Yan Xiaodao practically sprinted into the arrivals hall that day and immediately saw Qi Baoshan strolling leisurely toward him. Master Qi was holding a small Starbucks cup, yet he wore a simple front-buttoned silk jacket with gray cloth shoes. The combination should have looked slightly incongruous, but his mild, fair-featured face somehow softened every jarring little detail around him into an understated elegance all his own.
Yan Xiaodao raked a hand through his hair, sincere apology in his eyes. “Godfather, sorry. We got here late.”
Qi Baoshan tossed his small suitcase through the air to Yang Xifeng, hooked an arm around his godson, and leaned so close to Xiaodao’s cheek and ear that they nearly touched. He took one sniff and immediately recoiled. “Good lord… You’re barely late, but what the hell happened to make you smell like that?!”
“Just hacked up a cow on the way here!” Yan Xiaodao grinned innocently, showing his teeth.
“Sure. You smell exactly like cow offal and bloody guts.” Qi Baoshan sneered.
“It’s windy once you get outside.” Yan Xiaodao draped a cashmere-lined jacket over his godfather’s shoulders.
Qi Baoshan promptly looked it over. “Hey, your taste isn’t bad today. Good choice. You’ve improved since the last one.”
“Tsk…” Yan Xiaodao mocked himself. “I did get my start selling clothes and shoes, after all.”
A big boss naturally did not travel alone. Several attendants and bodyguards were actually following behind him, but at this moment they consciously kept well back. Along with Yang Xifeng carrying the suitcase, they followed silently and unobtrusively without interrupting, making the absolute distinction between insiders and outsiders plain to see. Qi Baoshan hugged the cow-reeking Yan Xiaodao tightly and laughed as they walked, then took off the cashmere jacket, now warm with his body heat. “It looks too young on me. Doesn’t suit me. It’ll look better on you.”
Yan Xiaodao was still caught off guard when Qi Baoshan pinched the fabric at the front of his suit. The warm, domestic intimacy between father and son made everything seem perfectly natural. “Quit standing there in a daze. It’s fine. Take yours off and let me wear that instead.”
Yan Xiaodao felt a little guilty. “Mine really stinks.”
Qi Baoshan smiled faintly. “What do you smell like that I haven’t smelled before? If I was going to be disgusted by you, I would’ve fucking dumped you in a drainage ditch fifteen years ago instead of raising you all this way.”
＊
Anyone who had never met Qi Baoshan would have had trouble believing that a man like this was a wealthy port magnate who held enormous sway in his corner of the city, someone with connections on both the legitimate and criminal sides, who had weathered every kind of storm and once been ruthless enough to do whatever needed doing.
All that exaggerated nonsense in jianghu novels was just that—nonsense. The man certainly did not have three heads and six arms. In fact, there was no vicious or murderous aura between his brows at all. He had a long, even face, fair skin, and a quiet, restrained appearance and temperament.
The ones who looked openly ferocious, bared their teeth at everyone, and had no schemes in their heads were the first to get surrounded and wiped out the moment they showed themselves. How could people like that survive for long?
Qi Baoshan was not particularly old either, only in his early forties. He had taken good care of himself and looked like an ordinary, cultured middle-aged man—surprisingly approachable, even. With his gold-rimmed glasses, silk jacket, cloth shoes, and square leather case in hand, his bearing and posture made him look as though he had stepped back a century into the late Qing or Republican era to embody the local character of this old city. Clearly, he was no ordinary man after all.
Yan Xiaodao drove on the way home.
Yang Xifeng was demoted to the passenger seat. Bored with nothing else to do, he put his fast mouth to work and embellished the entire story of chopping open a truck and herding cattle until it became even more ridiculous than it already was.
Qi Baoshan quietly listened to the show, then noticed the shopping bag on the back seat. There was another thick coat inside, but the color and style looked like something meant for a woman.
“Who’d you buy that one for?” Qi Baoshan asked, staring at the back of Yan Xiaodao’s head.
“My mom,” Yan Xiaodao said.
“I was buying one anyway, so I got hers at the same time. When those little spring winds blow down from Inner Mongolia, she still needs something warm. Her new place looks pretty bare and doesn’t seem very warm either. I want to add a few more things.”
