Cha Wenbin and a few others slipped away from the inn in the chaos and returned to their hometown, with a much better attitude than before.

  The biggest difference between rural and urban areas is: cities perform miracles every day, while rural areas repeat one legend after another.

  Some legends sound absurd, such as our village often has people talking about a kind of ghost on the mountain called "Bai She Gui".

  The first time I heard this word, it was also the adults who told me. For rural children, fields, rivers and mountains are our largest playgrounds. Adults are usually busy with farm work and have little time to take care of children, so they make up some fake ghosts and monsters to scare the kids.

  "Bai She Gui" is how it was passed down to our ears in such a situation.

  It is said that on the mountain, there is a ghost wearing white clothes, which can transform into small animals and lure people to climb the mountain. Then, people will get lost in the mountain and eventually be found with only a piece of human skin wrapped around their skeleton after several days. This story, which was quite frightening at the time, did prevent us from going up the mountain to play to some extent. However, there were still fearless children who would go to challenge the limits. Because the temptation of the big mountain for us is really too great, with various wild fruits, and if we are lucky, we can even dig out one or two bird nests or find a tortoise.

  This "White Bone Demon" was only heard of in the past, but never seen. Slowly, its image began to fade in our children's minds and wasn't as frightening anymore. As time passed, the intimidation from adults also started to lose effect.

  A Fa is a middle-aged man with a slightly disabled right leg, several years older than my father. He also has a son named Long Long, who is one year older than me and can be considered a childhood playmate.

  They are all farmers and inevitably have to deal with the mountains for four seasons a year. Their home is also located at the foot of the mountain, behind which is a bamboo forest. At that time, rural areas still used earth stoves, which burned firewood.

  This fire is directly pointed, it's hard to ignite, so people use dry bamboo branches, fold them into small bunches, light them up, and put dry firewood on top, this is called igniting. So, usually, we also call these bamboo branches ignition sticks.

  Because there are large tracts of bamboo forests in western Zhejiang, matches were not usually stored. When cooking, just pick up a few from the backyard and break them off to use.

  That evening, we had finished dinner at home and were chatting in the yard. The weather had already started to enter autumn, although it was not as hot as in midsummer, but it could still make people unable to fall asleep in the first half of the night.

  It was after eight o'clock when a flashlight shone into our courtyard, and a woman's voice asked anxiously, "Has anyone seen my Ah Fa?"

  The newcomer was A Fa's wife, a woman with particularly large breasts, not very intelligent, but quite straightforward, loud voice, and a bit hasty in doing things. A Fa's leg disability had been there since childhood, this woman did not despise him, instead she gave birth to a pair of children for him.

  My mom saw it was her and stood up, preparing to give up her seat, saying: "Nothing, what's wrong?"

  That old woman panted heavily and shouted: "Oh my, I'm so anxious. Before I cooked dinner, I asked him to go find a match to light the fire. He went to the backyard, and I waited for half a day without seeing him come back. Then I went to look for him, but there was no one there. I thought he had something urgent to attend to, so I waited another half a day, still without seeing his shadow. You all know that his legs aren't convenient, I asked around outside and everyone said they hadn't seen him. A perfectly fine person just disappeared out of nowhere."

  If it were someone else who had disappeared, it wouldn't be surprising, for example if the men had sneaked out to play cards. But at mealtime, Ah Fa rarely socialized with others and was usually either working or staying at home, so his disappearance at this time did indeed make people feel a little abnormal.

  Look at that woman, she's about to cry. Mother quickly asked Father to help find her. At first, Father muttered to himself, "A grown man can still get lost, who knows what urgent matter he has somewhere."

  Our village is not big, with only about a hundred households, but it's not concentrated. It's laid out along the direction of the river, and from the head to the tail of the village, it takes about two kilometers to walk. However, every household knows each other, so if you want to ask about someone's whereabouts, it's not difficult at all.

  The situation is obviously not good, the first half of the village asked around, they all said they had never seen anyone. Because if Afa wanted to leave the village, he would have to go through this road. Since they all said they hadn't seen him, then the person must still be within the village range, so I continued to look inside.

