Qi Baoshan was old after all. Yan Xiaodao could not bring himself to use a killing move against him.
If time could have turned back ten years, the balance between them in a fight would have been completely different. But Yan Xiaodao was now in the prime of his strength, while his godfather had undeniably grown old. The outcome was obvious.
What did a man raise a son for? So that one day, when he himself had grown old and weak and lost his former power, that son could rebel and turn the blade back on him, trampling him underfoot? Anyone would find that impossible to bear. All that talk of a kindness as weighty as a mountain, and in the end affection was only paper-thin. Yan Xiaodao could not bring himself to keep fighting either. He had no wish to remain tangled in this. A moment earlier, the thought of subduing Qi Baoshan and taking him to Xue Qian to surrender had flashed through his mind, only to collapse beneath its own weight.
What right did he have to force his godfather to surrender?
Every person’s life was nothing more than the countless choices they made along the way, ultimately spliced together into the thing called fate.
Yan Xiaodao did not draw a blade. He shoved the other man aside with one palm. Today he wanted only to get away, and he was the first to rush out of the cabin and onto the deck.
The ship had already traveled a considerable distance. The docks and shoreline now looked like a row of childish toy blocks, low, blurred, and indistinct.
Yan Xiaodao had no chance to go below and stop the workers running the engines. The deck pitched constantly over the swells, and the ship was moving fast. He and Master Qi finally stood facing each other again at the bow.
Fate had played a bitter joke on the two of them, an invisible hand drawing them into a trap neither could break. Months earlier, when Qi Baoshan sent Yan Xiaodao aboard the Cloudtop to fish for someone, he could never have imagined that only a few months later he himself would become a great fish surrounded and hunted across the sea. And fifteen years ago, when Qi Baoshan returned home in triumph and threw half a million yuan in cash onto the coal mountain, he could never have imagined that father and son would one day fight like this. A clearly drawn Chu River–Han Border now divided their positions, and neither was prepared to yield.
Elio’s Notes: “Chu River–Han Border” is the dividing line on a Chinese xiangqi board, named for the historical Chu–Han conflict. Here it becomes an image for the irreconcilable line drawn between Qi Baoshan and Yan Xiaodao.
The white-shark flotilla closing in from every side drew nearer and nearer to the cargo ship.
Yan Xiaodao bit his lower lip. With nowhere else to turn, he suddenly lunged at Master Qi, trying to seize him bare-handed.
Qi Baoshan drew a gun and pointed it at him. “Don’t move.”
Yan Xiaodao stopped beneath the muzzle, his expression grave.
Qi Baoshan warned him, “Xiaodao, step back. Don’t come any closer.”
Yan Xiaodao asked softly, “Godfather, would you actually shoot me?”
Qi Baoshan smiled bleakly and asked in return, “If you were the one holding a gun on me right now, would you fire?”
Yan Xiaodao shook his head. “I couldn’t do it.”
“Neither could I… even though today you’re the one betraying me.” Qi Baoshan’s voice was hoarse. “I raised you for all these years. Do you think I could bear to? Wealth and rank, you don’t want them. A chance to escape far away, you refuse it. The bond between father and son, you throw away without hesitation. You insist on driving me to a dead end! In the end, you still chose him!”
…
Some feelings had grown too fine and complicated over the years to be explained clearly anymore. They had long since gone beyond idle teasing and restless desire, beyond crude and shallow hunger of the flesh. It was more like a deep emotional dependence and possessiveness.
Perhaps everyone carried a solitary island deep inside, tasting a century of loneliness and unwilling to cut themselves open for others to see, drifting along a frozen river. Everyone longed to find some solid shore to cling to, some nest where they could take root, and in near-mad desperation refused to let go of the affection and wealth held in their own hands. At the moment of confrontation, tearing apart, and separation, the pain was inevitable.
Sometimes what a person wanted was very little: two bowls of hand-pulled noodles in gravy, a few small dishes to eat with liquor.
