Act One: Sneaking Along the Old Hunting Trail and an Unexpectedly Smooth Passage
Exactly noon. The sun blazed overhead, but beneath the endless mountains and dense canopy of the Nantou range, the light here still seemed dim and damp.
Chen Po-han parked the black SUV beside an abandoned forest road roughly two kilometers from the outskirts of Wuyin Village. Inside the vehicle, the four of them sat tense, as if the air had solidified. Zhang Wei and A-Xiang gripped their defensive flashlights and portable detection equipment, their breathing slightly labored. Lin Yu-ching sat in the back seat, her face somewhat pale, both hands clutching the backpack on her knees.
“Yu-ching, this trail… is it the old hunting path leading to the village?” Chen Po-han turned around and looked sharply yet steadily toward the back seat.
Lin Yu-ching drew a deep breath and surveyed the narrow mountain trail ahead through the window. It was overgrown with weeds and nearly swallowed by vines. She nodded firmly. “Yeah… Once we follow this hunting path over the ridge, we can bypass the boundary marker at the main entrance and go in from the edge of the orchard behind the village.”
“Good. Stick to the original plan and stay on high alert.” Chen Po-han made the decision at once. He pushed open the car door and secured the detector and antidote injector on his person. “If anything unexpected happens, prioritize self-preservation and retreat.”
The four of them cautiously stepped onto the abandoned old hunting trail.
All along the way, Zhang Wei and A-Xiang kept a constant watch on their surroundings, mentally preparing for the worst: hidden sentries, traps, or even vicious villagers blocking their path. A-Xiang even gripped an iron rod for self-defense so tightly that his palms were slick with cold sweat.
Yet the entire hour-long journey through the wilderness was eerily, unbelievably quiet.
There were no arrows from the shadows, no mysterious electromagnetic interference, and no one jumped out to stop them. When Lin Yu-ching pushed aside the last clump of thorny wild roses, the view before them suddenly opened wide.
Act Two: The Village Gates Thrown Open and a Warm Welcome
What appeared before them was not the abandoned village they had imagined—a gloomy, terrifying place like a graveyard for the living—but a “peach blossom spring” bathed in sunlight, with cooking smoke curling gently into the sky.
Wooden houses stood in orderly clusters along the mountainside. The streets were spotlessly clean. They could even hear the distant calls of poultry and the laughter of children at play. Several village women sitting by their doorways and drying medicinal herbs saw Lin Yu-ching emerge from the back mountain trail with three strangers from out of town. Far from showing panic or hostility, they all set aside what they were doing.
“Oh my! Isn’t that Yu-ching?”
A kindly middle-aged woman carrying a bamboo basket came toward her with a beaming smile. She looked Lin Yu-ching up and down, her tone as warm as if she were welcoming a long-lost child of her own. “Child, you’ve only been away at college for a few days. How did you get so thin? Come here and let Auntie get a good look at you… And who are these people…?”
Lin Yu-ching froze in place. The defenses and explanations she had prepared caught in her throat in an instant. She stared blankly at the woman’s utterly genuine, warm, natural smile. For a moment, she could not tell whether this was a hallucination or another terrifying trap.
Just then, several of the village’s core elders—including the great elder, whose face had been grim only a few days earlier in the ancestral shrine—came slowly over, leaning on their canes.
To everyone’s surprise, the great elder’s face was creased with kindly wrinkles. He even took the initiative to greet them. “Oh my, Professor Chen—and the people from the Nantou Police Department… Oh, no, you’re students from National Taiwan University, Zhang and A-Xiang, right? You’ve had a hard trip coming all this way!”
Chen Po-han’s brows drew tightly together, and his long fingers instinctively clenched around the equipment in his pocket. He stared coldly at the great elder, his voice filled with intense suspicion and wariness. “Great Elder? How… how did you know who we are? And what exactly are you trying to pull?”
The great elder chuckled. His laughter was hearty and open, completely devoid of the sinister, terrifying pressure he had radiated deep inside the ancestral shrine a few days earlier.
“Professor Chen, you’re a highly educated man. How did you end up imagining Wuyin Village as a den of dragons and tigers, just like those rumors online?” The great elder waved a hand and spoke sincerely. “Please, come inside. I’ve already had someone brew some excellent mountain tea. Since you’re here, let’s lay every misunderstanding out in the open and clear everything up today.”
Act Three: A Lavish Lunch and the Illusion of “Having Everything You Need”
Surrounded by the warm hospitality of the village chief and several villagers, Chen Po-han and the others were led, half believing and half doubting, to the activity hall in the center of the village.
The long wooden table was already covered with an abundant spread of home-style farm dishes—steamed stream fish, home-raised poached chicken, freshly picked mountain vegetables, and even steaming wild mushroom and pork rib soup. The villagers around them cast curious yet friendly glances their way, and several young people even smiled and greeted Lin Yu-ching.
“Eat up. Don’t be shy—it’s all organic food we grew ourselves.” The village chief personally poured Chen Po-han a cup of warm tea and smiled. “Professor Chen, haven’t you always suspected that our village has some shameful secret? Look around and investigate all you want. We have everything we need here—running water and electricity, self-sufficiency, and a very comfortable life.”
Zhang Wei and A-Xiang looked at the feast spread across the table, and their stomachs betrayed them with a loud growl. But their inner vigilance kept them from picking up their chopsticks.
