One night, Feng Fan confides to the captain to be a passionate mountain climber, but also to have been responsible for the deaths of several people on his last journey.
During the conversation, an alien spaceship approaches Earth and, using its own gravity, creates a large mountain of seawater in front of the research vessel.
One day, they came across deadly water for the first time, called "changing stone", since the entire planet is surrounded by an ocean.
[1] Alexis Ong wrote in the Reactor Magazine, that the short story "allows its sole protagonist enough breathing room to actually be a person, at least until it devolves into a play-by-play retelling of an entire civilization’s development.
"[2] Jaymee Goh wrote on Strange Horizons, that the "expository paragraphs ... are particularly tedious in first contact stories such as 'Mountain,' 'Devourer,' and 'The Micro Era,' where there is barely any human drama and the protagonists are flat.