The novella tells the story of an ancient crime that haunts the present, told in allusive and poetic terms, which gives it an aura of mystery. The original Chinese text, published in May 2019, was ranked second on the list of the best novellas of 2019 by the Chinese magazine Shouhuo. The story takes place in an abandoned mine, in the middle of a dark mountain forest, where a rather strange young man lives, who seems to have withdrawn there like the scholars of old fleeing the court. Living from selling mountain mushrooms at the local market and from a small restaurant he opened by the roadside, he spends his evenings reading poems by candlelight, from books he regularly collects from the home of a hunchbacked old man who is just as solitary and strange as he is. We guess through snatches, and through the dialogue, that another mystery surrounds the old man's son, who has disappeared and seems linked to the visitor's past. The heavy atmosphere is illuminated at times by sudden bursts of poetry which make up a large part of the unusual charm of this text.