The Cloudtop sailed at full speed across the sea during the day and soon left the waters patrolled by the country’s coast guard, entering the international shipping lanes, everything bathed in the auspicious golden light of peace and calm. Yet beneath that dignified beauty lay extravagance outsiders never saw. The moment the ship crossed beyond domestic jurisdiction, layer after layer peeled away, exposing its true debauched face beneath the surface.
The blazing sunset leapt down to kiss the horizon. As golden wind met jade dew, crimson clouds spread across sea and sky, and purple fireworks suddenly burst above the cruise ship.
A married actress in a dignified black-and-gold mermaid evening gown was caught completely off guard when someone grabbed the hem of her dress. Amid screams from the spectators, the gown was stripped off her and she was hurled into the outdoor pool on deck with an impressively difficult three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin through the air. The Blue Sea Cloudtop feast had officially begun.
The atmosphere and colors of the cruise deck seemed to change in an instant.
The beautifully dressed men and women who had been strolling elegantly over the graceful silver-white body of the enormous liner seemed to rip away the masks they had only halfheartedly been wearing. They stripped off the layer of human skin that served as nothing more than an inconvenient fig leaf, and everywhere were trembling bodies plunging into revelry….
Yan Xiaodao had been relatively unlucky. He was staying in one of the more affordable cabins on the lowest passenger deck and quickly discovered that it really was extremely “affordable.” Even with the curtains drawn, they could not block out the wildly moving silhouettes outside, some of them tangled together.
Stepping outside the cabin was no improvement. The restaurants and ballrooms had apparently gotten started too. He could hear people going at it right in the corridor outside his room, banging into his door in rhythm with what they were doing.
Yan Xiaodao considered it for a moment. If that unusual person really was aboard the ship right now, whether he had come willingly or was being held under some form of confinement, he probably would not choose a bottom-deck cabin with scenery this lousy like Yan Xiaodao had. It would be far beneath his status.
He quickly took out his phone and sent a text message.
At that exact moment, Young Master Liang Youhui, standing beside the pool, had just had his pants stripped off from behind and was being driven into the water like a big white fish. The “big white fish” even burst back above the surface and struggled stubbornly once or twice before his phone followed him down with a splash.
“Fuck…” Yan Xiaodao narrowed his eyes behind the gap in the curtains and watched helplessly.
Yan Xiaodao had been so bored that he had already finished half of The Battle of Moscow. He was engrossed in the part where the hard-fighting Siberian Red Army, holding its ground on brutally frozen positions, turned the tide and held the German forces at bay in the outskirts only eight kilometers from Moscow. Just as he reached a particularly thrilling passage that had him itching to applaud, Young Master Liang fought an “encounter battle” of his own in the pool with some plastic-faced little demon from who knew where, finally recovered his phone from the bottom, and crawled back onto the deck.
Fortunately, the new titanium-cased phone was exceptionally waterproof. In Liang Youhui’s palm, three message-alert tones sounded in rapid succession: ding, ding, ding. The messages appeared directly on the screen.
At the sound of the alert, Liang Youhui’s eyes lit up beneath the sunset fireworks, because he had assigned special notification tones to certain “close friends.”
The text from Yan Xiaodao was written in a teasing tone: 【Hui-baby, I timed you. Not even twelve minutes. Your stamina’s worse than a giant panda’s.】
Liang Youhui immediately called him back. He wiped himself down carelessly with a towel, pulled on a pair of swim trunks, and followed the faint sound of a ringing phone into the ship. Through the corridors he went, searching left and right, until he reached the doorway of one ocean-view cabin. Yan Xiaodao stood leaning there in a suit and leather shoes, wearing an amused, leisurely expression as though he had been waiting specifically for him.
“Keep pretending! You bastard, you’re still pretending with me!” Liang Youhui pointed at Yan Xiaodao’s nose, but his happiness was simple and completely genuine.
Yan Xiaodao braced one hand against the doorframe and let him into the cabin. “You really think I couldn’t get myself a ticket?”
Liang Youhui took one look around the room and immediately felt that this miserable space of a few dozen square meters was so cramped there was nowhere to put his feet. “Why didn’t you book upstairs with me?”
Yan Xiaodao answered dejectedly, “Tsk. My godfather chewed me out. Said I was neglecting proper business and coming out here to fool around. I didn’t have the nerve to use his money to book the top deck.”
Liang Youhui threw an arm around his good buddy and patted Xiaodao on the chest. “You. If you’re short on money, just say the word to your brother.”
Yan Xiaodao continued playing miserable, mocking himself. “With this thick old face of mine, I still couldn’t fetch a decent price from you.”
