Early in the morning, the sky looked like shit, gray and overcast.
Four or five cars were parked in front of the electronics factory. One of them—the most expensive—still had its engine running and the heater on. Zhou Ruo An sat inside.
As his assistant, Ren Yu still found it difficult to completely trust his twenty-something employer. Zhou Ruo An was indeed cunning and ruthless, but he was still young, and that inevitably cost him some of the credibility that came naturally with age.
“Fourth Young Master, can you really bring workers over from an electronics factory in the neighboring city and get us running again?”
Zhou Ruo An raised the Southern red agate pendant in his hand and examined its patterns against the weak sunlight. “I don’t have that kind of pull—but if Old Master Jin speaks up, do you think it might be possible?”
“Old Chairman Jin?” Ren Yu’s face lit up. “If it’s him, then this shouldn’t be difficult.”
“Bullshit.” Zhou Ruo An laughed and slipped the pendant back into his pocket. “It’s the end of the year. Everyone’s rushing to fill orders, and their factory is already working flat out. Why would they lend us their workers? Just to fill my order, they’d have to sacrifice their own business. Even if I begged Old Master Jin, he wouldn’t ask them to do that.”
“Then these workers…” Ren Yu hesitated. “Are they fake hires again?”
Zhou Ruo An lazily pulled out a cigarette. “Real. Couldn’t be more real. Otherwise, how would I fool the Second Young Master?”
With the cigarette between his lips, he searched his pockets for a lighter. His words came out muffled around it, sticky and dragging, like an undercooked fried egg. “I did ask Old Master Jin to help me borrow workers, but only for one day. They can make up a single day’s lost output with some overtime. That way, Old Master Jin won’t be putting the neighboring factory in too difficult a position, and they can count it as repaying an old favor.”
“One day?” Ren Yu held up a finger. “What good is one day?”
Zhou Ruo An didn’t answer. After failing to find a lighter, he turned to his newly appointed assistant. “Got a light?”
“N-no.”
Zhou Ruo An smiled and raised a finger too—except his was the middle finger. “You’ve worked in an office for four years, and when your boss wants a cigarette, you don’t even have a lighter?”
Ren Yu looked slightly embarrassed. “President Zhou doesn’t smoke, so I never got into the habit of carrying one.”
“Go borrow one.” Zhou Ruo An pointed toward an ordinary sedan parked across the road. “Ask him.”
Following his gesture, Ren Yu looked over. The driver’s window was halfway down. Every so often, a hand holding a cigarette extended outside to flick away ash. Smoke curled across half of a cold, hard face, blurring the man’s features, but one thing was obvious—he did not look easy to deal with.
“He’s the ‘villain’ you hired?” Ren Yu asked.
Zhou Ruo An bit hard on his cigarette filter. “Just a vicious dog.” He touched the bandage on his neck. “At least he’s useful.”
Ren Yu went to borrow the lighter. He was exceedingly polite, his refined face wearing a practiced smile. Sitting in his own car, Zhou Ruo An cursed under his breath, “Fine, treat people differently depending on who they are—but now you’re doing the same with dogs? What the hell.”
He lit his cigarette with the borrowed lighter and lowered his window halfway to let in some air.
The man in the car across the road looked over. Zhou Ruo An met his gaze without the slightest courtesy, then flicked his wrist and tossed the lighter into a roadside trash bin.
A faint smile suddenly appeared on the other man’s cold face. He brought two fingers together and slowly pressed them against his own neck.
Zhou Ruo An immediately covered the bandage on his neck, his expression changing at once. Between their locked gazes, only the cold wind swept across the asphalt. Zhou Ruo An spat out some cigarette ash, turned forward, and shut the window again.
Ren Yu was still hung up on his earlier question and brought it up once more. “Fourth Young Master, what good is borrowing workers for only one day?”
Still irritated, Zhou Ruo An lifted his eyes and saw two buses slowly approaching along the village road. “Did you spread the word in the village like I told you?”
“I bribed one of the striking villagers. Word’s already gotten around that the Zhou family’s Fourth Young Master brought in workers from out of town.”
Ren Yu turned his head and happened to see villagers hurrying out from the wasteland and swarming toward the electronics factory. “They’ve come looking for us?”
Smoke drifted slowly between Zhou Ruo An’s lips, and his smile deepened. “You’ll understand soon enough why I only borrowed them for one day.”
They clearly hadn’t come in peace—and they were carrying tools.
Zhou Ruo An turned his gaze back toward the sedan across the road. Sure enough, the driver’s door opened and a tall man unfolded himself from the car. He wore a long down jacket and a neat buzz cut, a short cigarette between his fingers. After taking one last drag, he casually flicked it away and crushed it beneath his shoe.
At that signal, the doors of several vans parked along the roadside slid open. One wild, untamed face after another appeared, bringing the words danger and violence vividly to life.
Sometimes, Zhou Ruo An would remember that morning—the pale gray daylight, the silence of the countryside shattered by sudden noise. The buses rolled steadily along the village road, long trails of dust rising behind them and swallowing the withered scenery along the roadside.
The striking villagers blocked the buses with hoes and brooms in hand, shouting like warriors defending their homeland as they tried to drive away the unwanted newcomers.
That was when Lin Yi entered the scene. He seemed particularly suited to winter’s bleak colors, like a blade coated in frost. Just looking at him made one’s skin ache.
At times like this, Lin Yi rarely wasted words. There were no pleasantries; he warned them and tried to stop them. When that failed, he used force.
When he pinned the wrist of the loudest troublemaker beneath his shoe, snowflakes began drifting from the heavy sky. Snow collected in his buzz cut. Amid the curses and cries, he lit another cigarette, crooked a finger, and beckoned Zhou Ruo An over.
