Futile Devices Scans

Filth (FL)

By: Su Er Liang

Source Availability Note: A small number of installments are absent from the publicly available Chinese source because of platform censorship. We do not reconstruct or invent missing source text; the translation covers the material available to us.

Native Title: 污秽 by 苏二两

Genre: Adult, Drama, Mature, Psychological, Romance, Slice of Life, Yaoi

Tags: Antihero Protagonist, Betrayal, Blackmail, Childhood Bond, Crime, Devoted Love Interest, Drugs, Gangs, Hidden Identity, Identity Fraud, Jealousy, Manipulative Characters, Modern Day, Morally Gray Characters, Obsessive Love, Poor to Rich, Possessive Characters, Power Struggle, Revenge, Schemes and Conspiracies, Social Class Difference, Toxic Relationship, Underworld, 1v1

Content: 85 Chapters + 7 Extras

Status: Original Complete | Translation Complete | Proofreading Ongoing

Shared Universe: Filth is set in the same universe as No Such Bird and Four-Faced Buddha. Each novel follows its own story and can be read independently, but they share the same broader world.

Proofreading Note: This completed translation is currently undergoing a full recheck against the Chinese raw. Earlier chapters may be revised to correct mistranslations, restore missing details, standardize terminology, and improve English readability while remaining faithful to the original. ✅ will be placed beside the chapter title in the Table of Contents to signify that that specific chapter has been proofread.

Synopsis:

Filth—污秽 (wū huì)—is a Chinese word with several meanings.

It can mean something dirty or unclean.

It can describe someone of lowly or humble status.

As a verb, it can mean to soil or defile.

And it can also refer to obscenity or sexual violation.

Zhou Ruo An once points at the word on his phone and laughs.

“Lin Yi, this word describes the two of us perfectly.”

With a cigarette between his lips, Lin Yi gives him a sidelong glance. “What does the fourth one mean?”

Zhou Ruo An snickers. “That one probably describes our future.”

“Ours together, or each of us separately?”

“…Damn.”

For most of his life, Zhou Ruo An has belonged to the kind of place respectable people prefer not to look at too closely.

He grows up in an urban village where poverty, scams, backroom deals, street fights, cheap cigarettes, and people living one bad decision away from disaster are simply part of daily life. Clever, shameless, ambitious, and remarkably good at surviving, Zhou Ruo An has never been particularly interested in being a good person.

Neither has Lin Yi.

Lin Yi is the man who has been beside him through those years: fighting, scraping together money, taking jobs that do not bear close examination, and watching Zhou Ruo An scheme his way through one impossible situation after another. Their relationship has never needed a respectable name. They know each other too well for that.

They have been poor together.

They have been beaten together.

They have done ugly things together.

And for a long time, Zhou Ruo An assumes that whatever else changes, Lin Yi will simply remain there.

Then an opportunity appears.

Zhou Ruo An is brought into the wealthy and powerful Zhou family as the young master who had supposedly been lost outside the family for years.

Almost overnight, the street punk disappears beneath tailored suits, expensive watches, careful manners, and a new identity.

The Zhou family, however, is not a fairy-tale homecoming.

Behind its polished doors is a vicious struggle over legitimacy, inheritance, corporate power, and who will eventually stand at the top. Every branch of the family has its own interests. Every favor comes with a price. Brothers smile while preparing knives for one another, loyalty can be purchased, and blood itself is useful only when it can be turned into leverage.

Zhou Ruo An adapts frighteningly well.

If becoming a Zhou family young master requires deception, manipulation, blackmail, bribery, or stepping on someone else on the way up, then so be it.

There is only one problem.

His old life refuses to disappear.

After countless unanswered calls, Lin Yi eventually sneaks into the Zhou residence at night. Through a window, he finds the man who once followed him through their filthy, penniless days now standing on the other side in expensive clothes.

Zhou Ruo An hands him several stacks of cash.

“Lin Yi, forget the Zhou Ruo An who was once covered in filth.”

“A breakup fee?”

Lin Yi takes the money.

Then he leaves.

It should have ended there.

It does not.

What follows is less a clean separation than an increasingly vicious tug-of-war between two men who know exactly where the other is weakest.

Money becomes a weapon. So does history.

Old debts become new debts. Favors become IOUs. Threats become negotiations. Affection is denied, sold, repackaged as business, and dragged back into the open whenever either man tries to pretend it no longer exists.

Zhou Ruo An wants to climb high enough that no one can ever look down on him again.

Lin Yi has no interest in stopping him.

But neither does he intend to be discarded merely because Zhou Ruo An has decided his old life has become inconvenient.

And beneath the schemes, family warfare, gang violence, blackmail, jealousy, and constant attempts to gain the upper hand lies a much simpler problem:

These two men know each other at their absolute worst.

They know the poverty, the lies, the ugliness, the selfishness, the cruelty, and every humiliating thing the other would rather leave buried.

And somehow, that is precisely why neither of them can truly walk away.

Filth is a dark, psychologically charged modern romance about ambition, class, identity, loyalty, and two deeply flawed men who repeatedly turn love into something that looks suspiciously like debt.

It is not a story about one good man redeeming a bad one.

Neither of them qualifies.

The author describes the pairing simply as:

Bad gong × bad shou.

Table of Contents