Chapter 1

My boyfriend came back from the mountains a different man.

He had been a respected police officer, known from television. Now he had quit his job and drifted through his days, listless and dispirited, as though his spirit had gone out of him. Apart from eating and sleeping, he did nothing but play games in internet cafés, no different from a street layabout.

When I asked why, he only said he no longer wanted to be a policeman. He would never tell me the real reason.

Unable to learn the truth from anyone around him, I decided to go to the mountains myself.

1

It happened in 2008.

That summer, during the Beijing Olympics, I went to the mountains to volunteer as a teacher.

Before describing my time there, I should explain the circumstances.

At police college, I had a boyfriend named Xia Cheng. We both studied criminal investigation. He was two years ahead of me.

We studied and trained together, wandered the campus, and talked about life and our ideals.

College romance was sweet, but brief. Xia Cheng graduated first and became a local criminal investigator.

He was outstanding. Top of his class at college, he soon distinguished himself on the force, helping solve murders, kidnappings, and other cases.

He had even appeared on television as a representative of the city's young police officers. People sometimes recognized him in the street.

“Isn't that Officer Xia from TV?”

His future was bright. He seemed unstoppable.

In the summer of 2008, I entered my third year at college. Xia Cheng had been working for a year.

Everything had been going well. Then, just as his career reached its height, it stopped.

He suddenly resigned.

When I asked why, he said only that he did not want to do it anymore. He refused to explain.

I asked his colleague Wu Hui. Perhaps something had disturbed him during an investigation, he said, but he did not know the details. When I pressed, he said the case was ongoing and he could not disclose anything.

I asked Xia Cheng's mother too. She knew nothing. She only cried.

It was not just his job. His mental state had changed.

His mother said he slept until noon and spent his days listless, as though possessed. He refused to go to hospital. She went from doctor to doctor and brought medicine home, but he would not take it.

He seemed to have become someone else, drifting from day to day, eating, sleeping, and playing games in internet cafés.

I wanted a serious conversation, but could never catch him. After class, I searched the cafés every day.

The fifth time I found him, he asked to break up.

I demanded to know what had happened. He did not turn. He merely waved me away and kept tapping the keyboard. The game's brilliant colors lit his face without dispelling its gloom.

The bright young man I knew was gone.

The senior student I had admired, the spirited policeman on television, the boyfriend who had loved me so deeply—all seemed to have “died.”

I stood numb. In the end, his mother led me out.

She bought me a meal. We talked, two women sharing their grief, and cried together.

Afterward, she took off her gold necklace and earrings and offered them to me.

Her son was “ruined,” she said. She could not bear to waste my future. Only then did I realize it was a farewell meal.

I could still get out in time, she said. She could not.

I refused the jewelry. But we broke up anyway, at his insistence.

Later, through his mother's connections, Xia Cheng took a clerical job at her workplace and muddled through.

A promising young officer did not simply fall apart without a reason. Something was hidden here.

Around July 5, I remembered, he had said he was going to investigate a case in a mountain county called Yanyun. He had still been normal then.

One week there, and everything changed.

There had to be something wrong with that county.

What had he experienced?

I had to find out.

That was why I decided to teach in Yanyun.

2

Yanyun was poor and isolated, deep in the mountains.

It was so small I could barely find it online. Though Wu Hui would not tell me how to get there, I found someone who could.

To conceal my identity as a police student, I posed as an ordinary university student and applied to volunteer.

The principal, a man named Liu, was deeply grateful.

The night before leaving, I looked through my missed calls and unanswered messages. All were from Xia Cheng.

I tried calling him again.

This time, he answered.

“Are you all right?”

Silence. Only weary breathing came down the line.

“Why can't you tell me?”

Still nothing.

After a long time, he suddenly said, “Don't cut the spider's thread…”

His voice was hoarse and weak.

Before I could ask more, he hung up.

At the same moment, a message arrived from Wu Hui.

“Break up with him. Stop investigating.”

But all I wanted then was the truth.

Looking back, going to Yanyun was the worst decision I ever made.

3

On the morning of August 6, 2008, I packed my bags and boarded a bus for a neighboring city.

It was the most exuberant of summers. Beijing Olympics banners hung everywhere. On the bus, people noisily discussed the opening ceremony, two days away.

We had planned to go to Beijing together that month to watch the Games. We had even bought matching shirts.

But plans could not keep pace with change.

To get from the city into the countryside, I changed vehicles three times, then took a minibus into the mountains. Turn by turn, the world I knew fell away.

Yanyun lay hidden deep in forested mountains. Only one road connected it to the outside. Narrow and two lanes wide, it wound for almost two hundred kilometers, like a modern version of the old Tea Horse Road.

Mountains rose everywhere, green forests meeting blue sky and white clouds. In daylight, it was beautiful.

After five hours on mountain roads, we arrived in darkness. The beauty had another face.

Endless black ridges rose and fell like enormous beasts lying all around us. Thick mist blurred everything into a sinister gloom.

The town was deserted, with only a few scattered lights. Mist covered the road.

The bus stopped beside a battered sign. The passengers dispersed and quickly vanished into the fog, leaving the street empty again.

Someone called, “Miss Lu.”

A figure emerged from the mist: Liu Qi, principal of Yanyun Primary School.

He greeted me warmly, thanking me again and again, taking my luggage and asking after me as he led the way to school by flashlight.

At school, I sat briefly in his office. He poured me water and explained the situation.

Conditions in Yanyun were poor. Young teachers had come before, but all left within six months. The school now had only three teachers, all local. Everyone performed several roles. He was principal, Chinese teacher, and PE teacher.

I nodded, distracted.

My thoughts were full of Xia Cheng, the Yanyun case, and his words about a spider's thread.

But I had only just arrived. I could not ask too abruptly. For now, I was simply a volunteer teacher.

The principal gave me the class list, agreed on a teaching plan, and took me to my room.

Exhausted from the journey, I locked the door, unpacked, washed quickly, and went to bed.

Even in summer, mountain nights were cold. I curled beneath the quilt and soon fell asleep.

…