One spring when the snow had yet to melt, Gu Deng—a genius singer with countless fans—announced his retirement on Weibo.

Fans couldn’t accept it, and his agency went frantic trying to find him. But Gu Deng quietly bought a one-way ticket to Alaska.

He wanted to come here to watch whales—or perhaps, to die here.

But in the end, he lived.

He lived with a man—and with countless works born in this land.

Zhang Li was a man of few words. Because of his long expeditions tracking and photographing wild animals, he could go days without speaking. Yet whenever he did speak, his words struck Gu Deng right in the heart.

“Want to see the caribou migration?”

“Want to hear an Inuit whale-hunting song?”

But the moment that moved Gu Deng the most was in a wooden cabin in the snowy mountains, when the man handed him a steaming titanium mug.

“Pickled vegetable noodles. Want some?”

They crossed frozen rivers, climbed snowy peaks, and followed the polar caribou a thousand miles back to their birthplace.

Gu Deng saw a cub eaten by a male bear.

He saw majestic mountains turn pink under the setting sun.

He saw the towering whale bones standing in the Arctic tundra.

And when he truly decided to die, he realized—what he really wanted was to live.

To live in this land teeming with life.

To live in this rare and precious human world.