The torrential rain seemed to be washing away the entire mountain.

The mudslide warning had been blaring all night.


Lu Yao's feet were stuck in the cold mud, almost impossible to pull out.

The beams of searchlights swept anxiously through the darkness, cutting through the heavy curtain of rain, revealing the massive gash in the mountainside that looked like a ferocious scar.

The air was filled with the smell of wet soil, the juice of broken trees, and a faint hint of rust.


"Over here! Quick! Found something!"

The shouts from nearby were distorted by the wind and rain.


Lu Yao trudged over, one foot deep and one foot shallow, the powerful flashlight in his hand swinging violently with his movements.

The beam of light swept across a newly exposed fault line, where something unnaturally white gleamed in the mud.

It wasn't the reflection from rocks.

He stopped in his tracks, pinning the beam steadily on that spot.

It was a grim rib bone, still covered with black mud, like a grotesque specimen stripped of skin and flesh.

Following the arc of the rib, he saw vertebrae deeply embedded in the mud, and a twisted hand bone reaching upward.

This was not from a recent victim.

These bones had an aged yellow tint, bearing a quality saturated by the passage of time.

"Captain, here..." his voice was somewhat dry.

The geological team's Captain Wang was an experienced veteran. He crouched down and carefully scraped away the surrounding mud with his entrenching tool.

"Clink."

A crisp metallic impact sound was particularly clear amidst the rain.

Not a stone.

Several people worked together to dig deeper, and a heavily rusted sword was pried out. The blade was already mottled, only its outline still maintaining a sharp killing intent.

Then came a second, and a third.

And several bronze arrowheads whose original appearance was no longer discernible.

"This is... a Yan feather saber from the Ming Dynasty."

Captain Wang wiped the rainwater from his face, his tone mixing shock and disbelief.

"A standard military weapon, was this place a battlefield before?"

The team members discussed among themselves, the tense atmosphere of the disaster site slightly diluted by a strange sense of history.

Only Lu Yao, he stood quietly, besides the howling wind and rain, he seemed to hear something else.

Very faint.

Like hundreds or thousands of people shouting in the distance, metal clashing, and the mournful cries of war horses before death.

That sound penetrated his ears, bringing a bone-chilling coldness.

"Did you hear anything?" he couldn't help asking.

"Hear what?" the young team member beside him replied loudly, "The wind sounds like ghost wails, it's deafening."

Lu Yao didn't speak again.

Looking at the white bones gradually revealing themselves in the muddy water, along with weapons pointing in unclear directions, he felt a chill climbing up his spine from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.

The wind blew stronger.

Inside the hastily erected tent, several emergency lights cast a pale glow, while the unearthed weapons and bone samples were neatly arranged on waterproof sheets, awaiting further processing.

Lu Yao's gaze fell upon a bronze arrowhead that had been cleaned.

The arrowhead had a peculiar shape, with three-edged blood grooves exuding a fierce aura.

As if possessed, he reached out his hand.

His fingertips touched the cold, rough metal surface.

Whoosh—

A thunderous sound exploded in his mind.

The tent, team members, and emergency lights before his eyes instantly disappeared, replaced by a muddy battlefield that looked almost identical to the hillside where he was currently located.

The sky was a blood-colored dusk.

He could feel the cold rain striking his tattered leather armor. Looking down, he saw a pair of scarred hands gripping a ring-pommel saber.

These were not his hands.

"Kill!"

The deafening battle cries surged from all directions.

A long spear, accompanied by a whistling sound, rapidly expanded in his pupils.

Squelch.

Excruciating pain shot from his chest. He could clearly feel the sensation of the spear tip piercing through flesh and crushing bone.

His life force ebbed away with the warm blood.

"Ah!"

Lu Yao suddenly withdrew his hand, stumbling back two steps and bumping into the toolbox behind him.

"Lu? What's wrong?" Captain Wang looked over with concern.

