With the support of her roommate Fen, Yu-ching returned to the women’s dormitory. The hallway lights were dim and yellow, and Fen kept comforting her the entire way, but Yu-ching’s mind was filled with the image of her brother’s cold corpse. Fen helped her take a hot shower and coaxed her into drinking a cup of warm milk. Only after Yu-ching finally fell asleep from sheer exhaustion and terror did Fen close the door, her face full of worry.
Meanwhile, Old Li from the Nantou Police Department was driving back to Nantou late at night. The windshield wipers swept back and forth at regular intervals, but his usually steady hands were trembling slightly. He kept glancing at the rearview mirror, unable to shake the feeling that pairs of eyes were staring fixedly at the back of his car through the thick fog.
At the same time, one in the morning, in the Physics Department building at National Taiwan University.
Chen Po-han still hadn’t gone home. He paced to the large whiteboard in his research office, picked up a black dry-erase marker, and rapidly drew several clear logic maps and chains of hypotheses.
“From the perspectives of the material world and biology, any phenomenon in which a person ‘dies after leaving a specific area’ generally has only two possible scientific explanations.” Chen Po-han’s voice was steady and calm as he tried to force the seemingly absurd mysterious deaths before him into the rational framework he knew best.
“First: ‘chronic toxins and controlled reversal.’” He wrote the words “biological toxins” on the whiteboard. “Wuyin Village is located in a remote mountainous region. It’s entirely possible that some locally endemic plant or fungus exists there, or that the groundwater is contaminated. The villagers may have inhaled or consumed it since childhood, causing a chronic organic toxin to accumulate in their bodies. Some food or herbal tea regularly provided in the village—even the incense burned in the ancestral hall—could actually be an ‘antagonist,’ or antidote. Once a young person leaves the village for more than a certain amount of time, the toxin receptors in their body reach a critical threshold, triggering acute organ failure or loss of consciousness, which then leads to ‘accidents’ such as drowning or car crashes.”
He paused, then drew a red line on the whiteboard pointing toward “organized crime.”
“Second: ‘highly coordinated clan-style assassinations and deliberate disposal of bodies.’” Chen Po-han pressed the tip of the marker hard against the board. “That so-called grand elder and the village core are, in essence, a closed interest group. They use believers or informants to monitor people’s movements across Taiwan. Once a violator who has turned twenty-five tries to sever ties with the village, covert ‘enforcers’ abduct them, inject them with neurotoxins to induce drowning, then transport the bodies to distant ports or rivers and dump them there, creating the supernatural illusion that ‘leaving the village means death’ and using it to maintain endless psychological terror over everyone else in the village.”
He capped the marker with a crisp click and turned toward the people around the room, whose expressions were complicated and grim.
“Either way, this is a thoroughly human crime, not some vague divine punishment.” Chen Po-han’s eyes were cold, the edge in his voice uncompromising. “If it’s a material phenomenon, it will leave behind chemical residues and physical traces. I’ll bring a spectrometer and sampling equipment and personally dissect that village’s water, soil, and air—as well as those old men playing at ghosts and gods—until there’s nothing left to hide.”
Although he had logically derived two seemingly flawless scientific hypotheses, for some reason, a place deep in his heart continued to ache faintly. He recalled the atheism his parents had drilled into him from childhood. Whenever he asked where their old home was, his parents would always turn ashen and tell him, “There are no gods in this world, and there is no hometown. Our roots are in Taipei.”
Yet that same afternoon, while Chen Po-han was working through his hypotheses in his research office, danger had already begun quietly seeping into Lin Yu-ching’s everyday life on campus.
With no classes that afternoon, Lin Yu-ching was walking alone down the old hallway of the College of Liberal Arts, on her way to return a book to the library. The autumn wind swept through the corridor, stirring waves of fallen leaves.
As she turned the corner, she noticed a tall, thin man standing beside the window at the end of the hallway. He wore a gray janitor’s uniform, a face mask, and a baseball cap. In his hand was a large mop, and he was wiping the window glass.
