After getting off the plane, the person Old Harris sent to pick us up had already been waiting in the car for quite some time. Ignoring their repeated urging, I spent an hour checking the luggage. No kidding—if I hadn’t checked their luggage item by item before departure, I wouldn’t have discovered that William Bennett had secretly lent his laptop to his nephew, who had been swaggering around school with it every day. When the teacher found out that this laptop, worth over 40,000 yuan, was the most advanced model at the time, he immediately borrowed it to “study it.” Embarrassed, William Bennett could only keep quiet, hoping I would forget about asking him to bring the laptop.

After discovering this, I was furious. David Clark and Brian Cooper also joined in scolding William Bennett. You have to know, his laptop had the “Flora” software installed—without it, what would we look at in Shennongjia, just random plants? So, in the middle of the night, we dragged his nephew out of bed, drove him to the teacher’s house, put on our best smiles, gave every possible explanation, and finally managed to get the laptop back from the teacher, who was clearly unhappy.

What was even more infuriating was that the teacher, probably annoyed by all the software installed on the laptop, actually deleted our “Flora” and installed a complete database of math, physics, and chemistry problems from elementary to high school. Brian Cooper, furious, wanted to go confront the teacher right away, and if I hadn’t persuaded him to consider the late hour and the need to avoid causing a scene, the teacher would definitely have gotten an earful. After all, Brian Cooper had been training for three years!

Frustrated, I had no choice but to stay up all night reinstalling “Flora.” At William Bennett’s repeated request, considering his nephew’s future and also to spare the country’s “flowers” from our group’s destruction, I kept the problem database the teacher had installed. Of course, to ensure our software could run properly, I had to delete the GPS global positioning software.

By the time I finished all this, dawn had broken. I grabbed William Bennett, shoved a brass whistle into his hand, and said menacingly, “You don’t have GPS anymore. From now on, you’ll have to use a sextant for positioning, and use this brass whistle to let us know where you are. You’d better start praying.”

Because of this incident, even though the others were full of complaints, when I checked the luggage, all they dared to do was ask in concerned tones, “You didn’t sleep at all last night—are you tired?” without a single word of complaint.

After checking the luggage, it gradually grew dark. In the setting sun, the few of us got into the car and headed toward the mountain village. In the twilight, I kept seeing newly built vacation houses along the roadside, all constructed by the local government to develop tourism. From time to time, we also saw some fallen trees by the road, their trunks covered in green moss and fungi. At this moment, they were peaceful and quiet, the noise and glory of the world already far behind them.

Looking at these noisy lives and heroic deaths, I seemed to hear the struggle and strangulation for survival in nature, the painful moans that come from fighting and killing... I couldn’t help but feel a wave of sorrow: in a few centuries, a few hundred centuries, when the next ice age comes to Earth, will Shennongjia still be a refuge for living things?

I was tired. Rocked by the movement of the car, I gradually drifted into sleep. In my dreams, I heard the cries of the mountains and forests, the call of our ancestors, and the sobbing of flowers and birds...

After a few days of rest and preparation, we entered the mountains under the guidance of our guide. Before setting out, I solemnly announced a few rules to the villagers who came to see us off: “We will not leave a single piece of trash behind. Other than the scenery, we will take nothing with us.”

Doing this not only reassured the villagers and kept them from disturbing our research, but also served as a warning to those guys, so they wouldn’t do anything to make the villagers uneasy.

We walked into the mountains, we entered the forest. The Qinling firs soared straight into the clouds, growing side by side with the region’s unique arrow bamboo, without a hint of hesitation; their gnarled branches, about ten meters above the ground, crisscrossed and overlapped, blocking out the sky and sun, with not a trace of leisurely ease; all kinds of vines twisted, coiled, and climbed like snakes—some spiraling up the 20- or 30-meter-tall firs, some embedding themselves deep into the firs’ trunks, and the strangled firs would one day crash to the ground. This is survival of the fittest.

What I can never forget is that camphor tree. It stood tall, its branches lush and leaves abundant. The camphor tree is known as the “immortal tree,” often appearing in many mythological novels. Legend has it that the tree in the Moon Palace is a camphor tree, and some say that in every painting of the Queen Mother of the West, there must be a camphor tree behind her, and so on. The camphor tree’s leaves are like palms, its flowers like hammers, its fruit like eggs, with a navel, possessing extraordinary vitality. It can live for thousands of years, and the ancient Shennongjia has become its home. Looking at it, I felt the greatness of life, and I was filled with awe.