Or one more night sharing a bed head-to-foot, feet-to-head.
Yet after Ling He appeared, all of those things had become extravagant wishes. They would not happen again. The weight Ling He carried against their fragile father-son relationship was crushing enough to destroy it completely.
But today, Yan Xiaodao felt that he was the island being pushed mercilessly away, drifting farther and farther from shore. A wind rose inside him, stirring a cold ripple of loneliness, because he was losing too many things he treasured. He seemed to return to more than ten years ago, when he stood at the village entrance in torn clothes, the charred ruins of his home behind him, white funeral streamers fluttering over graves on the mountain, the wails of wandering ghosts echoing in his ears while savage faces on the coal mountain tore at his flesh. Everything he had witnessed in this human world splashed blood-red across the deck before his eyes.
He had never been willing to express any of this to others. In more than twenty years of living as an orphan, there had never been more than two or three people beside him whom he could call family.
Did gaining one kind of bond always mean losing another at the same time?
Could the two truly not coexist? In this moment, the tearing pain reached his heart.
Water gathered in Yan Xiaodao’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Godfather. I love him. I will choose him. I will never leave him.”
Master Qi kept the gun pointed at him and said nothing more.
Yan Xiaodao knew the great matter would not be resolved today, leaving regret that might follow him for life. His chest hurt badly. Qi Baoshan’s plan to deceive everyone and pull the foundation out from under him had forced him into a dead corner this time, leaving him disappointed and heartsick.
Yan Xiaodao raised a hand and pointed toward the distant harbor. “Godfather, that’s home for both of us. If you can think this through, go home.”
Then he looked deeply at the other man. “Your son has been unfilial. I’m saying goodbye today. I’m jumping from here. Take it as though I’ve put three blades through myself and made six holes. From now on, we walk separate roads. Godfather, take care of yourself.”
The words had been expected in some corner of both their hearts, but speaking them aloud still struck Yan Xiaodao with enormous grief, while Qi Baoshan’s face filled with shock.
In his final glance, Yan Xiaodao saw the muzzle in Qi Baoshan’s hand trembling. In the end, his godfather still did not shoot him. Yan turned without hesitation, climbed over the railing, and threw himself into the rolling sea.
Below was a chasm of waves. Below was the severing of their bond.
Yan Xiaodao plunged into the sea and was instantly swallowed by the surging water. His figure vanished from the surface, leaving only a burst of white foam.
Everyone shouted in alarm. More than half the boats immediately swung around and raced frantically toward the place where he had gone over, only to watch that patch of white foam disappear from sight as well. They could not even tell exactly where Yan Xiaodao had entered the water.
The speedboat Ling He was driving hit a wave so hard that the entire hull nearly rolled into the sea. It slewed sideways out of control, frightening Mao Zhixiu into shouting, “Ancestor, do you even know how to drive a boat?!”
Ling He’s emotions were just as out of control. He felt as though he had seen this before: Xiaodao falling into the water.
No, not the sea. A river. And Ling He himself had been the one who acted ruthlessly, ramming Xiaodao’s car off Guanhai Bridge.
In the scene he had imagined then, Xiaodao and the car had fallen exactly like this into the river and been swallowed by the current. Only now, witnessing such a sight with his own eyes, did Ling He finally understand the needle-sharp terror of that instant. The sea was turbulent, a hungry monster opening a dark blue-black mouth and spraying foam. Swallowing a human figure as thin as a scrap of paper would be effortless.
About a minute and a half later, far from the place where the white foam had vanished, a dark speck suddenly appeared, bursting from the surface as though it had shot up from the seabed.
The speck gradually became a strong human figure. After surfacing, he spent a moment gasping and resting, then looked around, switched on his human-brain GPS, found the right direction, and only then began swimming steadily toward shore.
Ling He turned the speedboat in an arc across the water, chasing the dark figure.