At first, Lin Yu-ching didn’t think much of it. But as she drew closer, the janitor suddenly stopped moving and slowly turned his head.
The moment she saw the eyes exposed above the mask, the blood in Lin Yu-ching’s entire body froze—that was someone from the village! Although he had changed into a city janitor’s uniform, she could never mistake that gaze, that deathly coldness steeped for years in mountain mist. It was A-Hai, a villager who had just turned twenty-three this year and should have been helping with farmwork back home.
Lin Yu-ching turned in terror, trying to run, but a hoarse, icy voice came from behind her.
“Yu-ching, what’s the rush?”
At some point, A-Hai had silently moved to the side of her escape route. He leaned the mop against the wall, removed his mask, and pulled his mouth into a stiff, textbook imitation of a smile that sent chills down her spine.
“The village chief heard you’ve been getting too uppity while studying in Taipei, hanging around with cops and professors and who knows who else. He specifically sent me up here to take a look at you.” A-Hai stepped closer, lowering his voice. His tone carried undisguised menace. “The grand elder told me to give you a message: The outside world is dangerous. Students should act like students. If you can’t keep your mouth shut about things you shouldn’t say or keep digging into things you shouldn’t investigate…”
He paused, the corners of his eyes narrowing.
“You wouldn’t want to see your brother’s body floating on the water in the newspaper a second time, would you?”
There were no other students nearby. Only distant, indistinct commotion drifted through the air. Lin Yu-ching’s legs went weak, and she pressed her back hard against the cold wall. Fear tightened around her like an invisible net.
Under the catalyst of sheer terror, her mind instantly connected this to the hypothesis Professor Chen Po-han had developed in his office the night before: “highly coordinated clan-style assassinations and deliberate disposal of bodies.”
Wasn’t this seemingly ordinary school janitor one of the “village enforcers” Professor Chen had described—the people responsible for monitoring everyone across Taiwan, carrying out abductions and assassinations? Had her brother encountered someone like this back then? Had these seemingly harmless but utterly bloodless villagers watched him from the shadows like prey, then ultimately shoved him into an icy river?
“You… you bunch of lunatics…” Lin Yu-ching’s voice trembled as tears spilled from her eyes. “You killed my brother, and now you’re here to kill me too?”
A-Hai let out a cold laugh, put his mask back on, picked up the mop, and turned to leave. He left behind only one icy warning.
“Stay away from those outsiders. If the village hears even a whisper about something again, it won’t end with a verbal warning.”
Watching A-Hai’s back gradually disappear at the end of the corridor, Lin Yu-ching clung to the wall as her stomach churned. She finally understood that the world was far darker than she had imagined. The claws of Wuyin Village had never let her go. They had already reached into Taipei, into this seemingly safe campus.
Act Two: Precise and Ruthless Preparations
Late that night, Lin Yu-ching stumbled to Chen Po-han’s office with Fen beside her and knocked on the door.
When she described encountering A-Hai, a village informant, at school that day—and being threatened by him—the atmosphere in the office instantly plunged to freezing point.
After Old Li learned the news over the phone, he slammed his fist against his desk on the other end of the line. “Those bastards! They actually dared to threaten our witness in person, right on the National Taiwan University campus! That’s a criminal offense!”
Zhang Wei and A-Xiang were furious as well. “Professor, this is insane! They’re acting like they’re above the law, treating Taipei like their own backyard!”
Chen Po-han stood before the whiteboard. After hearing Lin Yu-ching’s tearful account, the chill in his eyes reached its peak. He had initially thought this was merely a hidden clan-based execution of justice, but the other side’s brazen arrogance far exceeded his expectations. This wasn’t just defense. It was an outright provocation.
“Lin, you did the right thing by coming to me immediately.” Chen Po-han turned around, his voice low and firm. “This proves two things. First, my deduction was completely correct: Wuyin Village has indeed established a tightly controlled surveillance network across Taiwan. Second, they’ve begun to panic, because you’ve broken their silence.”
