Act One: Unintentional Whispers in a Corner of Campus
On an afternoon in mid-October, sunlight like scattered flecks of gold spilled beneath the banyan trees on the National Taiwan University campus.
Lin Yu-ching sat on an outdoor stone bench with two female classmates from her department, cradling a heavy original-language textbook as she ate a sandwich. Students passed by in noisy groups of two and three, filling the surroundings with the bright, carefree energy of youth.
“Yu-ching, you’re seriously not coming shopping with us in Ximending this weekend? I heard the new photo booth is insanely popular!” her roommate Fen asked around a mouthful of fries.
Lin Yu-ching forced a faint smile and shook her head. “No, I… have some assignments to finish this weekend. And there’s something going on at the dorm, too.”
“Oh, come on. You’re always like this! You’re holed up in the dorm or the library all day. Someone who didn’t know better would think you were studying for the civil service exam.” Her other classmate, Ling, teased her with a laugh. “But seriously, every time there’s a long weekend or winter or summer break, you always have to go back to the old home village, right? Where exactly is your hometown? Every time we ask, you get all mysterious.”
Lin Yu-ching’s smile stiffened slightly, and her fingers tightened involuntarily around her sandwich.
“My old home village is… in a small village in the mountains of Nantou. It’s hard to get there, and the signal is terrible.” Lin Yu-ching lowered her voice, her gaze drifting helplessly toward the deep blue sky in the distance. It was only a little over two hundred kilometers from Taipei—a distance other people could travel back and forth whenever they wanted. To her, it felt like an invisible cliff.
“I’m kind of jealous that you can all stay in the city and build a life…” Lin Yu-ching’s voice was so soft it was almost a mutter. “At least in a major city, you can decide your own future.”
Noticing her low spirits, Fen pressed curiously, “Geez, isn’t it just going home to visit your family? Why are you making it sound like some life-or-death farewell? Are your parents worried someone will kidnap you? Come on, tell us. Does your village have some kind of strict curfew?”
“I… really, it’s nothing.” Lin Yu-ching tried to brush it off.
“Oh, please! Every time you talk about this, you make that weird face. If you don’t come clean today, don’t even think you’re getting out of this!” Ling and several other classmates crowded around her, laughing and half-teasing as they pressed her for answers.
Under her friends’ half-joking questions and coaxing, Lin Yu-ching’s defenses finally collapsed completely. She lifted her head, her eyes faintly red, her voice trembling with fear she could no longer suppress.
“Do you… really want to know? In our village… everyone there will die on the day of their 25th birthday if they haven’t returned to the village.”
For half a second, it was as if the air itself froze.
Fen stared blankly, then burst out laughing. “Huh? You die if you’re not back in the village for your 25th birthday? Yu-ching, are you filming a soap opera or writing a horror novel? What century is this? You’re still doing that old feudal-superstition bit?”
“It’s true! The elders in the village say it’s…” Lin Yu-ching hurried to explain, only to realize she had no way to use science to prove the nightmare she had heard about since childhood.
Ling shook her head with a laugh. “Okay, okay, if it’s really that powerful, then just stay in Taipei for the rest of your life and never go back. Let’s see what it can do to you. What, is someone going to cross half of Taiwan to come get you?”
Lin Yu-ching looked at her classmates’ unconcerned, even amused faces, and a deep sense of helplessness welled up inside her. She knew no one would believe her. Those who had grown up beneath the blazing sun and had never seen the eerie, ever-burning lamps of a mountain village at night would never understand the suffocating feeling of an invisible rope tightening around their neck.
Act Two: An Urban Legend in the Club
At the same time, in the activity room of the popular Urban Legends and Folklore Research Club, afternoon sunlight streamed through the blinds, casting stripes of alternating light and shadow across the floor. Several students sat around a long table scattered with old books and newspapers, sorting through materials.
