Bro | Chapter 27

At around two or three in the afternoon, the little restaurant was always deserted. During that stretch of time, Wei Zhiyuan, who worked there carrying dishes as a waiter, was usually pretty idle too. So one day, when he asked with an innocent face whether he could play Snake on the boss’s phone, the boss handed it over to him without a second thought.

Wei Qian spent a whole week studying the map and the city’s garbage disposal system. Wei Zhiyuan spent that same week playing Snake… and sending a few messages to San Pang.

The first message was simple:

San-ge, save us. Don’t reply by text. If you get this, call my Ge’s phone at nine tonight, let it ring once, then hang up. , Xiao Yuan.

The second message left the city name and address, with another note added after it: Don’t reply. Don’t come look for us. Find a place to stay yourself. After you get here, call my Ge’s phone, let it ring twice, then hang up.

On the fourth day, Wei Qian received San Pang’s two rings.

So, following Wei Qian’s instructions, Wei Zhiyuan sent San Pang the third message: Get a big dog. After you get it, call my Ge’s phone, let it ring three times, then hang up.

On the last day, Wei Qian adjusted his physical condition and got ready to go to the boxing ring.

He got up early. While Wei Zhiyuan was still asleep, he used a carbon pen to draw a little turtle on the back of the child’s hand.

Wei Qian had already gone through that old math textbook from beginning to end. At the same time, he had copied the original owner and drawn a dozen little turtles on note paper. At a glance, he had practically inherited seventy to eighty percent of that “Divine Turtle Master’s” true skill. The turtles were drawn vividly enough to look real.

After he finished drawing, Wei Qian got dressed and drifted off with an air of transcendence.

Meanwhile, San Pang, with a big dog in tow, had already been sneaking around the western outskirts for a whole day and night.

A pickup truck drove over. San Pang hurriedly dodged the headlights, yanked back on the leash, and forced the dog to hunch its neck and hide with him, waiting vigilantly for the truck to pass.

The big dog stuck out its long tongue. Seeing San Pang’s nervous fat face coming close, it took the opportunity to give him a lick.

Only after the truck had driven off did San Pang erupt and roar at the dog, “Fuck, you just got done eating shit!”

The dog clearly did not think there was any hygiene problem with that at all. Wagging its tail, it said, “Woof!”

San Pang looked at the dog with deep concern. For some reason, it looked tall and handsome, but its intelligence seemed obviously below the standard level for its species. “Baby, we’ve already been stuck here a whole day. If we still can’t find it, that little bastard Wei Qian is probably going to croak.”

The dog… well, let’s just call it Gou Huanle. Gou Huanle happily dragged him forward, barked another cheerful “woof,” and seemed delighted at the thought, as if saying, Let that little bastard die.

San Pang sighed. “Who says otherwise? I want that little bastard dead too. He’s like trouble with legs. Who knows what kind of mess he’s gotten into this time. Looking for corpses in west city, sigh, your San-ge here is obviously meant to star in comedies, but for fuck’s sake I got dragged a thousand miles to guest-star in a horror movie!”

Gou Huanle suddenly hit the brakes, and San Pang’s nerves instantly tightened. “What is it? Is it nearby?”

…Only to see Gou Huanle lift a leg and piss under a tree.

San Pang: “…”

Only then did San Pang realize Gou Huanle had dragged him to a relatively high patch of ground. Looking down from there, he could see the garbage incineration plant. The stench was overpowering. He had no idea how Gou Huanle, with a nose many times sharper than a human’s, could still maintain its heroically cheerful spirit under conditions like this.

San Pang narrowed his eyes and looked down. Suddenly, he noticed that several large garbage bins of different colors had not been processed together with the rest of the trash. The small pickup truck that had just driven past him had stopped beside the garbage treatment plant. Several men got out, loaded those few bins onto the truck, and drove off.

Those people were definitely not workers from the garbage treatment plant, San Pang saw that clearly. The ones willing to do this kind of work were usually older people. There were not many young men willing to endure this kind of hardship.

But the men who had gotten out of the truck were all in their physical prime. Every one of them looked powerfully built, and they could easily hoist up garbage bins that looked extremely heavy.

Before long, the pickup drove off again.

San Pang squatted down, took out the map, and whispered to Gou Huanle, “That’s not right. The map says there’s nothing over there except one huge empty lot.”

Gou Huanle ignored him and only kept trying to drag him onward.

San Pang said, “Alright then, I’ll listen to you. Let’s go.”

San Pang hunched over and crept forward the whole way, darting and hiding with great care. Following the tire tracks and the direction of travel, and using the dog’s nose for help, he trailed the pickup’s path. By the time dawn was almost breaking, he had found a row of illegal buildings. They seemed to be the sort of unlawful private iron-smelting workshops that ordinary people ran on the sly. The pickup truck was already gone, but several garbage bins had been lined up outside. Their lids were open. One had tipped over by accident and was already empty.

Stretching his neck out, San Pang carefully peered into the overturned garbage bin for a while, and decided that it was clean to an absurd degree.