  In the village, there was a collective forest farm where an elderly couple lived. They were mainly responsible for watching over the forest to prevent theft and logging. Generally, they would go down the mountain once a week to buy daily necessities, and their home was just inside the village. That day happened to be the day when the old couple went down the mountain to shop. They disliked the scorching sun during the daytime and were afraid of the heat, so they chose to set off at dusk, taking advantage of the remaining daylight to hurry along the mountain road.

  Halfway through the walk, I met a man who was holding a handful of dry bamboo branches in his hand, with his head down, and continued to walk up along the mountain road.

  The old man took a look and saw that it was Ah Fa. He wondered why he was still running up the mountain at this late hour, so he shouted out to him.

  Ke Na Ah Fa turned out to be quite good, not answering a single word, pretending not to know him, only taking care of himself and walking away, which made the old lady somewhat unhappy, saying: "Look at him, like a plague god!"

  This elderly couple was the last person to see Ah Fa that day. When they told Ah Ba about this, Ah Ba felt that something might have happened.

  That road has countless forks, Zhebei is a mountainous area with high altitude, many places are deep mountains and old forests that no one has ever been to. Experienced farmers will not easily go up even in normal times, let alone a lame man carrying firewood running there.

  A Fa's wife immediately burst into tears upon hearing the situation, stomping her feet wildly on the road, saying that their family's man had been led astray by a "white seductress".

  They are all fellow villagers, when something happens, as long as they shout, people who come to help can gather half of the village in five minutes.

  A group of young and middle-aged men, some holding guns, others carrying machetes, and various flashlights, miner's lamps, and torches. Some even brought dogs along. As they entered the forest at night, heaven knows if anyone would still be alive by tomorrow, not to mention the presence of ferocious beasts, and the terrain being full of steep cliffs and precipices everywhere, without any lighting, it was highly likely that one misstep could lead to a fatal fall.

  The search operation almost started immediately, along the side where the old couple was last seen, the villagers were shouting and searching all the way.

  The mountain road is rugged and what makes it even more difficult is that there are too many forks in the road. The local dogs raised in the countryside look at the yard, but after all, they are not professionally trained search and rescue dogs. A startled rabbit can make the dog excited and run around, and people can only follow the dog, with no sense of direction to speak of.

  The forest is too deep, and no one dares to go in. We can only pray that Ah Fa hasn't gone in. The roads that people can walk on were almost all searched by nightfall. We children at home could hear the shouts of "Ah Fa, Ah Fa" everywhere from the top of the mountain. With Ah Fa's leg strength, he actually couldn't walk far, because he wasn't good at walking to begin with, let alone on such a difficult mountain road.

  But as a result, until dawn broke, Ah Fa's trail was still nowhere to be found, and no valuable clues were discovered.

  The first wave of people went down the mountain to sleep with various guesses, and the second wave of villagers took over their work to continue searching. For a time, all sorts of rumors about Ah Fa flew everywhere, some said he had gone mad, others said he had gone to commit suicide, and even more said that he was taken away by the "White Ghost".

  Such repetitive searching in the mountains lasted for about three days. Three days later, the villagers also gradually gave up, because they had dug through those most difficult old forests, and with the manpower and resources of these few days, it was enough to catch wild boars, at least a dozen wild boars were caught, let alone find one living person.

  Where is Ah Fa? In fact, he was on that mountain all along. Many times, people were really close to him, but no one could find him, or rather, he was leading them in circles.

  A Fa was finally found, just when people wanted to give up. Someone saw him standing in front of a 10,000-meter cliff, still holding the fire starter in his hand, standing there motionless.

  He shouted at him without a response, and everyone else didn't dare to get close, afraid that he would jump down. A few brave ones slowly approached him, hugging Afu's waist, but he didn't resist at all. It's worth noting that he hadn't eaten or drunk for four days, where did he have the strength to resist?

  A Fa was carried down the mountain, not saying a word, with empty eyes. The doctor couldn't say anything conclusive either. Except for being somewhat weak, there were no other abnormalities in his body. After putting up an IV drip, he left.

  Like this, he dragged on for a whole week, Ah Fa's eyes never closed, just staring blankly at the ceiling, whether day or night, his eyes were always open like that. What was even more inexplicable was that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't put down the lighter in his hand.

  Still relying on the women and children in his family crying and calling, Ah Fa remained unmoved. So, like this, Ah Dad went to invite Cha Wenbin over, wanting him to take a look, wondering if he had been possessed by some evil spirit?

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