Chapter Ninety-Four: Night and Fire

In the early hours of the thirty-first, the sky held not the slightest gap for starlight to slip through. Thick black clouds had knotted together overhead, like a vast dark curtain draped across the heavens above High Ridge Village.

Ren Jifu, sleeping on the second floor after drinking too much, was woken in the middle of the night by a swollen bladder. Half dazed, he got up and fumbled around for an empty bottle to piss into, only to catch a foul stench in the air.

"What is that smell... no, something's wrong..."

He jolted awake at once.

Gas.

It was gas.

The cylinder in the yard had sprung a leak?

Impossible. How could it leak for no reason?

Hurrying, he grabbed a flashlight and stuck his head out the window to look. Before he had even switched it on, a point of light suddenly appeared in the yard, glaringly bright against the darkness.

Then that point swelled violently in his field of vision, filling it in an instant.

In that moment, a flash of inspiration struck Ren Jifu. A great many things connected in his mind like scenes flashing through a film reel, lightning-fast and perfectly linked.

For an instant, he seemed to understand something.

But it was already too late.

The fire in the air abruptly contracted toward the center, as though time itself had frozen for a beat. Then the blaze, brimming with force, exploded outward in a thunderous roar.

Boom.

Centered on the three-story building, a fierce column of fire shot straight into the sky.

Within the flames, the top floor of the building seemed to blossom into one enormous firework. Countless paper scraps and cards of all kinds scattered through the air like little spirits born of flame. Many were burned to ash before they ever touched the ground, but even more were hurled by the blast to every corner of the demolition site in High Ridge Village, some whole, some torn and broken.

Barely ten minutes later, the wail of fire trucks sounded outside the village, and a large crowd rushed to the scene.

The blaze was quickly extinguished. The once-standing three-story building had become a ruin, leaving only one wall still standing in miserable defiance, swaying as if it might collapse at any moment.

A charred corpse was carried out from the site.

At the same time, the fire crew discovered countless strange fragments there. Some were intact, some damaged, and more had been burned into charcoal.

Reporters were among the most quick-witted people in the city when it came to news. Not long after the fire was put out, they too appeared outside High Ridge Village. Like the firefighters, they found all sorts of bizarre fragments amid the ruins.

Every scrap seemed to carry shocking information.

Director Qian from the Demolition Office also came to the scene. The moment he saw those fragments, he was stunned to the core.

What... what was going on?

"Director Qian, I have to report these items to my superiors," the fire commander said to him.

...

On the outskirts of Yijiang City.

"Uhh..."

A ghastly groan, like an old hen with its throat cut, sounded as a man slowly sat up beside a ditch reeking of filth.

He Dapeng rubbed his head. His skull felt as though it were splitting, and he stared blankly at the surrounding farmland.

Where was this?

How had he ended up here?

The last thing he remembered was drinking with Ren Jifu in the two-story building. They had drunk and drunk until everything went hazy.

"Could that bastard have drugged me?" He Dapeng was not stupid. He guessed the truth at once, but no matter how hard he thought, he could not understand why Ren Jifu would do something like this.

Drugging him brought Ren Jifu no benefit at all. Even if he died or vanished, the house would not end up in Ren Jifu's hands. On the contrary, he would not get a single cent of the promised payoff.

"Damn it, what kind of evil was that kid cooking up? He came running to say he'd help me at first, and now he's stabbing me in the back... Shit, he couldn't have been sent by the demolition office, could he?"

At that thought, He Dapeng scrambled to his feet and hurried to the nearest provincial highway, waving for a car to stop.

Several cars passed without stopping, but their license plates were all from Yijiang City. He Dapeng felt a little more at ease. It seemed he was still somewhere near Yijiang City.

...

After Yijiang City launched a hard-line crackdown on the internet cafe market, it was no easy thing to find a black internet cafe. After much trouble, Junzi finally found one hidden inside a residential house on the outskirts.

He sat in the far corner of the room. First, just as Zhao Zejun had taught him, he set up a foreign proxy to prevent his IP from being traced, and only then did he log in to the Yijiang City forum.

It was a post he had written long before.

"When you see this post, I should already be dead. My friend is the one posting it for me.

My name is Ren Jifu, and I live in High Ridge Village. By accident, I got involved in gambling...

The debt kept snowballing, from forty thousand to one hundred twenty thousand, growing every day. I had no way to pay it back. My wife and child both abandoned me. To force me to repay, they pushed me off a vehicle and broke one of my legs...

I am worse than dead already. I do not want to live anymore...

But even if I die, I will drag Song Tianming down with me. One more day alive for a man like that means who knows how many families will be ruined...

I stole a great deal of his illegal material and kept it in the building. After I die, many people will certainly see it. Even if they do not, it does not matter. A few days ago, I already mailed copies of these materials to the disciplinary commission, the court, and the public security bureau...

Song Tianming, I will not let you go even as a ghost!

And finally, let my lesson be a warning to everyone: stay away from gambling, and stay away from loan sharks."

After finishing the post, Junzi added several pixelated photographs, along with a number of crucial ledger images, beneath the article.

Then he opened several well-known domestic websites and posted the same content one by one.

...

Almost at the same time, in a late-night food stall somewhere in Yijiang City, Song Tianming's mistress, Xu Yanping, was eating supper with the two underlings who had been stationed with her at the Zejian Company.

The stall had been lively enough, but it was already late, and there were not many customers to begin with. Once those thugs sat down inside and started bragging and yelling, the last two tables hurriedly finished their meals, paid, and left.

Just as the wine cups were being raised, the curtain at the stall's entrance was pulled aside and a gust of cold wind blew in from outside.

"Fuck your mother, can't you see people are sitting here..." one of the underlings barked, then stopped halfway through the sentence.

The person who had come in was not some village girl delivering barbecue.

Jiang Xuan entered smiling, her head wrapped in a bandage and a pair of crutches tucked under one arm. Behind her followed four young men, all broad-shouldered and powerfully built, with corded muscles under their clothes.

The moment they stepped inside, they surrounded Xu Yanping's table.

Xu Yanping narrowed her phoenix eyes. "Jiang Xuan, what do you want?"

Before the two underlings could react, the four men with Jiang Xuan stepped forward without a sound, two restraining each one, while four daggers pressed against the small of the two punks' backs.

Xu Yanping's eyes narrowed. With a vicious glare, she said, "Jiang Xuan, if you dare lay a finger on me today, Old Song will kill your whole family!"

Jiang Xuan casually picked up a beer bottle from the table and glanced at the label. With a slight curl of her lips, she muttered to herself, "What a pity. This bottle would still fetch two dimes if it were turned in for recycling."

"What do you mean by that?"

Before Xu Yanping could finish, Jiang Xuan suddenly turned her wrist and smashed the bottle heavily down on the top of her head.

"Whether Song Tianming lives or dies is still up in the air. You'd better worry about yourself first."

Jiang Xuan tossed the broken bottle away and, leaning on her crutch, limped toward the exit of the red house without once looking back.

"Take them all."

Outside the red house, a nameless van sat waiting in silence, its doors flung wide open.