Qi Baoshan had no wife, so there was only one person Yan Xiaodao could mean when he said “Mom”: the countrywoman surnamed Yan who had found him by the roadside all those years ago and raised him as her own.
“Good.”
Qi Baoshan nodded and said only that one word. After a long while, though, he reached forward and vigorously ruffled his godson’s hair, then squeezed his shoulder. It was a long time before he let go, something unspoken shining in his eyes.
Xiaodao. Good.
Today, you defer to me in everything. I have no biological son, so there will inevitably be people who say you flatter me, cling to powerful connections, harbor ulterior motives, and have your eye on all the benefits waiting for you in the future. Maybe even I would think that way. Maybe even I would have no choice but to guard against you…
But you’re good to that poor old countrywoman who spent her whole life penniless and insignificant. That is why I respect you, Yan Xiaodao, for truly valuing loyalty and affection and for knowing how to repay kindness.
At noon that day, the group returned home—to Master Qi’s quiet private courtyard residence in the city.
The courtyard stood on prime real estate in the city center, surrounded by bustling commercial districts and constant traffic. Yet several nearby streets had taken a different path and been developed into pedestrian streets for tourism and leisure. Every road lay beneath the shadows of plane trees and locust trees, making the area a rare pocket of tranquility amid the noise. The houses lining those streets were all surviving buildings from the late Qing and Republican periods, each built to its own plans and style, no two completely alike.
Gray tiles over blue-brick walls, stone columns and whitewashed facades; behind the gate, a Guanyin figure trickled water, while beneath the veranda, mynah birds kept company.
The residence had originally been built as the mansion of a vice president during the Republican era. After the political regime changed, it spent several decades serving as offices for publishing and propaganda departments before Qi Baoshan eventually used money and connections to buy it. Naturally, the neighbors on every side of these streets were also the “imperial relatives and aristocrats” of the previous and present dynasties. There were no ordinary nobodies among them.
In recent years, outsiders saw Qi Baoshan as a detached, cultured “scholar-businessman.” He did not seem to have any particularly impressive family background or education, yet he had developed a taste for refinement and elegance. Most days he stayed in the courtyard reading, playing with his birds, or arranging antiques, beeswax amber, and agarwood.
Qi Baoshan ate slowly, chewing at an unhurried pace. Yan Xiaodao ate quickly. When he was finished, he personally went out to fetch a basin of warm water, bent down, slid it beneath the dining table, removed Qi Baoshan’s shoes, and let his godfather soak his feet while continuing to eat, easing the fatigue of the journey.
After a while, Qi Baoshan remembered something and turned to look for Yang. “Fengfeng, that suitcase you brought back—the present I brought for your boss… How’s the new house treating you?”
“The house is great!” Yan Xiaodao answered with solemn enthusiasm. “Thank you, Godfather.”
Those large European-style villas were actually part of Baoding Real Estate’s “Linwan Seaview Modern District” development, which was basically their own territory. There would always be a place available whenever he wanted one. If Yan Xiaodao felt like it, he could maintain three or four homes and sleep somewhere different every night. He also liked living together with three or five of his brothers. In ordinary life, he and his godfather did not live together; each had his own affairs to handle.
Qi Baoshan sighed. “Hey, I really ought to go over there one day. I hardly ever visit anymore. Bear Two probably won’t even recognize me when he sees me. Think he’ll bite me?”
“He wouldn’t dare!” Yan Xiaodao laughed. “If he dares bite you, I’ll beat him with a stick!”
While eating, Qi Baoshan suddenly asked Yang Xifeng again, “Fengfeng, has your boss ever brought a woman home?”
“Huh?” Yang Xifeng was sitting on a tall little stool about five paces away, tearing into a chicken skewer. His eyes immediately lit up as he raised his head. “Don’t think so? Never seen one. He never brings anybody home, so how are we supposed to see anything?”
“Bring them home just to humiliate you lot?” Yan Xiaodao shot Fengfeng a cold look. “I’m considerate of you boys. You’ve been living hard lives so long you couldn’t survive that kind of stimulation.”
