After David Carter entered the mountains that night, a fierce storm broke out in the mountains, with thunder and lightning raging, while the nearby city of S remained calm and peaceful, as if they were two completely different worlds. The elderly who knew all about the strange happenings of Yin-Yang Mountain would naturally mutter some superstitious words like “someone has knocked on the gates of the underworld again,” while their children and grandchildren would refute them with irrefutable scientific facts. Experts, on the other hand, would offer even more baffling explanations, talking about things like magnetic field changes causing thunderstorms—reasons that no one could really understand...

Setting aside these idle talks, when David Carter, who spent the night in the mountains, opened his eyes again, everything had already changed.

Volume One: Is There a Peach Blossom Land in Troubled Times

Chapter 0004: The Youth

When the general was young, he encountered danger and survived a great calamity. He did not speak for a month, and the villagers all thought it strange, attributing it to spirits and gods. However, the general grew angry and rebuked them, causing the villagers to scatter in fear. From then on, they all respected and feared him. The general was only ten years old at the time, yet his anger had such power—was this not extraordinary?

——“Annals of Great Qin—Anecdotes of the General”

The second son of Hunter Carter in Zhao Family Village had been dazed lately, which greatly worried Hunter Carter, who only had this one heir to carry on the family line. He blamed his wife, who hadn’t watched the child carefully and let him fall into the well, and gave her a severe beating. The ten-year-old child fell into the icy cold well water; though he wasn’t bruised or injured, by the time he was rescued, his whole body was purple from the cold and he was barely breathing. After a whole day and night of rubbing and warming, they finally saved the boy, whose formal name was David Carter and nickname was Rocky. But ever since Little Rocky, who used to be so lively and robust, woke up, he hadn’t said a single word. Maybe it was because he’d been in the cold water too long, or maybe the icy water had seeped into Rocky’s eyes—when he stared at people, it sent chills down their spines. Samuel Carter, who had spent years dealing with wild beasts in the mountains, could clearly see in the child’s eyes the fierce glint only a mother wolf protecting her cubs would have. This frightened Samuel Carter badly. First, he called the half-baked barefoot doctor from the village. The old man poked and prodded David Carter for a long time before slowly declaring a bunch of things no one understood, like “deficiency and cold” and “external evil invading the body.” He then wrote a prescription, supposedly handed down from his ancestors, for Hunter Carter. Hunter Carter glanced at it—he recognized the characters, but not the words themselves—but that didn’t stop him from rushing overnight to the town more than twenty li away to fetch a huge pile of herbs. The doctor’s words sounded magical, but the effect on the child was nothing of the sort. After ten days of medicine, there was no improvement at all; the boy was still dazed, and not a single word could be coaxed from his mouth.

The villagers all believed in spirits and ghosts, so at this point, Hunter Carter hurried to invite Little Carter, the village’s shaman.

When Little Carter arrived at Hunter Carter’s house, he insisted that the child had been possessed by a water ghost from the well and that an exorcism was necessary. For everyone in Zhao Family Village, inviting the gods was a not-so-common event outside of weddings and funerals. On the day of the ritual, dozens of villagers, young and old, gathered around the altar set up by Little Carter, watching with a mix of awe, curiosity, and excitement as the rather otherworldly-looking Little Carter began the ceremony.

But the outcome was awkward. Maybe Little Carter’s powers were lacking, maybe the water ghost was too strong, or maybe Little Carter’s ritual actually worked—who could say? After half an hour of fussing, the child who had been sitting quietly in front of the altar for days without uttering a word finally spoke.

“Stop pretending to be mystical. Get lost.” The voice was neither loud nor harsh, but the chill in it made everyone who heard it shiver inside.

Little Carter, who was in the middle of his ritual dance, was petrified on the spot. No one knew who screamed, “A ghost!” and the onlookers scattered like startled birds and beasts. Little Carter, coming to his senses, jumped up in fright, his face pale as a sheet, and ran off, stumbling and crawling like a rabbit shot with an arrow.

Watching the people flee, David Carter didn’t know what to feel. He had realized something was wrong as soon as he woke up. Time travel sounded unbelievable, but even movies from the 1980s had started to explore the idea, and by the 21st century, it was no longer a novel topic.

Time travel might not be entirely accurate; to be precise, it was soul possession. His battle-hardened, steel-like body was gone, and now his soul was still that cold, cunning warrior’s, but his body had become the fragile frame of a small child from who-knows-what era.

“Kid, don’t scare your dad... Is that you? Rocky?” Hunter Carter’s family stood at a distance, surrounding David Carter.

David Carter glanced over: three women—one who looked to be in her thirties or forties, probably the child’s mother, and two younger girls, his older and younger sisters. As for the man, that was the child’s father. After these past few days, David Carter had figured all this out.

Over these days, the care and concern from these people had stirred some distant memories in David Carter, but those were from before he was thirteen years old.