Once during the chaotic era of the Republic of China (1912-1949), some travelers discovered a wild, lifeless mountain. With its forbidding height and treacherously steep slopes, the mountain had had no trees, bushes, or any grass, not a single one. But what really attracted the travelers’ attention was a great abundance of the finest natural gold nuggets that could easily be seen embedded in the rocky cliffs at the foot of the mountain, and the golden glow coming from the crown of the mountain that was so shining that the sky above was lit up with the yellowish glow. The news spread instantly. People poured in from all directions of the country to mine the gold mountain, but surprisingly, to this day none of them could make their way back with so much as a single nugget. The helicopters on rescue missions, as soon as getting in close vicinity, invariably met with fatal accidents themselves. What was even more horrible was that, with the number of missing miners soaring, the wild mountain had started to come alive with trees, undergrowth, and creeks ran in far greater numbers than on other mountains. A few old villagers living at the foot of the mountain, who were lucky enough to have survived their mining expeditions, would warn new visitors to stay away from the mountain, or not to drink any water at least, if they had the misfortune of ending up on the mountain for any reason. The mountain was locally referred to as the Haunted Mountain, and its original name had gone into oblivion.

Y, a bad investor who had found himself penniless recently, had thought of selling his house so that he could have some cash and set himself up as a street vendor as a livelihood. But when he became aware, from some friend of his, of the Haunted Mountain story, a second thought occurred to him: why go to all the trouble only to get himself paid poorly, when there was a gold mine waiting for him – all he needed to do was to go up the Haunted Mountain and knock any piece of gold that pleased me off the cliff and he could sit back and enjoy a comfortable sufficiency that could last for months, not to mention the crown of the mountain where gold was so abundant as to shed a glow to the sky above. With a successful trip from up there, he would be provided for the rest of his life. These reflections drowned his friend’s warning out of his mind, and he pretended that he would rather put his trust in science than in some foggy, elusive “supernatural thing”. In a desperate effort, he sold his house and bought all the necessary mountain-climbing gears and, teaming up with two friends X and Z, another two losers in investments, whose acquaintance he had made on the Internet, set out on their ambitious expedition.

It was already dark when they arrived at the foot of the mountain, so they were obliged to spend the night in the village. The few old villagers who had narrowly escaped from the Haunted Mountain knew, as soon as they entered the village, what the trio were there for and tried to convince them to change their mind and go back. But they were too feverishly bent on their plan to listen. And they wouldn’t “make the foolish mistake” of giving up success when it was so close at hand and just because of some rumors. And those missing miners probably had succeeded in mining the gold and for fear of uninvited attention, got away with their fortune and lived somewhere far away under a false identity, the three miners reasoned with themselves. They thought of buying some water supply before going up the mountain but couldn’t get any villagers to sell it to them, because the villagers, knowing where they were going to, wouldn’t agree to their request for the world. Seeing no other choice, they went outside the village and got the water supply they needed, spiteful and thinking of avenging themselves by making the stupid villagers jealous of their success tomorrow.

Before dawn next morning, when the whole village was still asleep, the three miners sneaked out and started making their way up the mountain. No artificial road of any kind, not even something remotely resembling a road, had ever been built on the Haunted Mountain in view of the evident dangers and risks it gave rise to. The three miners were obliged to follow, each step of their way up, the old footprints left over by their predecessors. Soon that trail of footprints led them to what seemed to be the source of a gurgling creek, and there the trail stopped short, as if the life of the person who had made those old footprints had stopped short, as inexplicable as the clear stream, which seemed to have emanated from nowhere but some invisible crack of the rocks nearby. Shrugging it off, the three miners were turning to find a new trail somewhere, when X claimed that he felt thirsty, which was only natural, given how much time they had trudged in the mountain. Eagerly X took several big gulps of water, and then stopped to ask his two friends if they needed to take some too, which they declined, trying to ration out their limited supplies – only several liters of water – for later, as the Haunted Mountain seemed ridiculously high to them. But before they went long, X grumbled about feeling thirsty again. Y frowned, took a glance at his watch, which showed it had been only a few minutes after X drank last time. But as he took his eyes from his watch back to X, he was alarmed to find that, like some fish craving for water after having been deprived of it for hours, he had, in those few seconds, finished taking in more than a liter of water. Sensing that something had went wrong, he darted in to grab at the water bottle X was holding, but only got shoved aside by him. At that moment, something happened to X in a terrible apparition. He literally imploded like a water balloon bursting at a prick, splashing Y and Z with water – not blood – as clear as the gurgling creeks on the mountain. X’s “body”, or rather what was left of him that had changed into water, dropped on the ground with a splash, and flowed forward down to lower altitudes. And, like a hot spring coming out of some crack of the rocks, it brought vitality to the trees it passed by as it moved along. The woods on the Haunted Mountain seemed ever livelier with it.

