Act Three: Equipment and the Secrets of the Hidden Chamber
“Cancel the plan for two weeks from now. We’re moving up the schedule. We leave tomorrow night.” Chen Po-han made the decision without hesitation and turned toward the metal storage locker.
He began inspecting, one by one, the scientific instruments needed for the operation: 1. Portable ion chromatograph and water-quality testing pens: To determine whether the village water source contained neurotoxins or unknown alkaloids. 2. High-frequency electromagnetic spectrum analyzer: To detect whether jammers were interfering with communications around the village. 3. Miniature infrared thermal-imaging tracker and night-vision goggles: To deal with possible covert surveillance and nighttime searches. 4. Medical-grade antidote injection pens and a first-aid kit: For immediate emergency treatment in case of the “biotoxin poisoning” he had hypothesized.
Zhang Wei and A-Xiang helped pack nearby. Watching the precision instruments pile up across half the table, A-Xiang couldn’t help swallowing nervously. “Professor, this isn’t fieldwork. This is practically a counterterrorism mission for special forces…”
Chen Po-han fastened the last latch on a waterproof case. The metal clasp snapped shut with a crisp click. He lifted his head, his gaze calm and resolute. “When you’re dealing with a closed clan that can make dozens of young people collectively ‘accidentally drown’ and remain standing for decades, no amount of excessive caution is excessive. Pack your personal belongings. We leave on time tomorrow evening.”
Act Two: Beneath the Nantou Mountains on a Rainy Night
The next night, at eleven, the black SUV belonging to National Taiwan University’s Physics Department had already slipped silently off the highway and entered Nantou County.
A light rain pattered outside. Under the headlights, the trees lining the mountain road clawed wildly at the darkness like countless twisted souls. A heavy pressure filled the vehicle. In the back seat, Zhang Wei and A-Xiang stared through the windows at the pitch-black mountain haze, an indescribable chill rising in both their hearts at the same time.
According to the original plan, they first had to meet Detective Old Li at an old gas station at the foot of the mountain. With police resources and Old Li’s understanding of the local situation, it would be their final stop before entering Wuyin Village.
At exactly midnight, the SUV slowly pulled into the provincial-road gas station at the foot of the mountain, its sign flickering erratically.
An aging black Mitsubishi police car sat on the empty concrete lot. Its roof beacon was off, and the entire vehicle lay silently concealed in the shadows, its windows covered in condensation.
Chen Po-han parked beside the police car and killed the engine.
“Professor, Old Li’s car is over there.” Zhang Wei pointed ahead.
“Yeah. Stay alert.” Chen Po-han pushed open the door, and rain immediately soaked his shoulder. He strode to the police car and knocked on the driver’s-side window.
No one answered from inside.
Chen Po-han frowned slightly and knocked harder. “Old Li?”
Just then, the passenger-side window lowered a narrow crack. A strong smell of tobacco mixed with a faint scent of blood drifted out of the car.
Old Li’s face looked unnaturally pale beneath the dim interior light. His eyes were sunken and webbed with broken blood vessels, his expression a complicated mixture of extreme exhaustion and terror.
“Chen… Professor Chen, why did you really come?” Old Li’s voice was as hoarse as two sheets of sandpaper rubbing together, and it trembled violently.
Act Three: Hints from Above and a Warning to Retreat
Chen Po-han opened the door and sat directly in the passenger seat. In a low voice, he asked, “Old Li, you’ve been out of contact all day, and your phone was turned off. We came to meet you as agreed. What happened? And what’s with the smell of blood?”
Old Li gave a bitter laugh and slowly switched on the small light inside the car. His already worn jacket was spattered with dried mud and broad patches of dark-red blood. A simple bandage appeared to be wrapped around his left arm.
“I’m fine… Just a flesh wound.” Old Li waved a hand, deep helplessness and fear showing in his eyes. “Professor Chen, I’m telling you… turn around and go back to Taipei right now. This situation is bigger and deeper than we imagined.”
