Bro | Chapter 55

As for this matter, well, it is a long story, like a child without a mother.

The chain of cause and effect could only be described as one coincidence piling on another.

The place where Wei Qian and the others did their very first project back then had now developed into a mature project division. Of course, limited by the development of the city itself, the investment scale of the team here had never been very large, and its staffing was not exactly top-notch either.

That was where the incident happened.

It started with President Zhang’s cousin.

President Zhang himself was a well-known disaster of a man, that was already beyond dispute, but his cousin was no simple figure. Back then he had been the municipal party secretary, and by now he had already been promoted to the provincial level.

Through various unofficial channels, Wei Qian and the others had also heard that this highly valuable cousin was very likely, in a few years, to be transferred directly to a centrally administered municipality as the top-ranking official there. The man was exceptionally skilled at maneuvering, had broad connections, and came from a powerful background. What was more, during his term in office he had actually managed to produce some genuine achievements, building the core commercial district of a third- or fourth-tier small city up to a standard not much worse than the provincial capital.

As for the exact rhythm his future would follow, no one could say for sure.

So for Wei Qian and the others, this line of connection absolutely could not be allowed to break.

Even though both Wei Qian and San Pang agreed that President Zhang, who had once screwed them over, was a complete moron beyond all doubt, they had still maintained an excellent relationship with him. In private they often kept in touch across cities, eating and drinking together, and when he introduced dubious projects, they simply found excuses to decline them.

The cousin had returned to his hometown in order to celebrate the birthday of his aged mother, that is, President Zhang’s eldest aunt on his father’s side. The old lady was eighty-nine. According to local custom, elderly people’s birthdays were supposed to avoid exact round-number milestone ages. The proper age celebration was held one year early and done on a grand scale, so this was effectively her ninetieth birthday banquet.

President Zhang and his cousin had organized it on a huge scale. The invitation had even been personally delivered by President Zhang straight to the chairman’s office at headquarters.

The birthday-star old lady had already become so senile that she could not even recognize her own son. As the ceremonial lucky mascot of the birthday banquet, she merely appeared in her wheelchair for show through the whole thing, and was very soon wheeled away by a nanny to be spoon-fed mush. After that, the birthday banquet turned into a club for members of the network.

Wei Qian and San Pang had each brought one of those absurdly pretentious business card cases that could only hold a very few cards, so they ran out in the blink of an eye and had no choice but to rely on the resourceful chairman’s secretary Xiao Fei to keep resupplying ammunition on the spot.

After a birthday banquet that lasted three to four hours and was even more exhausting than a negotiation, the degree of familiarity between guests and host naturally sorted itself into ranks. The closest ones, of course, were to stay behind, change venues, and continue chatting.

That day the big leader cousin was fairly generous with his face. He sat down with Wei Qian and the others, along with President Li Fengya, who had worked with them back in those earlier years, and drank several pots of tea with them before finally hurrying back overnight to the provincial capital to attend to his countless affairs, leaving behind only a thoroughly drunk and directionless President Zhang to entertain the guests.

Wei Qian immediately had the project division make arrangements. With Li Fengya staying at the table as company, they hosted President Zhang to a return banquet of their own, serving him so attentively that he was delighted to the point of blooming. On top of that, perhaps because he had reached his own turf, President Zhang grew somewhat carried away. So after the meal he started putting on a drunken show and stirred up trouble, insisting on dragging Wei Qian and the others out somewhere to “have some fun.”

On the road, San Pang said to Wei Qian with a greenish face, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Sure enough, President Zhang led them to a dazzlingly luxurious private club. At the entrance, a row of heavily made-up pretty girls had already lined up neatly, smiling sweetly as they waited to welcome them.

Li Fengya was the sort of practical, down-to-earth man who buried his head in work, and at home he had an old wife who had shared hard times with him, plus a son and a daughter. The moment he saw this setup, the alcohol was frightened clean out of him. He waved both hands repeatedly and said, “President Zhang, old brother, this won’t do, this really won’t do. This is no good. Your saozi, she… this isn’t appropriate!”

President Zhang was drunk and unreasonable. The second he heard that, he took offense and let his face drop. “What, Li-ge, are you looking down on me? Are you saying I, surname Zhang, am not hosting you properly? Or are you saying these little sisters aren’t high-class enough, not fit to keep old brother you company?”

Li Fengya turned green, sweat breaking out on his forehead. Wei Qian shot San Pang a look, and San Pang immediately stepped in to smooth things over with the smile of a laughing Buddha. “Li-ge’s afraid of his wife, and that’s not exactly news. President Zhang, is today the first day you’ve ever met him? Last time I saw saozi, wow… one roar from the wife and his legs were trembling on the spot. With old brother you treating us this warmly, aren’t you just putting our willpower to the test?”

