Prologue

  "Hiss, hiss, hiss!"

  This was the sound of boots trudging through the mud, and every time Zhou Ping had to exert great effort to pull his feet out of the mud. The red soil, soaked by several days of rain, seemed to have countless invisible hands pulling at his legs. Soon, Zhou Ping's legs felt as if they were filled with lead, both sore and heavy.

  "Pffft!"

  "Damn it!" Zhou Ping finally managed to pull his right leg out of a mud pit, with thick mud oozing into the opening of his hiking boots. The skin on his right foot immediately felt a cold and sticky sensation. Zhou Ping's eyes widened as he looked around for a dry spot to clean his boots, but unfortunately, everything around him was muddy, without even a large stone in sight.

  "These bastards, ran so fast, and suddenly disappeared!" Zhou Ping cursed in frustration. As a "bricklayer" (civil engineer), he had finally managed to take time off during the National Day holiday to go on an outdoor trip with two friends. On the way, they found a beautiful patch of wild lilies, and as a photography enthusiast, he stopped to take some great shots with his SLR camera. However, when he finished taking pictures, he realized that his companions were nowhere to be seen. He had to take a shortcut and chase after them, but didn't expect the continuous rain over the past few days to turn the shortcut into a muddy road. His companions were still nowhere to be found, leaving him alone struggling in the mud.

  "My phone has no signal!" Zhou Ping took out his mobile phone, only to see that the signal indicator on the screen was zero. He dejectedly put the phone back into his bag: "When I get back, I'll throw this piece of junk away and buy a new one, for sure!"

  At this time, Zhou Ping suddenly heard a burst of voices. He immediately ran in the direction of the voices at the fastest speed, completely disregarding the splashing mud and water all over his body. As he ran, he shouted loudly: "Wang Cheng, Li Zhiguo, you two bastards, where did you run off to? Don't think about not inviting me for a Beijing-Fujian self-service meal! Just wait till I get back, I'll teach you two a lesson!"

  However, Zhou Ping only heard the faint sound of people's voices coming from afar, but never saw the shadow of his companions. The fog around him grew thicker and thicker, so that even in broad daylight, he could only see a dozen or so meters away. He stopped in his tracks, turned on his flashlight, and through the fog, he could vaguely make out a rectangular object about two to three meters high and one meter wide not far away. Zhou Ping stretched out his hand to feel his way forward while cautiously moving forward, he didn't want to step into another mud pit again.

  Suddenly, Zhou Ping suddenly felt a slight numbness on his fingertips, as if he had touched an invisible thin membrane with static electricity. He hesitated for a moment, then gritted his teeth and took a big step forward.

  "No——!" Along with a shrill cry, an unusual wave of fluctuations appeared in the air. The fog began to rotate violently around the location where Zhou Ping was standing, like flowing water. After several minutes, when the fog dispersed, there was no one left on the muddy ground, only two rows of footprints proved that someone had been here before.

  It was unknown how much time had passed when Zhou Ping woke up from his coma. He struggled to lift his head and looked around at the environment. What entered his eyes was a dense thicket of shrubs. With great effort, he crawled up from the ground and began to search for the path he had taken to get there, but what surprised him was that within his line of sight, there wasn't a single sign of human presence. He muttered to himself in a low voice, looked at the compass on his watch, and started walking north - that direction was where the starting point of this outdoor trip was located.

  After more than half an hour of trekking, Zhou Ping finally found a small path, although it was just a trail trampled by human feet, without even stone slabs. This still made him very happy, after all, with a road came people, and it led to residential areas - whether villages or cities, where he could take a good bath. He had already decided that when he met the two companions who had abandoned him, he would extort them severely, upgrading the self-service meal standard to Victoria Hotel - the highest-end buffet in his city.

  But when Zhou Ping walked to the end of the small road, the scene in front of him left him stunned. The dilapidated earth houses, farmers wearing straw hats and working hard with simple tools in the fields, and a few children chasing and playing on the ridge, if these could still be explained as being on the set of some film or TV show, there was one thing that couldn't be mistaken - Zhou Ping took out his phone, and in despair saw that both the network signal and communication signal were zero. In 2013, when the "Village-to-Village Connection" project had already been completed, a residential area this size wouldn't possibly not have a China Telecom base station.

  "Oh heavens, where on earth have I ended up?!" Zhou Ping knelt down in despair, looking up at the sky and wailing.