Chapter 1: Hotel X

“Do you know that Hotel X was a zoo before?” Judy whispers gossip in my ear.

At this moment, we have arrived in the mountainous area where Hotel X is located. Lucy, the monitor, is leading the students to climb the hillside as if walking in the street in front of the team. The scenery in the forest park is indeed magnificent. We have not yet reached the top of the mountain, only on the half-hill slope. Looking below, I saw that we have trudged through a vast expanse of greenery.

The sun shines on the ground through dense leaves. There are bursts of fragrance in the air that belong to the trees. I walk forward, listening attentively to the cicadas chirping from the grass and the chirping birds soaring freely in the sky.

The bus we take has shrunk to the size of a sesame seed as if it has been trampled under our feet. The few stone stairs with moss that occasionally appear in the mountain roads make people feel the artistic conception of returning to the mountains and forests.

The thick iron guardrail on the side of the mountain road, extending along the way to the top of the mountain, gives people the illusion of falling into the deep mountains and old forests after traveling through time and space. The lush view makes students who are accustomed to seeing reinforced concrete roads suddenly have a wild burst of reintroduction to nature.

We are eager to go forward, although we are still maintaining our lined-up formation. Everyone speeds up, especially the male students. Most of the boys have spontaneously organized a game, the first to the top of the mountain wins. The physical strength of girls is not as good as boys. We have taken to groups in the middle of the line, laughing and joking.

“I heard that the zoo was closed down for years because all the visitors disappeared, and the bodies were never found.” Judy is a fan of thriller movies, and everyone is familiar with her telling scary stories.

“It’s not just the people that are missing. In earlier years, when the zoo was just built, its owners spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy lions and tigers. Although the iron gate was not broken and the lock remained closed, the wild animals just disappeared, and the zoo lost a lot of money!”