Yang Xifeng protested indignantly, “Yeah, our lives aren’t even as good as Bear Two’s and Third Lady’s. We’re worse off than dogs!”
Qi Baoshan laughed too, pointing at Yan Xiaodao with a razor-clam shell between his fingers. “You—who have you got? Bring her home so I can have a look too. Ah, this really is irritating.”
Yan Xiaodao lowered his eyes. He did not want to discuss something this private. “Nobody. Nothing serious.”
Yan Xiaodao certainly had women. There were one or two longtime “female confidantes” from the demimonde whom he had known for years, but he never brought them home. Sometimes he spent the night elsewhere and left at daybreak. One thing could be said for him: he handled his affairs openly and without much concealment. Even when he paid for sex, he paid generously and kept things mutually willing; he did not mistreat or make life difficult for women, and he stayed away from respectable young women who had nothing to do with that world.
In front of several younger brothers in the room, Qi Baoshan said bluntly, “Xiaodao, stop hiding it from me. I know about the one or two women around you. They’re both quite pretty, but their status and family backgrounds simply aren’t presentable… You could never end up together. They’re nowhere near good enough for you! I was thinking…”
It was the words “not good enough for you” that changed Yan Xiaodao’s expression. He rejected the idea coolly. “What’s not good enough? What status or family background do I have? Who am I good enough for?”
“Hey—stop right there.” Qi Baoshan raised a hand to shut him up, his gaze fixing firmly on Yan Xiaodao’s face. “What status and family background do you have? You’re my son, Qi Baoshan’s son. That is your status. So tell me, who’s good enough for you?!”
Qi Baoshan seemed to have thought this through long ago and spoke in a tone that allowed no argument. “I’m thinking of looking around among the families nearby. At minimum, a girl from the household of a ‘fourth-rank official’ or above. Three or four years younger than you would be about right. Family background, looks, education, personality—not one of them can be lacking, or even I won’t approve.”
Yan Xiaodao did not respond again. Refusing to answer was his silent resistance.
‘Fourth-rank official or above’… Meaning at least a bureau- or department-level official?
Yang Xifeng had a skewer clenched between his teeth and laughed. “What’re we doing here, then? Just get us a third-generation Red princess! Bro, drive a hundred and twenty kilometers west and that city’s full of princesses!”
Elio’s Notes: Qi Baoshan is jokingly mapping modern bureaucratic rank onto the old imperial nine-rank system. “Third-generation Red” refers to descendants of senior revolutionary families; “princess” here means a woman from an exceptionally powerful political family.
Yan Xiaodao could tell his godfather was talking complete nonsense today and had wandered far off topic. There was clearly something behind all this. Qi Baoshan definitely had some serious matter bottled up that he intended to use to “straighten him out.” Had Yan Xiaodao screwed up some job recently?
＊
That evening, Yan Xiaodao did not stay with his godfather. Instead, he took several police officers he knew out to dinner. He called everyone himself and booked a table at Ziyunlou’s “Eight Great Bowls” in the city, serving authentic local seafood—fish, shrimp, crab, and sea cucumber.
Over drinks and dishes, the conversation ranged through gossip from every corner of the country, along with high-level rumors from neighboring Yandu.
Mr. Yan could drink impressively at the table. By himself, he put away as much alcohol as the four cops seated around him combined, while repeatedly urging those gentlemen not to drink, or at least to drink less, so they would not violate discipline. “If you don’t touch the booze and only eat seafood, it doesn’t count as breaking the Eight-Point Regulation.”
Elio’s Notes: The “Eight-Point Regulation” refers to official conduct and austerity restrictions intended to curb extravagant entertainment and other excesses among public officials.
He was not asking the police to do anything for him either. He only wanted to make friends and never forced anyone into a difficult position, which was why they dared eat with him. Once the meal ended, there would be no additional strings attached.
During dinner, one officer casually shared a piece of gossip. A major southern province had recently cracked an enormous case—a fifteen-year-old cold case that had never been solved. They had finally found the principal culprit, but the authorities had not yet worked out how to word the press release or publicly announce the details.
