The villagers slowly gathered around, and the twenty-something-year-old youth seemed to have grown bolder, approaching the spot where Mazao and I, two strangers, were standing.
He could be the young traveler mentioned in Dong Che's narrative; I also retrieved from my memory the appearance of the corpse I had seen before.
I could judge that this youth's height and build were almost the same as that of the corpse. The reason I could only say "almost" is because the latter had, after all, decayed, showing some phenomena like the giant's perspective typical of rotting corpses. More convenient than comparing their physical similarities was comparing their clothing. He wore a black and green windbreaker, identical to the one the corpse was wearing.
The young traveler, who was clearly already dead in a mountain ditch, was now strangely alive in this place.