He delivered the whole speech in a slippery, oily tone. President Zhang picked up the flavor of it, and his expression eased. He pointed at Li Fengya and said, “Relax, relax. We’re all brothers here, who’s who among us? Tight lips. What happens today, not a whisper of it will ever reach saozi. Ah, this is all because I didn’t think things through. Another day I absolutely have to bring something by and pay saozi a visit.”

With the step down offered to him, Li Fengya, no matter how unwilling he was inside, could not very well reject the face he was being given, and could only pinch his nose and put on a broad smiling expression.

President Zhang casually slung an arm around the leading woman and slurred, “Come! Introduce yourselves to my brothers. This… this is my little sister, my real little sister, and over there, th-that… they’re all my real brothers. You’d better, better take good care of them, you hear me?”

Just like that, under the principle that “the brothers and sisters of all seventy-two trades are one family,” Wei Qian and San Pang could think of no expression other than standing there and “heh-hehing” together.

President Zhang swayed unsteadily, and his “real little sister” hurriedly called over two girls, one on each side, to support him inside.

“You’d better not drop the ball later. I seriously can’t do this. Lin Qing would turn me into cured meat for sure.” San Pang took the chance to whisper to Wei Qian in a mosquito voice. “That shameless old bastard, his son’s practically about to get married and he’s still pulling this routine. Hey, wasn’t he always pretty good at holding himself up and playing the cultured gentleman before?”

Wei Qian stared straight ahead, expressionless, and squeezed out a few words through his teeth. “Do you know what it means to stick scallions up a pig’s nose?”

San Pang said, “What does it mean?”

Wei Qian said, “It means the old turtle bastard is pretending to be an elephant.”

As they were speaking, under President Zhang’s strong insistence, “real little sister” personally walked over toward Wei Qian and the others. From a distance she was already wearing a warm, enthusiastic smile. She had prepared her script in her head, planning to pick up where President Zhang had left off, first with a round of nonsense about real brothers and sisters, then stick herself onto them, touch their hands a little, and directly lead them inside.

But the instant she met Wei Qian’s cold gaze, the entire prepared script froze into a messy pile of useless garbage with a clatter.

Without even looking at her, Wei Qian passed by her side. Only after walking more than twenty paces away did he switch expressions like changing masks and put on a smile. “Big brother here is broadening the horizons of us younger brothers. We’re all benefiting enormously, really.”

President Zhang did not catch that Wei Qian was mocking him and took it for praise, chuckling happily as he accepted it.

San Pang knew that even after cultivating himself for a thousand years he still would not be able to produce an aura that made ghosts and gods avoid him like that. So he hurriedly scuttled after Wei Qian in tiny quick steps, borrowing the shelter of Wei Qian’s afterglow to defend the chastity of every inch of fat on his body, while secretly sending a text message to Wei Qian’s secretary: “Get the project division over here to rescue the throne right now. If you’re late, you’re all dead.”

Chairman’s secretary Xiao Fei received the level-one alarm and immediately made a tactical retreat to go call in reinforcements.

She did not dare be careless. In these past years, their Chairman Wei had already evolved from an “ordinary pervert” into an “unmatched pervert of the ages.” Countless people had left because of him, and countless others had stayed because of him. The company had gone through rises and falls more than once, and in the end had cut a bloody path through the times, surviving and expanding.

Efficiency, iron-bloodedness, and a clear hierarchy had already permeated the entire corporate culture.

At the birthday banquet at noon, someone had specifically come through President Zhang’s connections looking to resell a plot of land in his hands. Several managers from the project division had all been assigned out to inspect it. Since it was the weekend, the others were not at work either, so the only people left holding down the fort in the project division were two young guys, one from budgeting and one from engineering.

Their rank was too low. Usually they were just miserable young laborers following along and doing the dirty work, and they had never dealt with this kind of sugar-coated shell attack before. The moment they got the summons, neither of them knew what to do with their hands.

So what now? There was no way they could actually make Headquarters HR Director Lin Qing-jie personally rush over to catch the chairman patronizing prostitutes, right?

Then should they lie and say Chairman Wei’s girlfriend had come to check up on him?

But Chairman Wei was a diamond bachelor with no girlfriend. Everyone on earth knew that.

The two young men discussed it on the road, worried until their hair practically turned white. They even seriously considered the feasibility of setting the club on fire and manufacturing a fire alarm. In the end, though, they still could not think of any more creative plan.

The engineering guy said, “We need some emergency that requires Chairman Wei to come deal with it as an excuse. What kind of thing? Hey, how about we say one of our construction sites caught fire, what do you think?”

The budgeting guy asked, “How many would get burned to death?”

The engineering guy thought it over for a moment. Somehow, after running whatever algorithm his brain used, he pinched his fingers and gave an estimate. “Probably just seven or eight.”

The budgeting guy smacked the engineering guy hard on the head. “All day long you’re thinking about setting fires. Don’t tell me you’ve got arsonist tendencies. Think of something more reliable!”

So the engineering guy held his own big bald head and thought. The brain of a construction man labored along for a long while, and in the end a crafty gleam flashed in his eye. He came up with a top-tier rotten idea.