Liang Youhui rolled his eyes. “Whose fault is it that you refused to let me keep you in a golden house when we were younger?!”
The two always traded filthy jokes like this, but neither of them ever meant it seriously.
Liang Youhui was quite handsome, a young master who had been pampered from childhood and was also the only son in his family. He had seen plenty of grand occasions but had never experienced the dangers of the underworld, nor had he ever known what it was like to be displaced and tossed around by life. Boys raised in wealth like this were usually straightforward and lacking in schemes, generous to friends, with more money than they could ever spend and too lazy to calculate every advantage against everyone else. That was why Yan Xiaodao maintained this friendship with an innocent rich fool who was occasionally useful but did not require constant vigilance.
Yan Xiaodao chatted casually for a few minutes, asking only about what was going on aboard the ship.
Liang Youhui was an honest kid who said whatever he knew and nodded through the list one by one. “Yeah. Upstairs on the left is some really important third-generation Red from our city. On the right is You Haodong, you know, the crown prince of your development zone. Directly below me is Jian Mingjue, and he brought several women with him… Huh? You know all of them, right?”
Yan Xiaodao tilted his head and looked at Young Master Liang, the tiny black mole beside his nose lifting with an amused expression. “What exactly did you come aboard this ship to do? You here fishing for the big fish?”
Liang Youhui shrugged. “What fish would I be fishing for? I came to entertain myself. I was bored at home, and you never come play with me!”
Looks like Liang Youhui really is an outsider. He doesn’t know anything.
Liang Youhui, however, was also looking Yan Xiaodao up and down and thinking to himself, Xiaodao’s still better. His face and body are so damn easy on the eyes. That plastic-surgery freak in the pool just now looked like some third- or fourth-rate little demon crawling out of the Cave of Silken Web. Put him next to Yan Xiaodao and he wouldn’t even deserve to carry his shoes!
Liang Youhui suddenly remembered something. “Oh, right. When I was boarding earlier, You Haodong and the Jian family’s second son both started grilling me about whether you’d come aboard and what you’ve been up to lately. Isn’t that hilarious? Since when have you been sleeping with those two?”
Yan Xiaodao’s eyebrow moved. “What did you tell them?”
Liang Youhui said, “I said you’re such a straight-laced idiot there’s no way you’d come to something like this. And now you’ve made me look like I lied to them!”
Yan Xiaodao said, “…What did those two say they wanted me for?”
Liang Youhui said, “You Haodong said he borrowed a golf club from you last time you played and wanted to return it? Jian Mingjue said he had a particularly ‘fresh ace’ in his deck and asked whether you’d ever be interested in coming over to ‘play the ace’ together?”
Yan Xiaodao wore a calm smile as gentle as spring wind turning into fine rain. What complete fucking nonsense. They had made up terrible excuses. You Haodong and Jian Mingjue were most likely both in the know; both had boarded the ship to cast their nets for that big fish.
Master Qi had repeatedly warned him to keep one person alive and make sure nobody else killed him. The implication could hardly be clearer: other people had also come for the target, and some of them might make a move.
Yan Xiaodao knew these methods well. Even though he still had not seen the actual target’s face or found the man himself, he was already calculating, one by one, which troublesome figures aboard this ship might become obstacles in his path.
＊
Now that he had connected with Young Master Liang, from that evening onward Yan Xiaodao openly showed his face aboard the Cloudtop instead of continuing to hide. He deliberately attached himself to Young Master Liang from Yandu. For one thing, Liang came from a family with real status and money; for another, when the two of them came and went together, outsiders would simply assume they were buddies who had come out looking for some fun on the side.
That same evening, Liang Youhui took Yan Xiaodao to the top-deck open-air fireworks restaurant for a first-rate French dinner.
The sea breeze was giving Yan Xiaodao a headache, and Young Master Liang, unusually considerate for once, waved over a cup of coffee for him.
Yan Xiaodao sipped half the coffee. It was rich, with a lingering fruity, woody aroma at the finish. Quite distinctive. As expected of coffee from a high-end French restaurant.
“This is called Southeast Asian elephant-dung coffee.” Liang Youhui wiped his mouth with a snow-white napkin and enthusiastically broadened Yan Xiaodao’s horizons. “It’s already the most expensive, top-tier coffee there is. You have to use beans from some particular estate in Panama, mix them with bananas, mangoes, and sweet sugarcane, and feed them to elephants—female elephants between three and six years old from Myanmar. Then you wait for them to shit the coffee beans back out along with the dung, sift the whole beans out one by one, roast them until they’re fragrant, grind them fresh, and the final result is the cup you’re drinking right now.”