“So cool…” Ren Yu murmured sincerely from inside the car.
Zhou Ruo An glanced at him, pushed open the door, and stepped outside. Along with the cold wind pouring into the car came a single remark: “Your glasses are fogged. Wipe them.”
That day, Zhou Ruo An used those one-day-only “new employees” to force the villagers, who had been on strike for two months, to reassess their own value.
After several rounds of confrontation, someone finally broke ranks and denounced the instigator. “The factory benefits were actually pretty good. It was Cui Liu who said we could stay home for these two months and still get paid.”
“Yeah. He said we could go back to work in a few days and we wouldn’t lose a single cent.”
“He even said we’d get an extra two thousand yuan to buy things for New Year.”
With all his attention focused on maneuvering one careful step after another, Zhou Ruo An inevitably relaxed in other ways. His body slipped automatically into an old habit. He lifted his fingers slightly and rubbed his knuckles together—a silent request for Lin Yi’s cigarette.
The gesture had been carved into his bones over the years, as natural as getting hungry when you hadn’t eaten enough, sleepy when you’d eaten too much, or shivering after taking a piss.
Lin Yi watched snow settle on the outstretched hand and melt into droplets. The hand was so pale it looked like cream spread over a cake base. After a moment of silence, he removed the cigarette from his lips and handed it over.
The crowd continued talking over one another, anger threaded through their voices.
Zhou Ruo An accepted the cigarette with obvious satisfaction, not caring how damp the filter was.
“Which one of you is Cui Liu?” he asked around the cigarette.
Everyone turned and pointed toward a man shrinking back among the trees. “That’s Cui Liu! He’s the one who told us to stop working and go home.”
The man being pointed at by dozens of fingers was fiddling with his phone. Seeing the crowd turn against him, he hid it behind his back and tried to defend himself. “Don’t falsely accuse me. I only wanted everyone to earn higher wages.”
“Cui Liu has a point too. There’s nothing wrong with people wanting something better.” Zhou Ruo An stepped in at just the right moment to ease the tension. “You can argue among yourselves about who’s right and who’s wrong, but my order can’t wait. The new workers are going into the factory first.”
With a wave of his hand, the buses started moving again. Their exhaust burst out like a fart that had been held in too long, scattering the freshly fallen snow across the ground.
“You can keep making trouble if you want. I’m going back to work.” A female worker shoved through the crowd. “A few thousand yuan a month is a hell of a lot better than scraping a living out of the fields.”
She hurried forward and entered the factory before the buses could reach it.
“I’m going back too.”
Like a string of firecrackers catching one after another, the reaction spread through the crowd. The villagers threw down their tools and hurried toward the factory, as though if they were even one step too slow, someone else’s ass would already be planted in their spot on the production line.
Ren Yu stood there dumbfounded. When he looked at Zhou Ruo An again, there was newfound respect and admiration in his eyes. From now on, I have to carry a lighter with me at all times. The best one I can get.
Now only one person remained standing in front of Zhou Ruo An—Cui Liu, still clutching his phone.
The call had never been disconnected. Every second continued to tick by.
On the other end, Zhou Zhe’s secretary frowned deeply and covered the receiver as he asked his superior, “All the workers have gone back to work. What do we do now?”
Zhou Zhe was still dressed in his usual plain clothes, but for once, irritation sharpened his normally indifferent tone. “I didn’t expect that bastard to steal the credit. But without the missing components, the order still can’t be completed.”
He raised his eyes, a cold gleam sharpening within them. “I went through all this trouble to put on this show. I can’t let Zhou Ruo An walk onstage and perform the whole thing himself. Get the car ready. I’m going to the county.”
＊
In front of the electronics factory, the wind and snow grew heavier.
The snow seemed to have blown straight into Zhou Ruo An’s eyes, leaving his gaze cold enough to sting.
Dropping his carefully maintained smile, he looked at Cui Liu and asked bluntly, “Were you the one who stole the components from the production line?”
“No.” Cui Liu gripped his phone so tightly that his knuckles turned white. “How could it be me? Don’t frame me.”
His legs were aching from standing so long. Zhou Ruo An crouched with the cigarette between his lips, then glanced upward—only to realize that from this position, Lin Yi beside him looked absurdly tall. Clicking his tongue, he pushed himself back up with his hands on his knees. “Has Bai Ban come back?”
Lin Yi watched Zhou Ruo An bob up and down, his voice as steady as the wind turbine turning in the distance. “Just got back.” He lifted his chin. “Over there.”
As he spoke, a small truck pulled up beside them, its tires carving long tracks through the fresh snow. Before the vehicle had even fully stopped, the person inside had already jumped out.
Bai Ban swaggered over like he owned the place. When he saw Zhou Ruo An, he gave a dismissive snort and tossed something toward him.
Pointing at Cui Liu, he said, “While you kept this old guy occupied here, I turned his house over three times. Finally found it hidden inside the brick-bed cavity. He hid it pretty damn well.”
Cui Liu’s expression changed drastically. “You broke into my house and stole something!”
Bai Ban squatted down on the spot. “What, you gonna report me? A thief crying, ‘Catch the thief’?”
The object had been wrapped in several layers of newspaper. Zhou Ruo An opened it and found exactly the set of missing components. He flicked away his cigarette butt and brushed the loose snow from his clothes. “Everything’s settled. Let’s go.”
He had only just turned around when a sudden rush of air came from behind him.
“Watch out!”
The hoe whistled through the air. Lin Yi yanked Zhou Ruo An into his arms, spun around, and took the heavy blow squarely across his back!