The three-week search operation on Ox-Head Mountain concluded with tragic finality. Twenty-four-year-old Ji Yuan, once full of promise, succumbed to fatal dehydration despite rescue efforts.

According to the two rescuers who found him, the youth had initially remained conscious though weak. Yet his last breath escaped during the frantic hospital transfer, leaving medical intervention futile.

The incident cast shadows over both the mountain and Ji Yuan's company, but his grieving parents bore the cruelest blow.

All this remained beyond Ji Yuan's perception.

...

Agonizing stiffness paralyzed his body.

This primal awareness greeted Ji Yuan's returning consciousness.

His muddled thoughts swam through needle-like pain permeating every limb.

Imprisoned in flesh that refused obedience - eyes sealed, tongue leaden, senses dulled - he could only endure escalating torment.

After eons of suffering, the excruciating waves finally receded.

Left gasping like a beached fish upon cold, unyielding ground, momentary relief gave way to creeping dread.

This was no hospital bed nor home. Icy drafts whispered through unseen spaces, provoking involuntary shivers his frozen form couldn't suppress.

The cloying scent of mildew mixed with distant insect trills and avian calls. Had he been dumped on some desolate road? Drugged and abandoned in wilderness?

Time lost meaning in the unbroken silence. No footsteps. No engines. Only nature's indifferent symphony.

Gradually, his hearing sharpened alarmingly - pinpointing cricket chirps and nesting birds with eerie precision, even gauging distances between unseen creatures.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Yet this hyper-awareness bred not wonder but spiraling panic. Days? Weeks? Eternity?

Trapped in sensory deprivation worse than any dark cell, sanity's threads frayed as he desperately replayed memories.

The last clear recollection: two uniformed men by the stream, their shocked cries as darkness claimed him.

Rescuers searching for someone missing over half a month. So why wasn't he hospitalized? What sinister twist separated perception from reality?

All threads led back to that accursed chess game beneath ancient trees. The vanished campsite. The rusted axe. Temporal dislocation defying logic.

His childhood favorite legend now mocked him - the woodcutter who watched immortals play weiqi, returning to find sixty years evaporated.

Like that fabled peasant of Lanke Mountain, Ji Yuan had stumbled into temporal distortion. But where the woodcutter received celestial peaches, he gained only mortal frailty - surviving weeks without sustenance by some cosmic oversight.

Unaware his physical form already moldered in a morgue, Ji Yuan's spirit raged against isolation's crushing weight.

No voices. No footsteps. No rescuers.

Western prisons' solitary confinement punishment suddenly made visceral sense. This endless void wasn't captivity but abandonment.

Come, kidnappers! Curse me! Kick me! His silent screams echoed in the void. Anything to break this maddening stillness.

Worst fear crystallized - not predators in the dark, but eternal solitude in some forgotten corner of existence, where even carrion-eaters wouldn't find him.