He did not dare bring the boat too close, afraid of injuring him. The mechanical roar of the engine and the crash of water dragged old memories back into his mind. On the waters near Linwan Port, a motorboat had once been struck by gunfire on a black, icy, rain-soaked night and exploded into a ball of flame.
“Xiaodao!”
“Xiaodao!!!…”
He stood precariously on the speedboat, struggling to control both direction and balance. Yan Xiaodao was only a few dozen meters away now. Without thinking, Ling He stretched out a hand.
The speedboat rode the wind and waves. With one perversely unruly bounce at the crest of a swell, Mr. Ling bent forward at exactly the wrong moment. His hips kicked up with the rhythm of the sea, and he went headfirst over the side with a splash.
Mao Zhixiu flung out one catlike paw but failed to catch him. With a yowl, the tragic “land cat” hurriedly threw a life ring after him.
Yan Xiaodao had watched Ling He fall out of the boat.
If he could have spared the breath to curse, he would have started swearing on the spot. Ling He, why are you jumping in when you’re this stupid?!
You don’t trust my swimming? What did you jump in for?
That one bounce and plunge exposed the gap between their swimming abilities in light-years. For one moment, Yan Xiaodao suspected that besides his nicotine allergy, Ling He had another fatal weakness: You can’t swim?
Ling He could swim. He was not going to sink the instant he entered the water. He had even spent a day and a night soaking inside the special torture cage Watanabe had made and emerged unharmed. It was simply that his swimming was an Olympic open-water marathon away from Yan Xiaodao’s. He struggled up and down among the waves and could barely tell which way he was facing.
Across the water, Ling He finally caught Xiaodao’s gaze and could not stop himself from smiling. A hot current rose inside his chest, making his body feel light enough to float upward. Unfortunately, the instant he smiled, a mouthful of seawater poured in. It was salty and foul.
Yan Xiaodao immediately swam toward him and discovered that this fearless idiot was actually laughing madly in the sea while continuously swallowing salt water.
Ling He seemed to have been swallowed by an equally violent rush of joy. Certain obsessions had tormented him for so long, robbing him of sleep and peace, even outweighing his fear of life and death. Now they finally released their grip, leaving him almost delirious with happiness.
Xiaodao’s loyalty and refusal to abandon him had struck directly at Ling He’s fatal point. Or rather, Yan Xiaodao himself was Ling He’s fatal point. Ling He kept his mouth open, gulping seawater, his gaze unfocused.
Yan Xiaodao caught Ling He by the back of the neck and hauled him up before the madman could drink any more seawater. He turned Ling He onto his back so he could float, then, like a powerful fish protecting its own clumsy little fish, slowly swam them back.
The two sprawled crookedly across the little boat, exhausted. Mao Zhixiu had been squeezed to one side like a sheet of paper and did not know whether to laugh or cry. “You two nearly scared me to death. Do you need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? I’m not doing it. You can help each other.”
Ling He’s face had been soaked pale. His ink-painting brows and eyes were glazed with shimmering water, his lashes filmed with rainbow-like droplets. Lying on his back, he looked up at seabirds wheeling across the sky while the dazzling noon sun flooded the sea.
“Stupid,” Ling He judged his own act of falling into the water.
…
He normally thought three steps ahead and planned every move. There would not be a second time for something as idiotic as losing his footing and almost drowning in the sea.
He closed his lashes and folded every scrap of joy and sorrow into the lines between his brows. “Xiaodao, you didn’t go with your godfather.”
That one sentence from Mr. Ling was a restrained, lovesick confession.
Mao Zhixiu theatrically covered half her face and peeked through her fingers, fully expecting Yan Xiaodao to do what anyone would expect in a moment like this and turn around to offer some intimate response. Instead, Yan Xiaodao lay flat against the metal floor of the boat, body and gaze unmoving, staring straight at the sky. He did not look at Ling He, and he deliberately did not look toward the cargo ship still traveling across the distant water.
Yan Xiaodao wiped the water from his face, perhaps wiping away other wetness along with it.
