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Beijing - October 28, 2043 - The famous mountaineer Li Jing has been missing since yesterday. He was doing the solo ascent of the Nanga Parbat by the Mazeno ridge route and failed to communicate in the evening. However the weather was very good. A helicopter was able to fly over the area, but there had been no avalanches and no body was visible.
Excerpt from China Daily: “Li Jing is considered one of the best mountaineers in the world, in the tradition of Maurice Hertzog, Erhard Loretan and Reinhold Messner. He is the perfect example of a conquering, ambitious and nature-loving Chinese citizen. It is therefore with great surprise that we learn of his disappearance while climbing Mount Nanga Parbat in Pakistan. The news is all the more surprising as the weather conditions were perfect for the ascent and the undisputed master of mountaineering seemed to be in his best condition. A helicopter has flown over the area, but no traces of an avalanche, fall or body were visible. Rescue workers were able to observe fresh tracks on the ridge, but they inexplicably stopped.”
Li was ambitious. His obsession with winning was such that some of his friends believed that, for him, the pleasure of winning had finally overtaken the pleasure of climbing. He had organized the ascent of Mount Nanga Parbat as one would plan a war. With meticulous care, he calculated his route, the food, the equipment, and considered all the solutions to attack the difficult passages in the most spectacular yet safest way. When he negotiated with sponsors, he kept a small notebook in which he lined up the figures and calculated the growth of his fortune to the nearest hundredth of a percentage. He would run all these numbers over and over again every night before he went to sleep and then run them again the next morning at breakfast.
Everything was going exactly as planned. The weather was perfect. Mount Nanga Parnat was considered one of the most difficult peaks in the Himalayas. But straightforward for Li Jing, even though he had chosen one of the most dangerous routes and had even searched for new passages previously considered impassable. Everything was going well, right down to the schedule; in his heart Li had even gone so far as to time his expedition: he was three minutes ahead. But this insolent success, for the first time in his life, bored him. It was too easy. It wasn't what he wanted. So he decided to take the step of crossing the Mazeo Ridge at night.
When he reached the middle of the ridge, his obsessions finally left him. Instead of numbers, counts, routes, and minutes spinning in his head, he could finally admire the immense and beautiful landscape of the Himalayas under the full moon. It was as if the worlds were reversed: the bright sky below, the dark earth above. Caught up in a new enthusiasm for this new land to be conquered, he stepped into the void and fell like a stone into the dark abyss that was opening up beneath him.
Realizing what was happening to him, Li felt the moment of his death coming and as he waited for his body to explode on a rock, he saw his whole life flash by, his education in a China on its way to becoming the most powerful empire on earth, his enthusiasm for hard work and success, his studies in one of the most prestigious American universities, his first summits, the admiration he aroused, and also the influence he exerted on the youth of the entire world. He was going to die with the feeling of a huge waste. What was it all for ? What is there to conquer when everything on earth is already conquered? How can we fight for what is already given to us? All this life of surpassing himself now seemed to him to be a pittance. Faced with his disappearance, he was suddenly struck by the emptiness of his life and his work.
No one has ever found Li Jing. The sherpas claim that a winged deer fell from the sky. It came from Nanga Parbat and landed in the fairy plain. On landing it turned into a man, sitting naked in the snow. This was the story they told each other at night by the fire and shared with the curious tourists they guided in the mountains.
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