Chapter 1 — The Miraculous Mission

Wei Zhao could never quite understand it. The missions he carried out were so perilous, his enemies were so formidable, and the gains of his clients were so lavish — and yet, once all was said and done, what found its way into his own hands was so pitifully little.

Where on earth did the old man dig up such top-tier missions for him, anyway? Every single one was a narrow escape from death, and the pay that landed in his hands was fifty or a hundred yuan — on the good days. There were even times when it was two or three yuan. Whenever he thought of all this, Wei Zhao wanted to cry.

Taking the two hundred yuan he had bought with his own life, what Wei Zhao wanted more than anything was to let out a curse — son of a bitch! Though he was an orphan, and had never had a mother at all.

He had trained in martial arts under Old Man Wei, who had raised him, for fifteen years, and had read books for fifteen years as well — by any standard, that made him a man of all-around literary and martial talent, didn't it? In ancient times, he would have been the number-one laureate on both the civil and military examination rolls. Yet he was ordered about like a common coolie... When would this life of his ever see an end!

He'd heard that people in the city who built houses for others could rake in several tens of thousands a year, while he, fighting between life and death every day, earned no more than eight hundred or a thousand yuan in a whole year...

"Old man, you're not trying to fool me, are you? Two hundred yuan? I have a strong suspicion you've been skimming off my pay." Wei Zhao had doubted this more than once, but the old man dressed in the same clothes and ate the same food as he did — he certainly didn't look like a man of means.

"Be grateful you're getting paid at all. You think money's that easy to earn these days?" Old Man Wei rolled his bulging eyes and said crossly, "What? You don't want it? Then give it back. It's been a long time since I treated myself at Widow Wang's little eatery at the end of the village."

"..." Wei Zhao very much wanted to beat the scrawny, shriveled old man into the ground, but he knew that if he made a move, he would be the one getting beaten.

Just how formidable Old Man Wei's martial arts truly were, Wei Zhao himself could not say. All he knew was that whenever the old man practiced with him, he never exerted his full strength. And just when Wei Zhao felt his own skill had risen a grade, he would suddenly discover that the old man had risen a grade as well — and that he, Wei Zhao, was still the old man's vanquished opponent.

"All right. You've been tempered and trained enough over these years. It's about time for that one great matter." Without even lifting an eyelid, Old Man Wei sat cross-legged on the heated brick bed, smacking his lips as he munched on a plate of anise-flavored beans before him. "Do this mission well, and you'll never worry about food or drink for the rest of your life!"

"For real?" Wei Zhao knew that ever since the age of three, when the old man had picked him up while scavenging through the rubbish, he had been learning martial arts, medicine, and knowledge of the outside world from the old man — all for the sake of carrying out one great matter. Yet he very much doubted whether the pay for this great matter was really as generous as the old man claimed: one mission to last a lifetime.

"When have I ever lied to you?" Old Man Wei tossed another anise-flavored bean into his mouth. "Are you going or not? If you're not, I'll find a replacement."

"I'm going, of course I'm going!" Wei Zhao thought to himself, with a deal this good, only a fool would turn it down! One mission to last a lifetime, and after that he would never have to go through death and resurrection again. Even if it was a dragon's pool or a tiger's den, it would be worth staking his life on!

"Mm. Then off you go. Go to Songshan City, to the Gu Group, and find a man by the name of Gu Pengzhan. He'll tell you what to do next." A faint, barely noticeable crafty smile crossed Old Man Wei's lips. "But think it over carefully. Once you take on this mission, you must see it through to the end. There's no backing out halfway."

"Why? Just because there's danger, you won't even let a man run for his life?" Wei Zhao was hardly the one-track-minded type — anything he knew for certain would end in death, he flatly refused to do.

"Xiao Yi, I, your old man, have fed you and watered you for fifteen years — bought you a laptop, bought you a 3G internet card..." The old man rolled his eyes and launched into a rambling tirade. "I ask you to do one little thing and you come up with all these questions. Don't push me!"

"Damn it!" Wei Zhao's anger flared up at the old man's words. "You raised me for the first three years. From the age of six, I was the one cooking, splitting firewood, and weaving straw shoes to earn money to feed you. Don't you push me either!"

"You secretly watch porn on that computer in the dead of night — don't think I didn't know!" The old man glared and said, "You forced me to say it! And you'd even sit there facing that computer..."

"Fine... I'll go... and I won't run away — is that good enough?" Wei Zhao's face flushed scarlet. He never expected that something he'd done so covertly could have been caught by that old relic. What an absolute disgrace. If he let the old man go on any longer, heaven knew what kind of X-rated scene he'd start describing.

And so, under Old Man Wei's threats and inducements, Wei Zhao shouldered his pack, boarded a northbound train, and, making light of ten thousand li, hurried to Songshan City — that modern, international metropolis.

Sitting on the train, Wei Zhao mused that from now on he would have to encrypt his porn and hide it in the system folders of the computer, and that while doing that sort of thing, he would also have to keep his eyes peeled in all directions and his ears pricked.

Still, Wei Zhao was quite looking forward to this mission. A windfall like this — one mission and you can retire for life — was exactly what he dreamed of. Though he could sense from Old Man Wei's words that this mission was no simple matter. Well, if it wasn't simple, then it had challenge — and challenge was what made it exciting!

"Pop!" A pockmarked man sitting across from Wei Zhao pulled open a can of Coke, then carelessly tossed the pull tab onto the table.

A crew-cut young man beside him, feigning indifference, picked up the pull tab and toyed with it in his hand. After fiddling with it a few times, he suddenly shouted, "Wow! Wow! No way! First prize!"

Though the crew-cut man's voice was not especially loud amid the clamor of the train car, the passengers sitting nearby all heard it, and one after another they turned their gazes toward him.

The pockmarked man was no exception. Seeing that the pull tab in the flat-top's hand was exactly the one he had just thrown away, his expression instantly turned sour. "Give it back, that's mine..."

"What do you mean yours? Is your name written on it?" The flat-top snatched his hand back, clutching the tab tightly in his fist, and glared. "Is your name 'First Prize'?"

"No... my name isn't First Prize... that First Prize tab was the one I threw away..." The pockmarked man, seeing how fierce the flat-top looked, began to feel timid, yet he didn't want to lose what was rightfully his, so he spoke in a trembling voice.

"You just said it yourself--you threw it away. Since you threw it away, whoever picks it up owns it." The flat-top snorted, sneering.

"Hey, how can you be like this?" The pockmarked man grew anxious and called out to a passenger across from him, a bespectacled man sitting to Wei Zhao's left: "Sir, you look like a scholar. Please judge this fairly--how can he do this? Isn't this just being shameless?"