His arm dropped, and his hand found Ling He’s almost by accident, disguising the surge of feeling under the waves by gripping tightly. How fortunate were the two of them to have found each other in the vast sea of people in this lifetime.
Across the broad water between the harbor and the open sea, only that one large ship remained locked in confrontation with the police. Patrol boats used a wolf-pack tactic to surround it completely.
Qi Baoshan stood at the bow with a gun in his hand. He would not fight, negotiate, surrender, or leave. He answered Captain Xue’s calls to surrender with silence.
Xue Qian also sensed that something about this was deeply unreasonable. Qi Baoshan had always been shrewd and experienced. Yet he had chosen broad daylight at noon to flee Linwan Port by ship. Did he truly think he could get away? Or had escape never really been the plan at all?
Qi Baoshan walked forward step by step and laughed faintly at himself, mocking the fact that he had ambitions reaching across a thousand mountains yet had been born into the wrong time, taken one wrong step, and lost the road back. And still he had been bound by the affection between father and son until, today, he had chosen to walk into a place of death himself. His great undertaking was unfinished, and the hero’s spirit had run short. Of course he knew there was nowhere to escape. Before leaving, he had only wanted one final answer from Yan Xiaodao, and in the end all those years of effort had dissolved into a phantom bubble on the waves.
Qi Baoshan reached the railing and cast a contemptuous glance over Captain Xue’s men. There was no shrinking or hesitation in him. In one clean motion, he climbed over the rail. Before everyone’s eyes, he opened his arms to embrace the sea and was swallowed instantly by the raging waves.
Ling He’s speedboat was already nearing the shore. Sharp-eyed Mao Zhixiu screamed. Yan Xiaodao raised his head and saw Qi Baoshan’s furious plunge into the sea.
Pain tore through his chest. A flood of spray seemed to wash his mind blank, while the blazing sunlight overhead stabbed at his eyes.
He staggered to his feet, trying to swim back, only to be held down hard by Ling He and Mao Zhixiu behind him.
The distance was too great. It was too late. He could not reach him.
Captain Xue had now watched two people jump into the sea in one day and was nearly losing his mind. He bitterly regretted not arranging in advance for several proper fishing boats to spread nets across the water and scoop people up.
Noise surged across the sea. Every vessel searched and tried to recover the missing man, yet against the vast ocean they were almost helpless.
…
Yan Xiaodao was carried into a vehicle by several of Ling He’s people and forcibly taken away from the scene. He did not speak once on the road home.
In truth, he had collapsed on the dock after reaching shore. In that instant, it felt as though every emotion in his body had drained away with his spirit and strength, everything in his veins flowing out until nothing remained.
He had been awake for a full day and night and had barely eaten. Every limb and bone felt completely wrung dry, without strength.
Even in misery he did not cry. He did not wail or become hysterical. His mind was a blank scorched white by overwhelming heat.
At last, the back seat of Ling He’s car held Yan Xiaodao, though Xiaodao was soaked through and in a miserable state.
Ling He cradled Xiaodao’s head against his chest. Both men’s wet clothes clung to their bodies, letting them feel each other’s warmth. They looked like two shivering penguins squeezed together on drifting ice. Behind each of them dragged the enormous shadow of a lifetime’s experience. They were exactly suited to lean against each other for warmth and find a harbor where their souls could rest.
Xue Qian called Ling He, perhaps taking Yan’s emotions into account. “Mr. Ling, ask the man beside you something for me. Can Qi Baoshan swim? We still haven’t recovered him. Is there any chance he could save himself?”
Yan Xiaodao took the phone without hesitation. “Master Qi can swim.”
Xue Qian pressed, “How well? This is a bay, not a swimming pool.”
“No worse than me,” Yan Xiaodao answered frankly. “Unless he truly intended to kill himself and deliberately let himself drown, he should be able to swim back from that distance.”
That one piece of information made Captain Xue bang his head against the side of the speedboat several times. Today he would have to order a comprehensive search of the water and seal the entire coastline.