“A major criminal case?” Yan Xiaodao asked casually.
The officer nodded. “It was a huge case back then. Of course, none of us would’ve known anything about it—we were probably still in middle school. An armored cash vehicle belonging to the biggest state-owned bank in that province got robbed. Supposedly there was fifteen million in cash and foreign currency? The accomplices were all caught, but the mastermind escaped and stayed on the run. He had several lives on his hands, including cops, and then he just vanished. Fifteen years, and nobody saw him again.”
“Who did it?” Only then did Yan Xiaodao raise his eyes with real interest.
“Just some desperate outlaw. Had a military-service background too,” the officer answered.
“Death penalty for sure, then.” Yan Xiaodao grunted.
“Unfortunately, it’s too late for the death penalty. By the time our people found his trail, he’d already been dead for fifteen years—they found incomplete skeletal remains from an unidentified corpse. After testing the DNA and comparing it against the records in the archive, they discovered it was actually the mastermind who’d escaped back then.” The officer shared a few side details pieced together internally, though naturally he could not know the full inside story of another province’s investigation. When he finished, he stared thoughtfully at Yan Xiaodao. “So you see why they can’t explain the case properly to the public yet. The killer himself got killed, leaving the police nothing but a pile of rotting bones. That means maybe somebody silenced him too, and there’s still a real culprit hiding behind him. Or maybe he ran into some freak accident and died unexpectedly back then… What do you think?”
Yan Xiaodao spat out a crab leg, then easily crushed a gigantic crab claw nearly the size of his palm between his fingers. He shoved the whole claw into his mouth, worked the crabmeat out with his tongue and teeth, then spat out a pile of shell. Even eating crab, he somehow managed to do it with the sweeping force of iron cavalry conquering mountains and rivers.
Finally, he chewed a thin slice of ginger and looked up. “If I had to guess—pure gut feeling—I’d say the former. There’s still a real culprit behind it, and somebody silenced him. He had the life to make the fortune but not the life to enjoy it. Did somebody also snatch that fifteen million out from under him?”
The officer who had shared the story looked up at him. “Mr. Yan, your gut really is right. Fifteen million was an enormous amount of money fifteen years ago.”
＊
Officer Sun called a server into the private room to settle the bill. The server bent closer and said, “Sir, the gentleman beside you has already paid.”
Officer Sun offered an apologetic pleasantry. “Mr. Yan, look at you. You’re always doing this.”
In some respects, Yan Xiaodao had the habits of a very traditional northern man. There was nothing he would not do for his brothers and friends, and whenever they ate together, he always fought to pay the bill. Simple and generous.
Yan Xiaodao said goodbye to the officers inside the private room. He did not escort the whole group through the front entrance and make a public spectacle of being seen together. Instead, he waited several minutes after the others left before departing alone.
He knew the way well and went out through a side entrance, heading downstairs to retrieve his car. Beneath the dim lights of the underground garage, his tall shadow stretched along the staircase.
Another shadow emerged from behind the wall at the corner. Only the shadow was visible, not the person; the black shape on the ground slowly spread outward like spilled ink.
Years in the underworld had made Yan Xiaodao cautious. He turned sideways and retreated three steps back into the stairwell, crushing the burning cigarette butt directly into his palm. When he could see a shadow but not the person casting it, he would never be the first to expose himself.
A woman’s seductive voice drifted around the corner in several lingering murmurs, followed by a man and woman almost wrapped around each other as they stumbled out of the shadows of the corridor. They too had discreetly chosen the side entrance. They were pressed so tightly together that even their shadows on the floor were tangled into one.
The man’s hand had already slipped impatiently beneath the hem of her skirt. The woman gave a flirtatious laugh, and the two entered the elevator.
Yan Xiaodao needed only one glance from behind the corner of the stairwell to recognize her.
It was the wealthy lady who had caused the accident earlier that day while driving a gold Bentley—Ms. Zhao Qifeng.
Perhaps she had decided the red coat had brought her bad luck, because Ms. Zhao had changed into a dark blue one this time. Yan Xiaodao could still identify her from the shape and details, though: the two exaggerated gel-sculpted curls at her temples gave her away.
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