“Looking at the mountain makes the horse run to death—Raya Mountain, running the hippo to death.

The dead bodies frozen on the rock face ahead looked particularly clear. Although they were only a few dozen meters away, in this situation, it would take four or five hours to actually reach them.

When the muffled oil bottle turned back to look, he realized that there was actually no path here. Their way of moving was to climb on the rock face; the terrain was steep and full of ravines. While it was possible to make progress, it would be extremely dangerous. He remembered that when the great lama Derin left, he had told him that a mountain that seemed certain to cause a fall was not dangerous. The real danger lay in the mountains that appeared to be passable; those kinds of mountains would claim more lives.

Even so, he had no thoughts of retreat.

Laba, after all, was getting old. He leaned against the cliff to rest for a long time before he had the heart to look at the frozen corpses.

There were too many of them. Looking at their postures, Laba knew how they had died. All the bodies were tightly pressed against the cliff, just like his current position. They must have been trapped here by the previous strong winds. Like him, they had wanted to rest before moving on, but then the temperature suddenly dropped, and many people froze to death while exhausted during their rest.

In cold places, death and sleep are sometimes equivalent; often, it only takes a few seconds to freeze someone to death.

“Boss, these people must have come out from the mountain. They were resting here when the temperature suddenly changed and the strong wind blew, causing them to freeze to death. They are the lucky ones; many others probably fell off the cliff after freezing to death.

Their bodies are buried in the snow and will never be discovered.”

“Come out?” The muffled oil bottle was a bit curious. “Do people move in the snow mountains?”

“It’s not what you think, Boss. Foreigners often go in, but it’s not considered ‘activity’—they just want to know the routes that cross these mountain passes to traverse the uninhabited area ahead, not to explore anything,” Laba said, his tone implying that the place was indeed uninhabited.

The muffled oil bottle simply nodded, his gaze naturally drifting towards the direction from which the group of corpses had come. Laba sighed. At that moment, another porter resting nearby shouted a few words in Tibetan. The muffled oil bottle didn’t understand, but Laba did; it was a message to him: “They are all strangers.”

Laba turned to look at the corpses. In the wind and snow, he couldn’t see clearly, but he could spot the bluish faces of the frozen people; they were indeed unfamiliar faces.

This was unlikely. The porters from Motuo didn’t know all of them but could recognize about ninety percent. If it were such an incident, at least half of them would be people they knew, but clearly, those faces were too strange.

“They are not from Motuo,” Laba said, noticing that the muffled oil bottle seemed to want to ask. He continued, “I haven’t heard of such a group of strangers entering or exiting Motuo, so where did these people come from? Did they enter the uninhabited area from somewhere else and just happened to pass by here on their way out?”

Laba was filled with confusion because, as far as he knew, there were only a few paths through this uninhabited area, and those paths were known only to the local porters. They were passed down through generations by the elders, as trying to describe them in words or represent them in drawings was utterly useless. These paths had to be traversed dozens of times before they could be remembered, making it nearly impossible for them to be leaked.

Another porter continued speaking to Laba in Tibetan, suggesting that there were things to be gained—encountering a corpse in the snow-capped mountains was sometimes not a bad thing. First, the corpse might have many valuable items on it that could be exchanged for money; second, if they could determine the identity of the deceased, they might be able to obtain some information fees from the family.

This companion pointed to a corpse in the distance, and Laba quickly realized that it was three foreigners. Their clothing was completely different from that of the locals, and nearby, some Tibetans were helping them carry many packages.

It was well-known that the foreigners’ packages often contained valuable items. Generally speaking, Laba and his companions wouldn’t target foreigners for two reasons: first, the lamas had a good relationship with them, and if a foreigner were harmed, the situation would not end easily; they would ultimately face severe punishment. Second, foreigners usually left half of their money to be paid upon their return, and the items they carried were very precious and unique, but selling them could easily attract the attention of the temple or the government.

However, this time was somewhat different, as these foreigners clearly hadn’t set out from Motuo. Their belongings appearing in Motuo would not cause any trouble.

The group exerted a tremendous effort to retrieve a few backpacks and then continued on their way. There’s no need to elaborate on the entire process, as it was not an easy one.

Around sunrise that day, Laba led everyone to a snowy slope where they dug a hole in the snow to shield themselves from the wind and rest, giving them a chance to look at the contents of the backpacks.

Inside the bags were mostly instruments and rock specimens. Foreigners always took some stones with them, and while Laba knew these were specimens, he didn’t understand what they were used for.

As they rummaged through the bags, speculating on the value of the instruments, they discovered two gold spheres inside one of the bags.

The two gold spheres were placed in an iron box, which also contained another item that was very tightly wrapped in cloth. While the two gold spheres were completely exposed, this other item was so well-wrapped—could it be more valuable than the gold spheres?

However, when they opened it, they found that it was an ugly piece of metal that resembled black stone. Throughout the entire process, a silent figure kept his gaze fixed on the only item in the backpack that was deemed absolutely worthless: a notebook filled with dense writing in a foreign language.

Seeing the focused expression on the silent figure’s face, Laba decided not to disturb him for the time being. They had obtained two gold spheres, and he felt they no longer needed to go any further; perhaps they were already richer than this silent figure.

Laba was immersed in ecstasy, feeling that this was the most important day of his life.

While he was feeling joyful and pondering how to explain his reasons for retreating to the taciturn man, the taciturn man handed him the foreigner’s notebook and asked what the words on that line meant.

It turned out that on one page of the notebook, there was a drawing, and next to it, the foreigner had written a note in crooked Tibetan.

Laba didn’t know many characters, but he could understand this sentence in Tibetan because a lama had once taught him these things during his prayers. The meaning of the Tibetan phrase was “the limits of the world.”

Laba didn’t understand; he looked at the drawing next to the Tibetan text and then made a facial expression to the taciturn man that indicated he only knew this much.