cases like this in remote mountain villages around here. When you strip it down, it's either the villagers collectively covering up the truth or some local gang carrying out extrajudicial punishment. You want to investigate? No one's going to dare say a word."
"Exactly. I asked several old officers who took part in the Wuyin Village relocation project back then. The moment I mentioned the place, they all acted like someone had cut out their tongues. They either pretended not to hear me or started talking about how it was 'not to be spoken of' and would 'bring bad luck.'" Old Li said bitterly, "It's treating the law like a goddamn decoration!"
Old Chen thought for a while, then lowered his voice. "Old Li, you're just too damn serious. Ordinary logic doesn't work with strange cold cases like this. If you ask me, instead of banging your head against a brick wall, go to National Taiwan University and find Professor Chen Po-han. I hear he's got sharp insights into materials science and forensic evidence analysis. And that guy is famous for being impossible to sway—he loves taking this kind of supernatural nonsense apart with scientific data. If he looks over these reports, maybe forensic science can point you toward something useful."
"Professor Chen Po-han at National Taiwan University?" Old Li murmured, weighing the name.
"That's the one. The hardheaded professor who publicly mocked even the university president for trying to organize some kind of group New Year's ceremony. Get him to help, and maybe he can dig this case out of the mud."
Old Li stared at the line questioning the cause of death in the report, then looked over the list of files marked "No such person found." He nodded heavily. He had already made up his mind.
Under the office's stark white lights, Chen Po-han was bent over a pile of academic papers, marking errors in experimental data with a red pen. When someone knocked, he did not look up.
"Come in."
Zhang Wei and A-Xiang pushed open the door. Their expressions were completely different from the carefree, rowdy attitude they had shown in class. Instead, they looked somewhat awkward.
"Professor, sorry to bother you." Zhang Wei clutched a file folder tightly in his hand. "We... have some academic questions we'd like to ask you about. Regarding the folklore and social-behavior statistics you mentioned in class."
Chen Po-han set down his red pen and removed his glasses, his calm gaze settling on the two of them. He saw through their intentions at a glance. They had not even brought notebooks, so clearly they had not come for academic reasons.
He did not call them out. Instead, he turned his swivel chair around, folded his hands, and gave them an unexpectedly patient opening. "This is about that student named Lin Yu-ching, and that so-called 'Wuyin Village,' isn't it?"
A-Xiang froze for a moment, then lowered his head awkwardly. "We know you think this is ridiculous, but... we just hope you can give us some scientific advice, at least enough to prove that this isn't the work of ghosts or monsters, but the result of some other human behavior. We really don't want to see Lin Yu-ching completely break down because of this anxiety."
Chen Po-han looked at the nearly stubborn concern in the two young men's eyes. Somewhere deep inside, a part of him numbed by overwork seemed to be gently stirred. He hated superstition, but he hated the way ignorance and fear could completely destroy a person just as much.
"Put it down." Chen Po-han stood and walked to the water dispenser to pour two glasses of water. His tone had softened considerably. "The name Wuyin Village not appearing in the geographic records doesn't mean it doesn't exist in reality. You want to use statistics to disprove it? Good. You want to let the evidence speak? Even better."
He set the glasses near the edge of the desk and turned to the two of them. "Take everything you have—scanned newspaper clippings, fragments of land records, and that so-called death data for twenty-five-year-olds—and organize it all into a spreadsheet. Send it to my email. If you want to find a direction from a scientific angle, then stop running around blindly like headless flies."
Zhang Wei and A-Xiang looked up in surprise, never expecting that kind of response.
"But let me make one thing clear." Chen Po-han put his glasses back on, and his eyes grew unusually deep. "I'm helping you because I won't allow 'logical fallacies' to run rampant among my students. If it turns out this data points to nothing more than ordinary campus bullying or a psychological scam, you'll go straight back to your textbooks. Understood?"
The two students hurriedly nodded like bobbleheads. As Chen Po-han watched them leave, a trace of worry flickered through his eyes—worry even he failed to notice. He turned toward the pitch-black night sky outside the window and murmured, "Twenty-five... What an interesting threshold."