Zhang Wei and A-Xiang leaned forward from the back seat when they heard that. “Uncle Old Li, what do you mean? We’ve already found out that someone from that village threatened Yu-ching on a campus in Taipei. Are you saying we should just stand by and do nothing?”
Old Li slammed a fist against the steering wheel and snarled, his emotions slipping out of control. “You think I don’t want to do something? This afternoon, I received a direct phone order from an official at the city police bureau!”
The car fell into a brief, deathly silence. The only sound was rain hissing against the roof.
“The official implied over the phone that I was to stop all investigations into Wuyin Village and those several cases involving unidentified corpses of twenty-five-year-olds found floating in the water. He said those files had been designated ‘permanently sealed administrative documents of the highest classification.’ Any rank-and-file officer who got involved privately would, at best, be ordered suspended, and at worst, prosecuted for leaking state secrets!” Old Li clutched his head and painfully tore at his hair. “I’ve been a cop for more than twenty years, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like it—the people above aren’t protecting the law. They’re wiping the asses of that bunch of murderers!”
Chen Po-han quietly watched Old Li’s emotional collapse. The coldness in his eyes did not diminish; it grew even sharper.
“Doesn’t intervention from the higher-ups prove that we’ve touched the core of this?” Chen Po-han’s voice was terrifyingly calm, as if backed by an irresistible force. “Old Li, you know better than anyone who those dead people were. Do you think this is merely an ordinary administrative seal, or has this clan long maintained an intricately connected protective umbrella across both politics and business?”
Old Li jerked his head up and stared at Chen Po-han in shock. “Professor, have you lost your mind? That’s the system! How are we supposed to fight the system?”
“I don’t need to fight the system. I only fight the ‘truth.’” Chen Po-han’s voice was icy. “I’ve brought a spectrum analyzer, chromatograph, and electromagnetic detector in my car. Before dawn tomorrow, I’m going into that village myself. Old Li, if you’re afraid, you can stay here or return to the station. But now that I’ve come, there’s no way I’m going back empty-handed.”
Old Li looked at the nearly stubborn rationality and fervor in Chen Po-han’s eyes. He opened his mouth, then finally let out a long sigh, as if shedding every last defense.
“Fine… Anyway, this old life of mine was something I salvaged from the mountains more than a decade ago.” Old Li pulled a crumpled hand-drawn map from his pocket and slapped it into Chen Po-han’s hand. “This afternoon, I risked suspension to steal this from the safe at the very bottom of the archives room: the ‘Distribution Map of Wuyin Village’s Old Air-Raid Shelters and Tunnels.’ The regular entrance is definitely being guarded by people from the village now. If you insist on going in… take this route.”
Act Four: Moving Under Cover of Night and Watching from the Shadows
At two in the morning, the two vehicles left the gas station one after the other. Following Old Li’s old map, they slowly advanced toward the forbidden zone swallowed by dense fog deep in the Nantou mountains.
The rain gradually stopped, but the mountain fog grew so thick it seemed impossible to disperse. Visibility dropped to less than five meters.
Chen Po-han parked beside a concealed forest road and turned off the lights. A-Xiang and Zhang Wei carefully unloaded the portable equipment from the rear compartment.
“According to the map, once we cross this dense forest and pass the abandoned old boundary marker, we’ll be within Wuyin Village’s territory.” Chen Po-han lowered his voice, put on his night-vision goggles, and turned to the three people behind him. “Remember, collecting physical evidence comes first. Don’t confront the villagers directly. If you run into danger… retreat immediately.”
The four of them set out along the wet, muddy mountain trail, guided by faint starlight and the green glow of their night-vision devices.
Yet none of them noticed—
About five hundred meters from where they had left the vehicles, at a bend in the road, a black unmarked van with its headlights off sat silently beneath the trees. Inside, a pair of cold eyes stared through a telescope, fixed on the backs of Chen Po-han and the others as they disappeared into the forest.
The darkness before dawn was like ink too thick to dissolve, swallowing the Nantou mountains whole.
