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A song? Out here in the middle of nowhere, how could there possibly be singing? Liana jolted awake at once, lifting her head and looking toward the direction from which the voice came. Unfortunately, she was only an ordinary person. In the darkness, she could see nothing at all.

The melody drifted faint and distant, clear yet desolate. It sounded like the plaintive weeping of a woman who had lost her lover, and also like the sorrowful murmur of a wanderer with nowhere to return. It was steeped in loneliness and grief.

At the moment, it seemed to be only an introduction. No lyrics had yet been sung, but Liana was already deeply drawn in, unable to resist tilting her head to listen more closely.

Suddenly, the prelude stopped, and Liana instinctively held her breath. It was about to truly begin, she realized. The world seemed to fall silent, as though everything were waiting in anticipation of that moving song. Then, the singing began.

“One moon, big and round, take one bite and eat it down.”
“Two moons, big and round, take one bite and eat them down.”
“Three moons, big and round, still one bite, eat them all down.”
“La la la~”
“……”

Why did such a beautiful prelude end up with lyrics like this?

Liana felt as though she had gone on a blind date after seeing photos of a handsome man, only to arrive full of excitement and discover the person was actually a warty toad. The sense of being utterly deceived washed over her.

“No, wait. That is not what I should be worrying about right now!” Liana suddenly snapped back to her senses. What she should be worried about was why there was singing in the depths of a remote mountain forest.

It was like hearing footsteps on the ceiling in the middle of the night, when there was clearly no one living upstairs. It was far too unsettling.

“Could it be…” An uncontrollable thought surfaced in her mind. Liana hugged her shoulders tightly, her slender body trembling despite herself. “The Mountain Ghost?”

Yes. That had to be it. The one singing at midnight could only be the legendary Mountain Ghost.

“But… can the Mountain Ghost feel sad too?” Even though the lyrics were utter nonsense, Liana could still hear sorrow in the song. To her ears, it sounded less like singing and more like a young girl’s quiet sobbing.

“No, no, no. What are you thinking, Liana? Is now really the time to think about that?” She shook her head hard, forcing all those pointless thoughts out of her mind. That’s right. What mattered was not whether the Mountain Ghost was sad, but what would happen to her own life.

What if, after finishing the song, the Mountain Ghost decided to find something to fill its stomach? Would she not be a ready-made midnight snack, delivered straight to its door? She had to run. Immediately.

Liana quickly extinguished the campfire and prepared to flee into the darkness in the opposite direction. No matter what, she had to get far enough away that she could no longer hear the singing.

“Moon~ oh moon~ why are you so far away? I want to eat you~ but I cannot reach you.”

Yet she had barely taken two steps when the song echoed again beside her ears, even more mournful than before. For reasons she could not explain, an extremely bold idea suddenly surfaced in her mind.

“What if…” Liana looked toward the direction the singing came from. “I go over and take a look?”

The moment the thought formed, even she was startled by it. “No, no, no. How could I even think that? If this were a horror story, I would absolutely be the first one to die.”

Yet she soon lowered her head and glanced at her own figure, at the curves that completely obscured her toes, and muttered to herself, “But it seems like the Mountain Ghost only eats small children. I am already sixteen. I should not count as a child anymore, right?”

That’s right. Definitely not. Her coming-of-age ceremony had been over for months now.

Driven by curiosity, Liana continued to persuade herself. “I will just take one look. One look and then I run. I will not stay. …What if I get discovered? I run pretty fast. That might actually work? Then it is decided.”

In this somewhat eerie back-and-forth with herself, Liana gradually mustered her courage. Following the scattered moonlight filtering through the dense canopy above, she carefully and quietly walked toward the source of the song.

***

After pushing through the dense forest, Liana discovered that there was unexpectedly a wide clearing ahead.

At the center of the clearing stood a massive, flat stone, its surface completely overgrown with twisting vines. Beneath the bright moonlight, the vines swayed gently in the breeze, casting hazy, flickering shadows across the ground.

The singing was coming from the top of that stone.

“That is…”

Liana rose onto her tiptoes and squinted as hard as she could. At last, illuminated by the moonlight, she managed to make out the vague silhouette atop the stone.

It looked like a young girl.

The side of her face, half-hidden in shadow, was so beautiful that Liana could not help but sigh unconsciously. She wore a tattered black dress, its ragged edges only serving to make her pale skin appear even more luminous, like flawless jade under the moonlight.

As for her limbs… Liana could not see them clearly. They seemed to be hidden beneath layers upon layers of vines, or perhaps they had already merged with the vines entirely.

Could it be that… the so-called Mountain Ghost was actually a thousand-year-old vine that had gained sentience? The thought startled Liana badly. Was it not said that with the boundary marker of the Immortal Cloud Pavilion in place, demonic beasts could not enter this area?

A creature that could ignore the boundary marker… just how powerful would it have to be? At that thought, Liana swallowed instinctively, the urge to retreat already rising within her.

**Crack.**

Just as she took a step back, her luck failed her spectacularly. She stepped squarely on a dry branch, which snapped loudly, producing a sound impossible to ignore in the silent night.

The singing stopped abruptly.

Liana saw that the Mountain Ghost had already turned her head in this direction.

“What do I do, what do I do, what do I do?” Cold sweat poured down Liana’s forehead as panic set in. “Should I run? No, of course I should run, but I do not know if I can get away.”

Still, there was no time to think. Running came first. Gritting her teeth and hardening her resolve, Liana turned and pushed her talent for fleeing to its absolute limit, sprinting at her fastest speed— only to trip and crash to the ground.

“Ouch…” Liana clutched her forehead and cried out in pain. When she turned her head to look, it was the very same branch again. “Damn it!”

Overcome with grief and indignation, Liana angrily accused the culprit that had caused her to fall. “You cursed branch! You tripped me twice now. What exactly are you trying to do?”

If her cushioning had not been good enough, she might have been disfigured by now. The thought only made her angrier. Huffing, she picked up the branch and flung it away with all her strength. ‘Go die somewhere else, you damned branch!’

The branch traced a perfect arc through the air, and before Liana’s stunned eyes, it landed with cruel precision right on the Mountain Ghost’s head, producing a clear, unmistakable thud.

“Ouch.” The Mountain Ghost cried out, seemingly hit quite hard.

“I-It’s… over…” At the sight of this, Liana’s legs gave out completely. She dropped to her knees on the ground and wailed as she begged for mercy. “Please do not eat me, Mountain Ghost! Do not eat me! I did not mean to do it, I did it on purpose—no, no, that is not right, I did not do it on purpose, I meant to do it—no, wait… actually I…”

In her panic, Liana only grew more incoherent the more she tried to explain.

“Anyway… anyway, please do not eat me.” She puffed out her chest as best she could and added, “I am very fat. I will not taste good.”

“……” For a brief instant, Liana felt a bone-chilling cold wash over her. But it vanished just as quickly.

A long time passed. No sound came, and no vines reached out like grasping hands to bind her into a human dumpling and drag her away to become a meal. Nothing happened at all.

With her head lowered and too afraid to look at the Mountain Ghost, Liana assumed that her begging had worked. Just as she prepared to quietly take advantage of the moment and slip away…

She heard a cool, distant voice speak. “Come here.”