Yan Xiaodao asked, “Please have someone retrieve the myna’s cage from the ship. Don’t let the bird starve. I still need to keep it for my godfather.”
Xue Qian agreed.
The search continued until darkness fell. Night covered the sea, and the water’s furious face turned black and unreadable. The police finally had no choice but to temporarily call off the operation.
The subtle turn in events came when Bureau Chief Bao made an urgent call to Captain Xue. “Did you receive what Qi Baoshan mailed you?”
Xue Qian had spent the entire day fighting on the front line and was exhausted and overwhelmed. He had not yet returned to the bureau to deal with desk work. “He mailed me something?”
Bao Zhengwei said, “I received mine. Get back here immediately.”
Bureau Chief Bao and Captain Xue had each received a package from Master Qi. Qi Baoshan had clearly planned ahead. He had absolutely no intention of dying for nothing, and even less intention of taking the blame and shielding certain people behind him.
Bao Zhengwei received one key, and Xue Qian received another. Beyond that, each of them received half a password and no other clue. But something like this was not enough to stop the police. Qi Baoshan had probably counted on Bureau Chief Bao finding the road he had pointed toward. Investigators checked every bank in the city and quickly identified the institution to which the two safe-deposit keys belonged.
The safe-deposit box used a dual-lock system. Only both keys together could open it. Inside were densely itemized files and documents, confidential contracts and account records between companies, as well as recordings Qi Baoshan had secretly made during the yearly gatherings at Twin Towers Villa. Master Qi, it seemed, had prepared a fallback long ago.
Xue Qian sat on the sofa in Bureau Chief Bao’s home. Master and student spent the entire night working through the material. Bureau Chief Bao finally concluded, “This time, whether certain neighboring departments like it or not, we have to report this upward immediately. And the way we report it matters. We need a moment that clears the clouds and lets everything come fully into the light… The case is enormous, with too many people involved, all of them wealthy and prominent. We cannot move recklessly. We really do need a joint investigation.”
“Invite Boss Liang Tong and Boss Jian Mingxun in to assist the public-security investigation. Put them under round-the-clock surveillance. Have the procuratorate enter and audit their assets. Restrict them from leaving the country! We may not be able to touch the people above them, but are you telling me we can’t even touch these two?!” Xue Qian ground the furious words through his teeth, then looked away, his chest tight and blocked.
Young Master Liang had sent him many messages throughout the day.
Xue Qian could not tell whether they were idle messages sent at random or whether Liang Youhui was probing for information on his father’s behalf.
Liang Youhui: 【Brother Xue, is the wind turning bad lately? Is something going to happen?】
Liang Youhui: 【Brother Xue, what case are you investigating? Is it connected to my dad? My dad definitely hasn’t killed anyone or set fires. He isn’t a bad person. What is going on?】
Liang Youhui: 【Ge, are you upset? Why aren’t you replying to me?】
Liang Youhui: 【Ge, can we meet? Do you… not want to be with me anymore?】
Mixed between the messages were piles of reaction images and emoticons. Usually they were cute joke stickers or indecent animated images meant to tease him. Today they were all kinds of sobbing faces, pitiful enough to make anyone looking at them feel sorry for the man.
Xue Qian badly wanted to tell this sweet idiot still completely in the dark, Youhui, your family has property and savings overseas, don’t they? Leave. Go far away as soon as you can. Stop getting involved in this. Don’t let yourself be dragged down for things your family did.
But he could not reveal a single word of the case to Liang Youhui. The mere fact that such a thought had entered his head made him realize how badly his resolve was already wavering, how close he was to betraying the oath he had taken when he joined the police, betraying the organization he had once regarded as glorious above all else, and failing the comrades who had died.
It felt as though he too had stepped onto the same arm of the balance Yan Xiaodao had once walked. At last he knew what it tasted like. Whether he moved forward or back, every step was unbearably difficult, and whichever way he turned, his heart was cut open.