Yan Xiaodao nearly spat it back out.
Liang Youhui burst into laughter, completely unconcerned, and carefully savored the aroma of his own coffee. Then he leaned his head closer and added with great seriousness, “I heard they specifically have to be virgin young female elephants—the coffee beans they digest supposedly smell sweeter.”
Yan Xiaodao had nothing to say. He glanced at the menu and wine list, both entirely in French. You little bastard are only bullying me because I can’t read foreign languages.
“This is even fucking worse than that old Ciqikou douzhi you tricked me into drinking last time!” Yan Xiaodao grimaced. “That douzhi you city people drink—I knew it was disgusting the second it hit my mouth. This elephant-shit coffee doesn’t even seem bad while you’re drinking it, but the more you think about the aftertaste, the more disgusting it gets. Aren’t you basically drinking the water they rinsed out an elephant’s intestines with?”
Liang Youhui laughed so hard he choked.
Yan Xiaodao never put on airs, and that only made a pampered rich boy who was accustomed to posturing find him even more appealing.
As it happened, Jian Mingjue and You Haodong had independently chosen the same restaurant that evening. They could be seen several tables away, each with a different female companion than before.
The two of them tacitly chose not to come over and make conversation with Yan Xiaodao. They merely nodded from a distance, said nothing, and pretended nothing was going on. Everyone was apparently here purely for entertainment.
In such a romantic Western restaurant, everyone else had brought a beautiful female companion. Only Liang Youhui had brought another man to dinner.
Liang Youhui felt the money had been well spent. Yan Xiaodao was far better than any of the tacky little demons he knew; even if Liang could not sleep with him, he could at least look at him more. Yan Xiaodao looked completely straight anyway. There was no hooking him.
After nightfall, the Cloudtop naturally descended once again into perfumed haze and howling madness.
By then, the cruise ship was already traveling through waters where several national boundaries met. It had long since left their own country’s territorial waters, beyond domestic jurisdiction and the reach of domestic law.
Liang Youhui wanted to drag Yan Xiaodao to a Tibetan-style Joyful Buddha massage bathhouse to indulge himself. Naturally, the attendants were male. The full package was available; they could twist you into yoga positions and massage every pressure point inside and out.
Yan Xiaodao sneered and pushed Young Master Liang’s face away. “You and I aren’t going into the same room. I know you’re headed through the door on the right. I’ll go have fun through the one on the left. We’ll each play our own game. I’m leaving!”
Yan Xiaodao was pointing toward the massage room on the left marked with a women’s symbol.
The two parted ways at the entrance to the pleasure district. Yan Xiaodao, however, did not enter the women’s massage room to seek entertainment. That elephant-intestine-rinse-water coffee had made his stomach feel like shit, and he had lost all interest.
That night, both the sea and the cruise ship remained perfectly calm, without the slightest ripple of disturbance. The quiet felt unusually profound.
Yan Xiaodao lay on his bed staring at the ceiling of the cabin, silently calculating the route. During the day, they would probably pass through the port of another country and stop there for a few hours. One more day after that, and they would reach Yilulifu Island.
The next day, close to noon, Young Master Liang’s call finally arrived. He had probably nearly drained himself dry the night before and only now recovered enough blood to crawl out of bed.
Yan Xiaodao’s voice was soft and lazy. “I just got up too. This bed’s too damn hard. Uncomfortable.”
Liang Youhui immediately said hopefully, “Then come sleep with me. My bed is super fluffy and super soft!”
Yan Xiaodao sneered. “You a good enough brother or not? Are we swapping beds, or just swapping rooms?”
“Hmph.” Young Master Liang got shut down yet again and still did not have the nerve to make the joke any dirtier. He could clearly sense that Yan Xiaodao possessed a naturally commanding presence. He was absolutely not as easygoing as he appeared. Yan Xiaodao hardly ever raised his voice or spoke harshly to anyone, yet somehow nobody dared take liberties with him or treat him like a plaything. Besides, Liang had never even seen Xiaodao without clothes on. This was entirely his own enthusiastic fantasy.
Yan Xiaodao never casually took his clothes off in front of outsiders.
Under his suit was a shirt. Under his shirt was a black waist wrap. Along his waist were two rows of blue-green and white-edged blades. Every morning at exactly six-thirty, he sat bolt upright in bed, scrubbed himself down with cold water, calmed his mind in meditation, extended his arms to work his knives, ate cheap food in enormous portions, and kept his daily expenses simple and casual. These had been his habits for many years.
