gentle beast

4

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu woke before the sky had become bright and packed up her things. She easily changed the leopard’s bandages and anti-inflammatory’s application, then made her way up the mountain road alone.

The mountain was very high and quite precipitous.

There were several places where the mountain stretched straight up and down at a near 90 degree angle.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu grit her teeth and, using the carabiner and alpenstock belonging to sport committee member Chén Bīn, she finally climbed to the top before dark.

She looked down at her watch, and it read 5:43 P.M. The entire journey had taken almost 12 hours.

Standing at the top of the mountain, she panted trying to catch her breath for several minutes. Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu thought, shortly after with incomparable joy, that she had never expected to reunite with her classmates and teacher this way.

Had they been looking for her these past two days?

Did they notify her parents?

If her mom and dad knew she fell off a cliff, where they frightened?

But, she turned her face to see the surroundings of the peak, and stared blackly, utterly stumped for words.

This was just an ordinary mountaintop. Along the cliff grew a few Greeting Pines, and beyond that, the sky stretched an azure blue. There was nothing else.

Where was the cliff she had fallen off of?

What about the G80 highway she could see from the school bus?

Before her, a continuous mountain range covered in greenery rolled as far as the eye could see.

Surrounded by high mountains in all directions, she stood in a dip in the middle like a huge basin. This basic was not barren, however, and there many growing plants that Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu could not name.

There was a stream circling through the mountain valleys, and it was the one Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu had crossed over yesterday.

Gazing passed the basic, the mountains seemed to extend endlessly into the world, the river meandering along it. There was a completely unfamiliar world laid out before Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu.

A world she had never come in contact with.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu tightened her hands slowly tightened into fists at her sides, her body shaking slightly. She did not blink as she overlooked this distant world.

The suspicion she had repressed deep in her heart was finally confirmed.

This world was not her own.

She had crossed over.

As if to accentuate her heart’s thoughts, the clock struck six and everything was immediately plunged into darkness.

Here, there were no high-rises, no science, no technology, no cell phone signal. . . and even no sunrise or sunset.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu stood upright even as her heart descended into madness.