He was dressed in a rain-soaked shirt and eating a bowl of noodles. The then 21-year-old Liang Jie had set out at midnight on his bicycle and had been riding for 14 hours nonstop in the stormy weather to reach Mount Qomolangma. The last kilometer of the journey took Liang a whole three hours. When he finally reached the camp on the mountain, he was numb from lack of oxygen and fatigue.