The cruise ship slowly approached the harbor, navigating precariously between rows of enormous offshore cranes.
Beneath the clear daylight, the water glittered brilliantly. Many people came out of their cabins and stood along one side of the railings to admire the magnificent harbor scenery.
Some of the male and female guests had already changed into tropical shorts and dresses and were lining up to disembark. They had four hours to wander around freely and get something to eat.
Liang Youhui vividly described the physical and spiritual experience of trying all eighteen martial arts at the Tibetan-style massage room the night before.
“It was like doing acrobatics. There were a ridiculous number of positions. I’m a fucking veteran driver, and even I got so nervous I was shaking! Jesus Christ, I had to start acting too and cooperate with all those attendants, a whole bunch of people rolling around all over the massage table like we were shooting gay porn!”
“Had you hanging upside down doing the splits, did they? Stretch all your tendons for you?” Yan Xiaodao laughed disdainfully.
“Oh, you’ve tried it too? Have you done the flying trapeze?” Liang Youhui immediately asked with great interest.
“I’m old now. Can’t fly anymore. Haven’t played that stuff in years,” Yan Xiaodao said with a cold laugh.
Yan Xiaodao kept exchanging nonsense with Liang Youhui, but his eyes were rapidly picking Jian Mingjue and You Haodong out of the crowd on deck, watching where each man went and whether they intended to disembark.
Jian Mingjue had probably gotten trapped by several little demons. With women hanging off both arms, he was dragged off the ship to go shopping.
You Haodong, meanwhile, sat at a small table in the rooftop open-air café without moving, his eyes constantly wandering, looking extraordinarily tense and preoccupied.
A light vessel two sizes smaller than the Cloudtop also slowly approached the harbor and moored alongside them, apparently to load or unload cargo. Baoding Group itself operated overseas shipping, so Yan Xiaodao studied the vessel. It did not resemble an ordinary transport ship. Various mechanical arms stood at both bow and stern, and there appeared to be a trawl at the rear.
It looked like a large fishing vessel.
“Whaling ship, maybe? I saw one on an Alaskan cruise route,” Young Master Liang remarked casually, then tried to pull Xiaodao ashore to have fun.
Right. It was a whaling vessel, sturdy and built to take punishment, with a maximum draft that looked to be around ten meters.
But why would a whaling ship come into a Southeast Asian route like this, with narrow waterways and islands packed everywhere?
Along both sides of the ship, tanks loaded with large fish and shrimp were faintly visible, so apparently it had arrived fully laden. On the broad deck, one raised section had been covered completely with black oilcloth.
After a whale was caught, it was generally placed on deck and covered like that. Whaling was tightly restricted internationally, and there were Japanese markings on the side of the ship. Probably another illegal whaling fleet organized by those Japanese devils, Yan Xiaodao thought.
At that moment, Yan Xiaodao noticed that a harbor crane had begun slowly lifting the heavy cargo concealed beneath the black covering—and it was being moved toward their cruise ship!
Whatever it was, something that could be lifted and handled so freely obviously was not a round, slippery dead whale. Beneath the black cloth was something shaped more like an oversized shipping container. It was eventually transferred to the stern of the Cloudtop, where supplies were loaded and unloaded.
Yan Xiaodao turned his head and stared at the operation, then suddenly looked upward again for You Haodong at the rooftop café.
You Haodong had stood up now too and was staring in the same direction, at the container shrouded beneath black cloth.
Yan Xiaodao suddenly understood.
The “big fish” had very likely come aboard—and in a way more bizarre than he could have imagined.
Perhaps that person had not dared board within Chinese territory, or perhaps the transfer involved some transaction that could not be openly explained. Whatever the reason, another vessel had brought the big fish aboard the Cloudtop at the port of this Southeast Asian country, in a place where jurisdiction was murky. From here, they would continue on to Yilu Island. That had to be it.
Yan Xiaodao had wondered before whether the big fish was coming aboard voluntarily for entertainment or being brought aboard under coercion.
He got his answer very quickly. The black-oilcloth-covered container—or perhaps it was some enormous cage—was not carefully handled as though labeled “Valuable, Fragile, Do Not Touch.” Instead, it was swung straight out and dumped into the sea! Several thick steel cables at the stern, sharp and strong as eagle talons, gripped the top of the enormous cage, leaving its entire lower half carelessly submerged in the salty, freezing seawater….
The color in Yan Xiaodao’s eyes changed. The rolling sea reflected in his pupils as he silently drew in a breath.
Could there really be a living person inside that thing?
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