Lu Yao was breathing heavily, his forehead covered in cold sweat, his heart pounding uncontrollably. He pointed at the arrowhead, his lips trembling, unable to utter a single word.

The dying soldier's desperate gaze seemed to be branded onto his retina.

The night grew deeper.

The rescue work was suspended due to the risk of a secondary landslide on the mountain.

Outside the tent, a hunched figure holding an umbrella stopped at the edge of the landslide area.

It was an old man from the village.

He took out yellow paper and incense candles from his basket, lit a bonfire, and the flames flickered in the wind and rain, alternately bright and dim.

The old man knelt in the mud, burning paper while muttering something.

Lu Yao was too far away and could only faintly hear a few words.

"...honored soldiers..."

"...rest in peace..."

"...don't be disturbed..."

Each word was like a small hammer, striking his tense nerves.

The next morning, as the rain slightly subsided, the team decided to retreat to the temporary command post in the county town first.

As the vehicle started, the driver turned on his phone's navigation.

"Strange, why is there no GPS signal?"

The driver muttered, having to drive down the mountain relying on memory alone.

The mountain road had eighteen bends, and the fog was heavy, with visibility less than ten meters.

The car drove for nearly half an hour before a familiar warning sign appeared ahead.

【Mountain landslide ahead, road closed】

The driver slammed on the brakes.

"This isn't right, how did we circle back here again?" he asked, his face filled with confusion.

Everyone looked out the windows to see the collapsed mountainside not far away, where white bones in the mud appeared particularly striking in the morning light.

They tried two more times.

Once following the road signs, and once taking a smaller road.

But each time the result was the same.

After half an hour, the SUV would, as if hitting an invisible wall, return to this pile of white bones.

The atmosphere in the car became unbearably tense, and no one spoke anymore.

They were forced to stay in the village at the foot of the mountain.

Lu Yao couldn't sleep all night, his mind filled with images of the bloody battlefield and the desperate faces of soldiers.

He imported the photos he had taken at the scene into his computer one by one, trying to find clues, placing all photos of unearthed weapons in one folder, analyzing the direction each was facing when discovered.

A shocking discovery made his hair stand on end.

All the knives, swords, and spearheads, no matter where they were excavated from, pointed in the same direction with astonishing consistency.

He drew a series of vector lines on the electronic map.

The endpoints of all lines converged at the same location—behind the village mountain, in an area the locals called the "mass grave site."

It was a place where nameless remains had been buried for hundreds of years.

Lu Yao's heart skipped a beat.

He opened the close-up photo of the skeleton and unconsciously zoomed in.

The photo was taken at night with a phone, with a lot of noise.

But when he turned the screen brightness to maximum, in the area where moonlight filtered through the gaps in the clouds, he saw something.

It wasn't noise.

Nor was it a coincidence of light and shadow.

Above the stark white bones, a blurry black figure stood silently.

It was tall, its silhouette outlined by moonlight, seeming to hold something long in its hand.

A spear.

Lu Yao suddenly stood up from his chair, a chill shooting from the base of his spine straight to the top of his head.

Holding his phone, he practically ran out of the temporary station to find Mr. Zhang, the old man who watched over the burial grounds in the village.

Mr. Zhang was sitting at his doorway, using sandpaper to smooth the wooden handle of an old hoe.

"Mr. Zhang."

Lu Yao's voice trembled slightly.

He handed over his phone.

"Please look at this. This is what we captured yesterday at the landslide site."

Mr. Zhang squinted his cloudy eyes, moving closer to the screen.

When he clearly saw the black figure standing with a spear atop the white bones, the wrinkles on his face instantly froze.

In the next second, his hoe and sandpaper fell to the ground with a "clang."

The old man's body went limp, and he fell straight to his knees before Lu Yao.

"Thud!"

He slammed his forehead hard against the stone-covered ground.

"Thud!"

"Thud!"

He said nothing, just kept kowtowing mechanically with all his might.

Soon, a streak of blood seeped out from his graying hair, flowing down along the wrinkles on his forehead.