Chapter 6: Chapter 6 Foggy Valley — Ink on an Old Map

Stepping through the rusted sign, Lê An was immediately swallowed by a completely different world. The primeval forest surrounded her with a huge wall of vegetation, damp and dark. The towering canopy of ancient trees intertwined with each other, completely blocking the sunlight, leaving only a few faint rays of light dancing on the carpet of rotting leaves.

The trail was just a narrow break in the bushes, perhaps made by wild animals searching for water. An had to use a forest knife to clear the path continuously. The harsh sound of the blade cutting branches broke the terrifying silence. The space was so quiet that An could hear her heartbeat and tired breathing. No birds sang, and no insects chirped as they did in ordinary forests. Every creature seemed to avoid this land, as if sensing an invisible evil spirit lurking there.

After nearly two hours of climbing over slippery moss-covered rocks and wading through shallow streams covered with forest scrapers, An finally reached the top of a gentle slope. She held onto an old tree root and leaned forward to look down.

Before her eyes appeared a magnificent but magical scene. It is a giant valley, sandwiched between two mountain ranges that stand like two black stone walls. The entire valley was covered by a sea of dense fog, rolling like ocean waves. The fog here is not the usual milky white color, but has a light gray color, carrying the musty smell of soil and rocks that have not been illuminated by sunlight for many years.

According to the low battery GPS device in An's hand, the center of the coordinates 14°N - 108°E - which is the location of Đan Trầm Village, or Area X-14 - is right below the deadly fog.

An checked her backpack straps, stuffed her jungle knife into the sheath at her side, took a deep breath, and began the descent. The deeper she went, the denser the fog became, limiting visibility to less than five meters. The cold air seeped through her windbreaker, penetrating to the marrow of her bones.

The ground under An's feet began to change. Instead of the soft, spongy leaf mulch like on the mountainside, the soil here is hard, jagged with orphan rocks and unusual sinkholes. Suddenly, the toe of An's sneaker hit a hard object. She bent down to look. It wasn't a rock, but a rusty, bent iron bar, part of a small wagon track.

She continued to grope in the direction of that iron bar. The mist was occasionally torn into small pieces by the winds that swept through the valley, enough for An to vaguely recognize the true structure of this land.

Đan Trầm is no longer a village. And it was not the ruins of a conventional military base as An had imagined.

When the fog cleared, the scene that appeared before his eyes made An stand still in shock. There are no ruined floors, no broken electric poles, and no concrete bunkers of logistics soldiers. Everything was literally "ironed flat".

The entire ground of this dozens of hectares wide valley is full of giant geometric scars. These are deep plowed furrows and bulldozed soil banks that form long artificial dikes, dividing the valley into strange squares. The earth here seems to be stripped bare, plowed and re-moulded by giant heavy machines. Trees cannot grow on this plowed and perhaps chemically poisoned ground, there are only a few yellow bushes of weeds, stubbornly clinging like ghosts.

These are not traces of devastating bombs. Bombs create random craters. This is a trace of leveling, systematic and large-scale destruction.

"Operation Relocation X-14... Total scorched earth," An muttered, recalling the blood-red lines in Colonel Hung's notebook. "They scraped this whole valley clean. They didn't just erase Đan Trầm's name from the map, they actually erased it from the face of the earth."

Eyes glued to the GPS screen, An groped towards the center of the coordinates. The flashing red navigation point took her to the center of a giant square plot of land, where the land was burned black. Even though half a century had passed, that strange black color had not faded.

In the middle of that blackened plot of land was a huge hole, with a diameter of more than thirty meters, extremely deep, filled with stagnant, moss-green rainwater. From a distance, it looks exactly like a giant festering wound on mother nature's body.

An stood at the edge of the hole, staring into the murky water. This hole did not look like a bomb crater, because its edge was too flat and steep, like a sinkhole caused by a giant underground explosion. "T-9 logistics station" is probably not a ground base, but an underground construction system? And to ensure absolute secrecy, after the project failed or ended, they blew up the entire underground structure, causing the entire surface of the valley to collapse, burying the Đan Trầm village that once existed right above?

That horrifying hypothesis made An feel her stomach clench in disgust. The lives of the people of Đan Trầm village in the past—where had they been when that underground explosion happened? Had they had time to evacuate, or were they buried under this layer of blackened soil and rock?

Suddenly, the sound of dry leaves rustling sounded clearly from behind An.

The sound was very light, but in the dead silence of the valley, it sounded as clearly as the sound of a sledgehammer hitting the eardrum. That's not the sound of the wind. It was the sound of human footsteps. One step. Two steps. Approaching her cautiously.

An's heart pounded into her throat. She did not turn around immediately, but reacted instinctively: her right hand quickly slid into her coat pocket, tightly grasping the pepper spray bottle, while her left hand slowly closed around the handle of the jungle knife at her side. Every muscle in her body tensed, preparing for the worst. A smuggler? A logger? Or were guards still secretly watching the restricted area?

An turned around, pulled out her jungle knife, pointed it forward in a defensive stance, and took a few steps back to keep a safe distance.

About ten meters away from her, where the fog had just broken open, a figure slowly appeared.

Those were not guards, nor were they loggers. It was an old man so skinny that he was only skin and bones. He was shirtless, revealing his thin chest, his ribs exposed to the wind, and his dark, wrinkled skin covered in mud. The clothes on his body were only rags wrapped around his waist. His hair and beard were white, tangled, chest-length, stuck together like rotten ropes.

In his hand, the old man held a forest machete that was seriously rusted, but the blade still exuded a cold, threatening look.

But what frightened An the most was not his weapon, but his eyes. Under the deep eye sockets, the old man's eyes were white, streaked with red blood. He glared at An, his look did not carry anger or murderous intent, but an extreme surprise, mixed with a crazy fear. He looked at her as if he were seeing a ghost come back from the dead.

"Who... who is that?" The old man's voice was hoarse and dry, like the sound of two rocks rubbing against each other. His pronunciation was very strange, like that of ethnic minorities living isolated for a long time in high mountains, but An still vaguely understood.

"Who are you?" An tried to keep her voice calm, one hand gripping the knife while she kept her eyes on the machete in the old man's hand. "I got lost. I don't mean any harm."

Hearing An's voice, the old man's body suddenly trembled. He dropped the machete to the ground with a "cring" sound. Thin hands raised to hug his head, mouth mumbling incomprehensible sounds.

"You're back... The people of the underworld are back..." The old man knelt down on the blackened ground, bowed continuously towards An, turbid tears flowing from his crazy eyes. "Don't cry anymore... please don't cry anymore... Đan Trầm is all burned... The red fire... The red fire is all burned..."

The name "Đan Trầm" coming from the wild man's mouth struck An like lightning. He knew about the village. His ramblings referred to "red fire" and burning.

Slowly lowering the knife, An felt pity rising to overwhelm even fear. This man, whoever he was, had clearly suffered a terrible psychological trauma related to this land, a trauma that pushed him into a life of crazy wandering in the depths of the mountains for decades. He was not a threat, he was a surviving witness – the only witness of Operation X-14 that the commanders of the past had intentionally or unintentionally overlooked.

An collected her weapons and slowly walked towards the old man prostrate on the ground. Little did she know that this fateful meeting with the "crazy keeper" would open the first door leading to the truth about the misty valley.