Zhang Wei, a third-year senior, carefully polished his camera lens with a lens cloth while casually bringing up the various campus ghost stories circulating lately. Across from him, A-Xiang, a second-year student, suddenly raised his head as if he had remembered some long-buried piece of gossip. With a mysterious smile, he said, “Speaking of that, Senior, my girlfriend says one of her classmates is from a village in Nantou. She told her that if people don’t go back by the time they turn twenty-five, they’ll die. Last week, I heard some older students in the department gossiping that a few years ago, there was also a female senior who suddenly took a leave of absence and went back to her old home in southern Taiwan. She never came back to school after that… Apparently, the rumors got pretty creepy at the time. It was something called ‘Mistveil Village.’ They said people there weren’t allowed to leave once they turned twenty-five, or they’d suffer a bloody disaster.”
Zhang Wei raised an eyebrow and put the cleaned lens back on the camera. He snorted. “Give me a break. College students get stressed out over midterms and start imagining things. They can tie anything to a curse. If something like that really existed, Professor Chen would be the first to use quantum mechanics to shock those rumor spreaders into questioning their entire lives. Besides, ‘Mistveil Village’? I’ve never heard of any place like that on a map of Taiwan. It’s probably some generic trash plot they found online—or something a bored person made up.”
They were still laughing when A-Xiang suddenly glanced at the calendar on his phone and slapped his forehead. “Crap! We’re going to be late for Professor Chen’s Applied Physics class this afternoon. We’re already retaking it! He’s the strictest about attendance. Come on!”
Act Three: Confrontation and Detonation in the Lecture Hall
Two in the afternoon. Inside the Physics Department lecture hall.
The old air conditioner rumbled dully, and the air was thick with the smells of chalk dust and caffeine. This was the famous university-wide course Professor Chen Po-han was teaching: “Rational Criticism and Scientific Thinking.”
Chen Po-han was around thirty-five. He wore his hair in a neat crew cut and had on a dark gray shirt washed pale with age, its sleeves folded precisely twice. He wasn’t looking at his notes. One hand was in his pocket while the other held a laser pointer, its red dot drawing a sharp line across the blackboard behind him.
In his usual cold, cutting tone, he was stripping various urban legends bare. Bursts of laughter erupted from the students below from time to time.
A-Xiang and Zhang Wei had just slipped into the lecture hall, panting for breath. They bent over and found an empty seat.
At that moment, Chen Po-han happened to be discussing “group psychological suggestion and urban legends fabricated out of thin air.” He surveyed the room, his gaze sweeping across every row like a blade, and said with a cold laugh:
“…A lot of people like to dress up ignorance as mystery, inventing places or curses that don’t even exist to scare themselves. Take that ‘Mistveil Village’ rumor going around online lately. People talk about it as though it were some genuine, mysterious place. In fact, I checked. It doesn’t exist in any household-registration or geographic database in all of Taiwan. It’s nothing more than people seeing threats in shadows—a collective hysterical disorder.”
At the words “Mistveil Village,” Lin Yu-ching, seated toward the middle-back of the room, jolted violently. Her face turned paper-white, and the pen in her hand nearly fell to the floor.
Up front, A-Xiang exchanged a look with Zhang Wei and whispered with a laugh, “See? I told you. Professor’s completely dismissive of this kind of legend. He even shot down the village’s name outright.”
But the male student sitting beside A-Xiang, who happened to overhear them, suddenly turned to look toward the back, then glanced at Chen Po-han on the lectern. Whether he wanted to show off or simply thought it would be funny, he raised his hand and shouted,
“Professor! You can’t blame us for imagining things! The village really exists! Lin Yu-ching, the student sitting in the back row, is from Mistveil Village! She was just telling us that the people there… die if they don’t go back by the time they’re twenty-five!”
With a boom, the quiet lecture hall erupted. Hundreds of eyes swung toward Lin Yu-ching in unison, and whispers and suppressed laughter surged toward her like a wave.
Lin Yu-ching felt countless strange, curious, mocking gazes stabbing into her. Shame, fear, and the despair of betrayal swept over her in an instant. Unable to say a single word, she hugged her backpack tightly, shot to her feet, and ran sobbing from the lecture hall under everyone’s stare. The wooden chair legs scraped across the floor with an earsplitting screech.
On the lectern, Chen Po-han’s brows drew tightly together. As he watched the farce unfold, there wasn’t a trace of sympathy in his eyes—only icy disgust at the spread of such absurd superstition across campus.