He glanced at Zhang Wei and A-Xiang, who stood ready at a moment’s notice, then at Old Li on the other end of the phone. At last, he made his final decision.
“The original plan is canceled. We’re not waiting for them to come to us.” Chen Po-han tore the marker from the whiteboard and drew a heavy circle around the words “Nantou Wuyin Village.” “We’re heading south first.”
At two in the morning, the atmosphere in the research office was completely different from during the day. Chen Po-han’s movements were as precise as when he operated nanocrystals in the laboratory.
He opened the locked metal cabinet in his office. Inside was the equipment he usually used for high-precision field surveys: a waterproof, shock-resistant portable spectrometer; an air-quality detector; a trace-drug extraction kit; and several wireless infrared surveillance cameras fitted with long-life batteries.
“Professor, we’re going too.”
The voice came from the doorway. Zhang Wei and A-Xiang stood there. Their faces showed intense exhaustion, but their eyes were unusually resolute.
Chen Po-han stopped what he was doing and gave them a cold look. “This isn’t a field trip, and it’s not some adventure game. Every possibility I analyzed just now involves an extremely high risk of death. If you go, you’ll only increase the burden on me to rescue you.”
“Professor, we’re not going for fun.” Zhang Wei walked in and placed the notebook Lin Yu-ching had brought out of the village on the desk. “There are still plenty of details in those relocation records we found in the archives that we didn’t understand. A-Xiang has a foundation in electronic engineering, so we can help set up the surveillance equipment. And Yu-ching is isolated and helpless in the village. Someone has to be able to stay in contact with her.”
A-Xiang straightened and said seriously, “Professor, you said you wanted to expose this human-made hoax. But if this really is a tightly organized criminal group, how could you possibly handle it alone? We know the details of this legend better than you do. We can help you avoid the villagers’ informants.”
Chen Po-han pondered for a long time. Looking at the passion and sincerity in the eyes of the two young men, he felt a faint stir of an emotion he hadn’t experienced in years. He knew perfectly well that he wasn’t compromising out of concern for his students. It was because, in this lonely battle of reason, he needed reliable assistance.
Over the next three days, Chen Po-han did not immediately set out for Nantou. As the head of a top-tier laboratory, he knew that “a blind investigation is suicide.” Until he had fully figured out the cards held by the opposing side, he had to make exhaustive preparations for collecting physical evidence.
During those three days, the Physics Department office became a small underground operations center.
Zhang Wei and A-Xiang used their free time to scour Taipei’s major libraries and land administration offices, digging up every gazetteer of the Nantou mountains from the Japanese colonial period through the early postwar years, Forestry Bureau reforestation records, and even microfilm archives of mountain maps from that era.
“Professor, look at this!” That evening, A-Xiang excitedly spread several color scans photographed from old land administration archives across Chen Po-han’s desk. “We compared aerial photographs from twenty years ago and forty years ago. The roads around Wuyin Village didn’t exist at all forty years ago. They were privately excavated ‘private logging roads’ built later. The strangest thing is that this road is marked on national maps as a ‘Forestry Research Institute restricted area.’ Ordinary civilian vehicles can’t legally enter at all!”
Wearing white cotton gloves, Chen Po-han examined the image data carefully through a magnifying glass and analyzed it calmly. “A private logging road means they have absolute control over passage. If we drive in and a truck or roadblock stops us halfway, we won’t even have a chance to turn around.”
Zhang Wei added from the side, “And we can’t get in touch with Old Li anymore.”
Chen Po-han’s fingers stopped tapping on the desk for a moment. “You can’t reach him?”
“Right.” Zhang Wei’s brows drew together. “Since yesterday afternoon, we’ve been trying to call Detective Old Li at the Nantou County Police Department. His colleagues said he took ‘personal leave,’ but his phone has been powered off the entire time. I’m worried he went to investigate alone and may have already tipped them off.”
The air in the office instantly froze. Chen Po-han’s gaze sharpened to a knife’s edge. He realized that time was on their opponents’ side. If something had really happened to Old Li, their advantage in the open would vanish completely.