With wild, round eyes Y and Z stared at this stream gurgling its way down the mountain. The mysterious warning against drinking water on the Haunted Mountain, the missing miners, and those creeks and streams, all these elements, which up to now had seemed like jokes more than anything else, began to make sense to them. Why was drinking water banned on the Haunted Mountain? The mountain seemed to be under a curse that anyone who should drink water while staying on the mountain shall be gone for good. No one could tell for sure what would happen next in this cursed mountain. Y and Z decided that they should get out of there when they still could. They allowed themselves a moment to cool down before starting to pack up and leave. But they hadn’t gone long before they found with fright that they were back to the spot where X had died: they were lost in the Haunted Mountain, or rather, they were trapped there. And soon it was noon after they had made some more circles in useless efforts. If the malice in the mountain was so strong in broad day, who knew what could happen under the cover of darkness overnight? With no chance of getting out of there, Y and Z saw no choice but to move on towards the crown of the mountain, which they finally reached after another several hours. The golden glow was right before them. Though exhausted with hours of thirst and hunger, Y felt with relief that all the efforts and pains finally paid off, and he stood there fascinated, dreaming of all the pleasures that a gold fortune could bring to him, when suddenly he became aware of someone drinking. He quickly turned his head to Z, who was convulsively pouring water into his mouth as if forced by an invisible hand, while looking to Y with entreating eyes at the same time. Y did not make a move to save his friend: why would he share a fortune with someone dying, especially when it was a fortune for which he had risked his life? Who else could know if Z died there? At that moment, Z suddenly blew up and turned into another creek, as one could imagine. Not bothering to wipe off the water that had splashed on his body, Y rushed up to the glow. The crown of the Haunted Mountain, which looked like a gigantic bowl, contained a great number of the finest gold nuggets, some of which were even larger than a truck, a fortune that could last for generations for someone like Y. At the brink of the “gigantic bowl” lay a skeleton. And there was a note that must have been left by that dead person, which shed light on the origin of the Haunted Mountain.

The first miner of the Haunted Mountain was a high school graduate who had failed in the college entrance examination. Returning home frustrated, he was excited to discover this unnamed wild mountain with its gold mine. With a fortune, he could hold up his head when he got home and enjoy a comfortable sufficiency of life. Obsessed with the idea of making a fortune, he neither drank any water nor took any rest on his excited and hurried way up the mountain. By the time he got to the crown, he almost fainted with exhaustion and drank like a madman. But in his desperate effort to quench the thirst, he got choked and, as too much water found its way into his lungs, he finally succumbed to suffocation. His obsessed spirit, lingering around the spot, was ultimately trapped by the unusually strong magnetic field of the Haunted Mountain. His spirit, growing malicious, placed a curse on the mountain that lured travelers to hydrate repeatedly, till they took in an overwhelming quantity so that his evil spirit could release all the water from the oversaturated body and the stomach alike. The victim’s spirit, thus extricated, would join force with the dead student’s, augmenting the curse to such power that any person on the mountain, with minimal intake of water, could die from it. Before he died, however, the student managed, as a precaution, to prepare a map of the mountain, illustrating how to go around the “easy way in but no way out” entrapment and find a way out of the treacherous terrain of the mountain. Now lucky for Y, all he needed to do was to refrain from drinking, take some gold, and get out of there as the map indicated.

In a feverish ecstasy, Y began to collect gold with trembling hands. But out of the abundance of the gold nuggets, he could only carry a tiny portion. In the fury that overtook him, he forgot how long the journey downhill would be and how weak he was, and he dropped all his equipment and loaded so many of gold nuggets on himself as if he were a packhorse. In a few minutes, on the joint onslaught of overburden and fatigue, he was seized with delirium. Without the presence of his mind and forgetful of the drinking ban, he saw the creek that Z had turned into, and threw himself down upon the stream to drink from it…

During the chaotic era of the Republic of China, some travelers discovered a wild mountain. With its forbidding height and treacherously steep slopes, the mountain was interlaced with creeks and full of life – trees, bushes and grasses. And the crown of the mountain lit up the sky above with a golden glow. It was known as the Haunted Mountain.