Act Four: Comfort in the Hallway and an Investigation by Her Classmates
In the shadowed hallway outside the lecture hall, the sunlight was shut out by the thick stone walls. Lin Yu-ching leaned weakly against the concrete wall, her shoulders shaking violently as her tears spilled over and the last of her inner defenses collapsed.
“Yu-ching, are you okay?”
Two figures approached, blocking the harsh sunlight ahead. It was Zhang Wei and A-Xiang from the Urban Legends and Folklore Research Club. They held freshly purchased hot cocoa and offered it to the trembling Lin Yu-ching.
Lin Yu-ching looked up in alarm, her vision blurred by tears. She sobbed as she wiped at her eyes. “Seniors… did you come out here to laugh at me too?”
Zhang Wei shook his head, his expression turning more serious. He pressed the hot cocoa into her hands. “We don’t think it’s funny. Honestly, A-Xiang once organized some old cases in the club’s database involving campus disappearances and students taking leaves of absence. A few of them… apparently had household registrations in the Nantou mountains, and their situations sounded a little like what you described.”
A-Xiang nodded in agreement. “Yeah! We thought it was strange when we heard Professor directly deny the village existed. Taiwan has plenty of abandoned mountain villages, but administrative boundaries and household-registration records don’t just vanish into thin air. We think… there may really be something going on behind this that no one knows about. Don’t be afraid. If you really need help, we’re willing to investigate this with you and find out what’s really happening.”
The earnest looks in the two seniors’ eyes warmed the loneliness and helplessness in Lin Yu-ching’s heart for a moment. But what surged up with it was an even deeper fear. “It’s no use… It isn’t an ordinary secret. It’s… something that kills people.”
Outside the research office after classes.
The setting sun stained the long hallway blood-red. Chen Po-han was looking down as he organized his lecture notes, preparing to turn back toward the research office, when he saw three people standing in the hallway: Zhang Wei and A-Xiang, who had stirred up trouble in class that afternoon, and Lin Yu-ching beside them, looking uneasy with red-rimmed, swollen eyes.
“Professor Chen.” Zhang Wei took a deep breath and stepped forward, his voice carrying the stubborn defiance unique to college students. “There’s something we’d like to talk to you about.”
Chen Po-han stopped and gave the three of them a cold once-over. His voice held not a trace of warmth. “If this is about that absurd farce this afternoon, I’m not interested. College students who should be studying physics spend all day gathered together playing with feudal superstition, and this is your research?”
“Professor, we’re not here to fool around.” Summoning his courage, A-Xiang held out his phone. On the screen was a scan of a fragmentary old newspaper and a blurry aerial photograph of a mountain village. “We found these old reports from more than a decade ago in the library’s underground archives. There really was once a settlement in the Nantou mountains registered under the name ‘Mistveil Village,’ but its household registrations were canceled twenty years ago because of ‘geological disasters and a complete village relocation.’ But… every one of the people listed on the relocation rosters has a blank record afterward!”
Lin Yu-ching listened from the side, her face as white as paper. She gripped the hem of her clothes tightly and couldn’t say a word.
Chen Po-han didn’t even look at the phone. He simply regarded them with a cold, condescending stare.
“Canceled household registrations and blank relocation records were commonplace in Taiwan’s early mountain-area administration. That’s administrative negligence and leftover problems in the household-registration system, not some mysterious curse.” Chen Po-han’s voice was an ice-forged blade, devoid of emotion. “Lin, I don’t care what childhood trauma or hysterical delusions you’re carrying around, but if you bring this illogical nonsense into my class and encourage other students to neglect their studies, you can forget about taking the credits for my physics course next semester.”
With that, Chen Po-han gave them no time to say another word. He turned, pushed open the research-office door, and slammed it shut with a bang, sealing all the commotion and fear outside.
Inside, Chen Po-han returned to his desk and pulled open a drawer, his brows tightly furrowed. Beneath a stack of rigorous physics journals lay a yellowed old notebook—the only keepsake his adoptive father had left him. Tucked inside was a hand-drawn map of the Nantou mountains, one that even he had never truly been able to understand.
Outside the door, Lin Yu-ching stared at the closed research-office door and shut her eyes in despair, letting the sound of fate’s countdown grow louder and louder inside her heart.