Garbage bins could contain anything, especially sloshing liquid filth. There was no way one could be this clean. It must have held something else.

San Pang had a vague premonition he could not put into words. He felt that he had found the right place.

Only then did he notice Gou Huanle’s abnormal behavior.

Gou Huanle’s eyes were wide open. All the fur on its body had stood on end. It bared its sharp canine teeth in the direction of that row of garbage bins, its paws scraping the ground uneasily, poised somewhere between fleeing and attacking. It had definitely already smelled something, and it was scared out of its wits.

That morning, a strange customer came into the little restaurant where Wei Zhiyuan worked.

The moment the place opened, he came in and ordered a bowl of noodles. He was in no hurry to eat, only sitting there as if he were deliberately killing time.

Both the boss and the boss’s wife were a little afraid, because ordinary people did not come in at this awkward in-between hour, neither breakfast nor lunch, to eat a bowl of hot, spicy noodles. Beneath the sleeves of the man’s undershirt, a corner of a tattoo could be seen, and his whole head was dyed yellow. He did not look like a good person.

That day, Wei Zhiyuan had Wei Qian’s phone with him, set to silent, as he waited for San Pang’s message.

If he found it, San Pang would give him one ring. If he got the job done, San Pang would give him another ring.

The first ring that morning had already come and gone, but the second ring still refused to come. At last, Wei Zhiyuan could not help growing anxious.

And right as he lowered his head to look at the phone, that strange customer had, at some point, risen to his feet and quietly drawn close to him.

Wei Qian had already finished the second match.

The moment he stepped onto the platform, he sensed that something was wrong. For someone like Wei Qian, who had long been used to doing thug work, as soon as a person merely stood in front of him, he could basically tell at the first instant whether that person was a threat. In the second match, he had moved up one level according to the rules, so his opponent should naturally have been stronger, but this man was not any more formidable than the opponent in the first match.

Wei Qian almost put him down without a scratch.

The audience let out disappointed boos, because to outsiders, Wei Qian’s opponent really did look tall, huge, and knotted with muscle.

But only people who had gone up there themselves knew that the man’s muscles were too knotted, the sort of build bodybuilders had. Great bulges of muscle like dead flesh seriously limited the speed of his punches. Other than being fairly resistant to a beating, he was almost useless.

Wei Qian wiped off his sweat and prepared to head back to the changing room.

Just as he stepped down from the platform, Zhao Laojiu came running in, panting hard. He grabbed Wei Qian’s hand and dragged him into a corner. First he put on an act of anxiously looking him up and down. Then he gave a very theatrical long sigh of relief and patted Wei Qian on the shoulder. “Oh, brother, thank god you’re fine. Thank god you’re fine.”

Wei Qian knew that the real matter had only just arrived.

Without giving anything away, he pretended to be confused and asked, “Huh?”

Zhao Laojiu slapped his thigh. “Aiyo, just look at these people, what the hell are we even keeping them around for… They made a mistake just now. That opponent of yours wasn’t even supposed to be in your low-level bracket. He was a mid-level fighter. That big guy, one of him could outweigh two of you. Your Jiu-ge was scared to death just now, afraid something might happen to you…”

Wei Qian sneered inwardly, but on his face he cooperatively arranged an expression of utter shock.

As if suddenly remembering something, Zhao Laojiu opened his bag and pulled out a thick stack of RMB from inside. It looked genuinely thick, more than two bundles. With a light flip, Wei Qian could tell there was at least over twenty thousand there.

“This time, your appearance fee and your bonus for winning, I’m paying them according to that man’s level. Ten thousand each. And this extra five thousand is something your Jiu-ge is giving you out of his own pocket. Ai, I’ve wronged you, brother. If I had kept a closer eye on things, you wouldn’t have suffered like this.”

Wei Qian put on a show of refusing for a while, and in the end, to no one’s disappointment, he “failed.” He stuffed the money into his own waistband pouch. Zhao Laojiu looked at him with a satisfied, benevolent expression. “Young man, you’ve got a future ahead of you. Go on then, go change your clothes.”

Wei Qian had already anticipated all sorts of possible situations. Of course, more than twenty thousand-yuan was an enormous sum of money, more cash than he had seen in his entire life. As a qualified miser for money, it was perfectly normal that his liver trembled and his head heated up a little. But very quickly, powerful willpower dragged him back.

He left the edge of the ring at an extremely slow pace. Halfway through, he stopped and looked back at Zhao Laojiu, only to discover that the man was watching him off with an indescribably smug, satisfied smile on his face.

Find some weakling from who knew where, let him think he had beaten a mid-level fighter, then use money to puff him up until he willingly jumped levels for the next match?

Impossible. Real fighters could all tell the difference between someone who was truly ruthless and someone who only looked fierce on the surface. As far as that last match went, they would only think they had gotten lucky. How many people would really risk everything over the twenty-five thousand-yuan in their pocket?