Chen Po-han, Zhang Wei, and A-Xiang wore waterproof, abrasion-resistant work clothes and carried heavy equipment on their backs. They trudged through slick, rotting leaf litter, each step sinking at a different depth. The air reeked of humus and was choked with impenetrable white fog. Visibility was less than three meters.
At the front, Chen Po-han held a high-intensity tactical flashlight in one hand and gripped the yellowed hand-drawn map Old Li had shoved into his hands before they left with the other. The map marked in red an “old air-raid shelter tunnel” leading to the rear mountains of Wuyin Village, supposedly allowing them to avoid every visible and hidden lookout at the village entrance.
“Professor, is this route… really right?” A-Xiang followed behind, panting as he wiped the fog from his glasses. The surroundings were unnaturally quiet. Aside from their own footsteps and the rustling of leaves in the wind, there wasn’t even the chirp of an insect or bird.
“Old Li got this map from an internal archive retrieved from the police station’s safe. The coordinates are logically sound.” Chen Po-han spoke in a low voice without looking back. The spectrum analyzer and electromagnetic detector in his hands, however, kept emitting faint beeps.
But as they went deeper into the valley, disturbing changes began to appear in the surrounding environment.
What should have been a steep cliff on the left gradually became an old stone wall built by human hands and covered in moss. The wall was severely weathered, with cracks filled by dark-green ferns.
“Stop.” Chen Po-han suddenly raised a hand and made a signal.
Zhang Wei and A-Xiang immediately stopped. Zhang Wei lowered his voice. “Professor, what is it?”
Chen Po-han said nothing. Instead, he adjusted the beam of his flashlight upward and aimed it a short distance ahead. The trail, which should have continued onward, had been completely blocked by a massive landslide. Huge rocks and rotting mud had piled up like a mountain, sealing the way forward. In the center of the debris, a stone stele stood half-buried in the dirt.
Chen Po-han strode over and brushed the mud off the stele with his gloved hand. When the flashlight illuminated the writing, his pupils contracted slightly.
Several powerful, mottled characters were carved into the stone:
—Turn back, and you may yet find shore. The living shall come no nearer.
“This… this isn’t the tunnel entrance marked on the map!” A-Xiang came over for a look, his face turning deathly pale. “Did we take a wrong turn? This is an entirely different abandoned forbidden zone!”
Zhang Wei pulled out his phone and compared it against the map, cold sweat beading on his forehead. “That’s not right, Professor. We definitely haven’t deviated from the coordinates on the map by a single step, but the direction of this trail… doesn’t match the terrain at all!”
Act Two: Lost, as Rationality Slowly Slips Out of Control
“Let me see.” Chen Po-han snatched the map away and studied it carefully in the flashlight’s beam.
Only now did he, a top scientist, keenly discover the map’s most fatal blind spot. This so-called “old air-raid shelter tunnel map” contained an extremely strange form of “human distortion” between its drawn scale and modern geographic coordinates. The angles between certain mountain peaks and the directions of the rivers looked reasonable, but had actually been altered by human hands.
This wasn’t a map that could lead them into the village at all. It was a “maze map” designed to lure outsiders into a desperate place deep in the mountains!
“We’ve been played.” Chen Po-han crushed the map into a ball, a flash of icy anger passing through his eyes. “The map Old Li gave us was wrong from the beginning. Or rather… Old Li himself was misled by certain people back then.”
“Then… what do we do now? Go back the way we came?” A-Xiang looked around. In the fog, the black tree shadows resembled countless twisted faces staring coldly at them, and the fear in his heart began to swell beyond his control.
“We go back the way we came!” Chen Po-han decided instantly. “The magnetic field in this mountain area has already begun interfering with our compasses. If we can’t get out before dawn, the loss of body heat will become extremely dangerous.”
But when they turned around to retreat along their original path, the muddy trail behind them, which had been clearly visible moments earlier, had somehow been swallowed completely by a layer of dense white fog too thick to disperse. Their footprints, broken branches, and even the markers they had just left behind had all vanished without a trace.
A deathly silence descended around them.