The two of them found a boiled edamame seller near the club and staged a self-directed scene of a person and a car fighting for the road, which ended with a scrape-and-bump “traffic accident,” after which they got out and started “arguing.” The argument escalated into an all-out scuffle, with the budgeting guy loudly shouting the name of the local company under which the project division was registered, and yelling, “This is a company car. You scraped it. Do you know how much it’s worth? Can you afford to pay for it?”

While they were fighting over there, Xiao Fei had already run upstairs and, right in front of President Zhang, given a highly embellished report. Wei Qian had never in his life heard of such a logically incoherent plan, and one corner of his eye twitched on the spot.

He hurriedly brought San Pang downstairs with him, but President Zhang, terrified that the world might not be chaotic enough yet, immediately ordered a whole great batch of beauties to follow them out as well, surrounding him like stars around the moon, apparently determined to witness this embarrassing scene for himself.

Wei Qian shot his secretary a vicious glare, and the corner of his eye twitched even harder.

There they saw the edamame uncle, having received a hundred yuan, getting addicted to the act. The more he played it, the more convincing it became, and he happily enjoyed the thrill of “making money by cursing in the street.” The two young men were two against one, yet somehow they were still fighting him to a draw, but by now several cars had already backed up behind them.

Just then, a young man dressed like a migrant laborer got out of a pickup truck that looked as though it was ready for the scrapyard.

The young man was tall and solidly built. All the visible skin on him had been tanned pitch-black by the sun. His pant legs and cuffs were carelessly rolled up, exposing on his wrist a string of old sandalwood Buddhist beads. On his head he wore a straw hat that looked explosively frayed because it had cracked in several places, covering half his face. Around his waist hung an enormous waist pouch that looked like it contained something bulky, perhaps a camera.

The innocent bystander who had gotten stuck in the jam walked over, patted the edamame uncle on the shoulder, and with one stretch of his arm separated both sides of the fight. “Guys, from what I can see, nobody’s hurt and the car’s not really hurt either. Meeting each other on the road is fate. Why bother? Forget it.”

The two young men from the project division exchanged a glance and thought that they had not yet rescued the imperial carriage, so they absolutely could not just let it go like this. But at the same time, they felt very embarrassed about obstructing traffic, and they were stuck between advancing and retreating. So their faces took on bitter expressions, yet their mouths alone, saying one thing while their hearts meant another, still blustered harshly in a weak voice, “Th-th-that can’t just be the end of it. We need an explanation. This old man is ob-ob-obviously trying to swindle people on purpose.”

The young man saw at once that something was off and smiled leisurely. “So are you planning to make this old man pay compensation?”

The instant the edamame seller heard the two words “pay compensation,” he nearly pissed himself in fright and immediately started to drop the ball. In a panic he hurried to explain, “I hadn’t originally planned to…”

The budgeting guy saw that he was about to blow their cover and quickly let out a howl to shut him up. “Don’t talk! Don’t talk! It’s your fault, what do you even have to say?”

The edamame seller pointed at him. “Obviously you were the one who told me to…”

Out of the corners of their eyes, the two young men saw Wei Qian already walking over this way. They thought they absolutely could not drop the ball at the very last moment, so with extraordinary tacit understanding they both shouted in unison, “Nonsense, it was you!”

They shouted so loudly that the edamame seller was stunned on the spot.

Just then, from not far away came a voice neither loud nor soft. With clear impatience, Wei Qian said to the chairman’s secretary, “Xiao Fei, who’s still barking over there?”

Elite secretary Xiao Fei immediately responded in the manner of a virtuous and capable wife, then strode over in great steps, viciously stomped once on each of them, and said in a rough voice, “Shut the hell up, all of you!”

Seeing how things were developing, the edamame seller rolled his eyes. According to the progress of the script, the next scene should have been him sitting on the ground and crying loudly. He took a deep breath, not yet having had time to work up the proper emotion.

Suddenly, the one who had been mediating, that young man who looked like a migrant laborer, lifted the brim of his hat a little higher and stared blankly in Wei Qian’s direction for a moment. Almost uncertainly, he called out, “Ge?”

Later, according to Xiao Fei’s own retelling, the fact that she had failed to seize the chance to quickly snap a photo of the boss’s expression in that moment was something she regretted for the rest of her life.

Wei Qian’s expression had at first been perfectly calm. But the moment his gaze fell on that young man and he recognized who it was, his expression abruptly turned to stunned shock. Behind him stood President Zhang, drunk and egging things on, together with a whole harem’s worth of disreputable professional women waiting as though for inspection. These sons of bitches and bitches together formed a certain grand and magnificent backdrop…

Which meant that after his shock, what Wei Qian was ultimately left with across his whole face was embarrassment.

He stood there in a daze for quite a while before finally murmuring, “Xiao Yuan?”

San Pang blinked hard twice with eyes blurred over by alcohol and cautiously asked, “Little brother, y-you… did you just come back from digging coal out in the western hills?”