There definitely would be some. But those kinds of people usually needed a huge sum of money, people on drugs, in usury debt, or supporting gravely ill family members, and they would not be signing an agreement for only three matches.

For most low-level fighters who had only agreed to three matches, the profit from this match had already exceeded expectations. The number who would have the nerve to gamble once more would absolutely not be many.

This was like throwing money into the water, like throwing meat buns at a dog. Zhao Laojiu could not possibly be that stupid.

Wei Qian’s mind was calmer than it had ever been before, spinning at almost full speed. Then suddenly, he stopped in his tracks.

Zhao Laojiu’s words, go change your clothes, abruptly echoed in his ears. Wei Qian realized what had felt wrong, it was the changing room.

From the very beginning, Wei Qian had vaguely felt that the arrangement of the fighting platforms was not normal.

According to ordinary logic, platforms for adjacent levels ought to be next to each other, which would also make things more convenient for the audience. The platforms for the other levels really were lined up like that, but the low-level ones were not.

The very lowest-level platform was near the main entrance, while the second-level one was all the way at the innermost part.

That meant if a second-level fighter wanted to get back to the changing room, he had to pass through a narrow side passage. It was so narrow that only one person could get through at a time. Inside it was almost pitch black. Supposedly the light had broken and had not been fixed yet.

And when fighters came up onto the platform, they entered from the outside so the guests could see them clearly. But when they came down, there was another rule requiring them to leave through the fighter passage, so they would not block the guests’ line of sight. The guests were not people they could afford to offend.

Which meant that when a second-level fighter stepped down from the platform, he had only that one passage to take. And that dark, long, narrow path was already right in front of Wei Qian.

Money and… hot blood.

In a flash, Wei Qian understood exactly how Zhao Laojiu intended to work this.

Imagine a poor fighter, lucky by chance, carrying in his arms a huge sum of money the likes of which he had never seen in his life, walking into that passage overjoyed. Deep in the innermost part, if he were suddenly ambushed, what would happen?

And if the attacker not only beat him viciously and injured him, but also robbed him of the money on his body, what then?

Being ambushed without warning in the dark dealt an enormous psychological blow. And for a person who had just won a fight on the platform, whose blood had not yet cooled, he would not feel fear or lingering dread because of the attack. He would only feel anger, even hatred. It was uncontrolled anger that would ignite that swelling confidence which had originally still been rational and controllable.

Not to mention the money.

If it was money he had never gotten, that was one thing. But if he got it and then had it snatched right out of his hands, anyone would be enraged… and people like them, all the more so. They would go mad.

Simple and brutal, but guaranteed to be astonishingly effective.

Wei Qian’s palms were soaked through with sticky cold sweat.

Right then, someone behind him asked in a low voice, “Why did you stop?”

In the west side of the city, San Pang felt as if his body was about to burst apart from fear.

Even now, San Pang still did not know what exactly had happened to Wei Qian and Wei Zhiyuan. He only knew that those two little bastards had run off without even a word of warning, leaving Grandma Song so anxious she was practically spinning in circles and nearly climbing the walls. She no longer even had the energy to call him fatso. Every day when she saw him, she would interrogate him at length like Xianglin Sao, chattering on and on without stopping.

San Pang was anxious too. After what had happened to Ma Zi that one time, even though he never said it out loud, he had practically developed psychological trauma.

On top of that, being nagged by Grandma Song every single day had nearly pushed him to the brink.

That lasted until he received a text from an unfamiliar number, written in Wei Zhiyuan’s tone.

That same day, San Pang bought a ticket from a scalper and rushed over. The entire time, he had been consumed with extreme dread, especially after receiving the message asking him to go find some corpse or other for Wei Qian and Wei Zhiyuan.

Of course, when the word corpse only existed on paper, it could still do no more than stir up San Pang’s worry and unease… It was only when he actually saw those genuine corpses with his own eyes that he was scared nearly out of his wits, with no warning at all.

San Pang and Gou Huanle slipped into the illegal little workshop. Along the way, Gou Huanle seemed able to sense the fear and caution of the human beside it, and actually did not make a single sound. The others had probably already driven away. Only one middle-aged man had been left behind to keep watch.

The middle-aged man was in a gloomy little room. San Pang took one look and saw that it was a crude makeshift shrine, with a Buddha statue set up inside. That man was trembling as he burned incense and kowtowed. The courtyard was piled with scrap copper and rotten iron. San Pang and Gou Huanle carefully avoided all that junk and headed toward a place that looked like it stored refining tanks.

Once inside, anyone timid enough could have pissed themselves on the spot. There was a whole row of troughs in there, and every one of them held corpses, all lying with their faces turned outward, white eyes rolled up, mouths hanging open. The corpse nearest the outside was still stiff. The ones deeper inside had already begun to give off waves of rotting stench in Guangdong’s humid, warm weather… The troughs were not full yet. They were probably waiting until they were full before burning them all together.

San Pang dropped onto his ass right there on the spot. At the same time, Gou Huanle gave a terrified bark.