Chen Po-han did not touch the tea. His gaze swept across the face of every villager present like a blade before he spoke in a low voice. “Village Chief, Great Elder, since everyone is being so frank, I’ll be direct. There’s a rumor going around that your village has been cursed for a hundred years—anyone born in Wuyin Village who turns twenty-five without returning to the village will suffer a mysterious, fatal accident. How do you explain that?”
At the word “curse,” the great elder not only failed to grow angry but burst into laughter, laughing so hard he doubled over.
“A curse? Ha, ha, ha! Young people just love their supernatural novels!” The great elder shook his head, then sobered and explained earnestly, “Professor Chen, I’ll tell you the truth. The so-called curse at twenty-five, the claim that people will die if they don’t return to the village—it’s all nonsense! Decades ago, the older generation in the village made it up as a ‘well-intentioned lie’ and an old legend to stop the young people from blindly fleeing to the big cities and leaving the village increasingly desolate and backward. That’s all!”
“A well-intentioned lie?” A-Xiang repeated, his eyes wide with disbelief.
“That’s right!” the village chief chimed in. “We may have everything we need and beautiful scenery, but transportation is inconvenient. The older generation was afraid the village would decline and the ancestral line would die out, so they used these old ghost stories to frighten the children who wanted to run away, hoping they would learn while young that fallen leaves return to their roots. What mountain god would take revenge in this day and age? It’s all feudal superstition!”
The answer was so absurd that it exceeded everyone’s expectations.
Act Four: The “Perfect” Explanation for the Missing and a Chilling Confrontation
Lin Yu-ching, who had remained silent until then, could no longer stay seated. She shot to her feet, her eyes bloodshot and her voice trembling violently with emotion.
“You’re lying! What do you mean, a well-intentioned lie? Then what about my brother? My brother, Lin Yu-sheng, turned twenty-five in Taipei two years ago, on his birthday. He obviously hadn’t returned to the village, and what happened? He was pulled out of the Tamsui River, a cold, bloated corpse! Was that a lie too?!”
The atmosphere in the hall fell silent for half a second.
The great elder looked at the distraught Lin Yu-ching. There was not a trace of panic in his eyes. Instead, he showed a compassionate, helpless sorrow. He sighed softly.
“Yu-ching… We were all deeply saddened to hear about your brother. But why have you never considered why he died?”
Lin Yu-ching stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“Your brother attended a prestigious university in Taipei and experienced the colorful world outside. He had long since grown ashamed of this little mountain village. All he wanted was to sever ties with his family, change his name, and completely escape everything connected to this place.” The great elder slowly rose, his tone calm and clear. “A few years ago, several young people who didn’t want to be emotionally blackmailed by their elders or continue carrying the village’s expectations chose to change their names and leave, even deliberately sending messages pretending something had happened to them so their families would finally give up and stop looking for them.”
“As for your brother…” The great elder sighed. “He may have fallen in with the wrong crowd, or perhaps he accidentally fell into the water himself, but you people pinned it on some damned ‘curse.’ Child, you really think too cruelly of us. We’re just a group of old people hoping to keep the village alive. Why would we kill our own children?”
His words were flawless, reasonable, and convincing. If Lin Yu-ching had not personally seen the bloodstained notebook beneath the altar table in the ancestral shrine, and if Old Li had not possessed several forensic autopsy reports stating that the “mineral composition in the lungs did not match the drowning site,” Chen Po-han might almost have been persuaded by the meticulously constructed explanation.
Yet as a top experimental scientist, Chen Po-han’s ability to observe human microexpressions and physiological reactions was far sharper than most people could imagine.
As the great elder spoke at length, casually attributing the “missing” to young people independently changing their names and leaving, Chen Po-han’s gaze passed coldly over the seemingly welcoming villagers around him like a high-precision scanner.
At the far right edge of the long table sat a young villager in charge of refilling tea and water. When the great elder mentioned “those people despising the village and deliberately sending messages pretending something had happened,” the young man’s fingers stiffened abruptly around the teapot, and his Adam’s apple bobbed once. Immediately afterward, he instinctively glanced from the corner of his eye at the father beside him. There was no relief in his gaze at outsiders misunderstanding the “truth.” Instead, an expression of extreme fear, guilt, and tightly coiled panic flashed across his face.
Even subtler was a middle-aged woman sitting beside the great elder. When she heard Lin Yu-ching mention her brother Lin Yu-sheng’s corpse in the Tamsui River, the corners of her mouth deliberately pulled into a perfectly standard “compassionate smile.” But the muscles around her left eyelid and on both sides of her cheeks twitched faintly and unnaturally from extreme tension—a classic physiological reflex produced by lying while forcibly suppressing fear.
Chen Po-han missed none of these tiny flaws.
By contrast, Zhang Wei and A-Xiang had already relaxed completely after seeing the lavish spread on the table and hearing the great elder’s reasonable explanation. They not only believed it, but even happily picked up their chopsticks and dug into the stream fish and home-raised chicken. A-Xiang even lifted his teacup and said with a laugh to the villager beside him, “I knew it! What century is this? There’s no such thing as ghosts, gods, or curses anymore. We were worried sick for nothing on the way here.”
Chen Po-han sat quietly in his place, his long fingers tapping lightly against the wooden table. He looked at the villagers before him, their faces wearing perfect smiles while their eyes were as cold and lifeless as stagnant water, and an unprecedented chill rose in his heart.
They had not used force or driven them away. Instead, through a nearly perfect display of voluntary openness and “warm hospitality,” they had packaged all their bloody crimes as a “well-intentioned folk legend.”