At the same time, several kilometers away, a few people encountered their respective difficulties.

After Fang Chao and Liu Zhi had stolen the Land Rover two days ago, they first went to a neighboring city and had the car repainted and fitted with fake license plates through an underground auto shop connected to the criminal underworld. After returning to San Jiang Kou, the two found themselves in a quandary about how to deal with the Land Rover’s owner. Liu Zhi’s suggestion was simple: dig a pit and bury the man directly. Fang Chao was somewhat conflicted—they had never killed anyone before. If they were caught someday in the future, their previous crimes would only amount to robbery, which wouldn’t carry a death sentence. But once they had blood on their hands, it would be a different story entirely. However, if they didn’t eliminate the Land Rover’s owner, he would definitely report them to the police once he got out.

As it turned out, they only agonized over this for two days before they no longer needed to agonize at all.

Early this morning, Liu Zhi came to a desolate wasteland where their large Land Rover was parked all alone. He pulled open the rear cargo area and saw the owner stuffed inside, motionless. Thinking the man was playing dead, he kicked him once. Still no movement. When he touched the body, it was already ice cold—the man was truly dead!

Truth be told, this car owner died quite unjustly. He was no ordinary person.

More than ten years ago, San Jiang Kou hadn’t yet been upgraded from a county to a city, and the local underworld was a chaotic mix of various elements. Four local young men had formed a gang known as “Mei Lin Yang Xie”—a pun on venereal diseases—and he was the second-in-command nicknamed “Gonorrhea,” whose real name was Lin Kai. Today’s entire social landscape was completely different from ten-plus years ago. Various criminal gangs had either been arrested or gone into hiding to legitimize themselves, and Lin Kai had long since bid farewell to his days of dominating the underworld, turning to business instead. However, he still retained the bearing of a gang boss. When out and about, everyone respectfully addressed him as “Brother Kai,” and no one dared to provoke him—except this time his luck ran out when he encountered Fang Chao and Liu Zhi.

He had merely been annoyed by traffic congestion while driving and tried to cut in from the bus lane, only to be blocked by that vintage Xiali car and even have Liu Zhi spit a thick wad of phlegm at him and give him the middle finger in contempt. How could he swallow such an insult? So he chased after them all the way, only to end up being beaten down by the two of them and stuffed into the rear cargo area. After being packaged like a piece of meat, Lin Kai realized he had kicked an iron plate. In the underworld, he could at most intimidate people, but these two gentlemen were truly out for lives.

At first, he struggled desperately several times, but each time Liu Zhi gave him a severe beating. He no longer dared to resist and only begged the two gentlemen to release him, swearing he would never cut in line while driving again for the rest of his life. The two men completely ignored him and simply stuffed his mouth with a towel.

Who knew that after only two days, on the morning of the third day, he would become a corpse.

Fang Chao stood in front of the rear cargo area with puffed cheeks, looking at the corpse helplessly, then glared at Liu Zhi.

Liu Zhi, being stared at so directly, trembled as he hastily explained: “Brother Chao, I really didn’t kill this bastard. I did beat him—this bastard kept trying to escape, but I only kicked him a few times. He’s not made of tofu; how could he be kicked to death so easily? You told me not to kill him, so I even let him out of the car periodically to relieve himself, fed him food and drink, took care of him so meticulously…”

“Shut up!”

Fang Chao shouted once, then walked to Lin Kai’s corpse with an ice-cold expression and observed quietly. The corpse’s mouth was stuffed with a large towel covered in saliva, slippery and disgusting. Fang Chao found a thin stick and used it to dig out the towel. After a few seconds, a foul-smelling stream of vomit overflowed from Lin Kai’s mouth.

Fang Chao thought for a moment and understood the cause of death: “He choked to death on his own. You must have kicked him in the stomach, causing him to vomit. With the towel stuffed in his mouth, he couldn’t expel it, so the contents of his stomach could only flow into his nose, suffocating him to death!”

Liu Zhi lightly patted his chest and breathed a sigh of relief: “So he choked to death on his own? Then it has nothing to do with us, right?”

“You’re thinking quite nicely,” Fang Chao said through gritted teeth. “We stole his car, kidnapped him, locked him in the car, and he ended up dead. Do you think it has nothing to do with us? If you were a cop, would you believe that?”

“I would!”

“I—” Fang Chao swallowed his saliva, took a deep breath, and could only admit, “Most police officers don’t have intelligence as high as yours, so they won’t believe it. This death is destined to be counted on our heads.”

“Then what do we do? Good people are all wrongly accused to death by the police like this!”

Fang Chao stood in place, looked around, thought for a while, then said with a frown: “The day before yesterday when he was racing with us, the surveillance cameras on the road probably captured everything. We can’t let anyone know he’s dead—let’s just bury him directly. I see this wasteland was recently demolished; it’ll be at least a year or two before they build houses here. By the time the corpse is dug up, it’ll have long since rotted away. Let’s bury him right here!”

Liu Zhi grunted and complained: “If I’d known, we should have just dug a pit and buried him alive from the start like I suggested. Why go through all this trouble? Made me deal with his shit and piss for two days—I haven’t even gotten married yet and I already played daddy for him!”

“Can you please restrain your brain and stop sticking your head up everywhere like a cock all day long!” Fang Chao, who had been holding back a bellyful of anger, slapped him hard on the head, scaring Liu Zhi into silence.

Afterward, Liu Zhi stood guard on the spot while Fang Chao went to buy a shovel nearby. When he returned, he stood in front of the car to keep watch while Liu Zhi went behind the car to dig a pit and bury the corpse.

After fumbling around for over half an hour, Liu Zhi finally finished digging the pit, pushed the corpse in, refilled it with soil, and patted down the mound with the shovel. When Fang Chao looked back, he almost spat out a mouthful of blood: “I told you to dig a pit to bury someone—what the hell are you building him a grave for?!”

Liu Zhi’s pit was dug too shallow. After pushing the corpse in and refilling it with soil, it turned into a mound. If there were just one more tombstone, it would be a complete grave. If a grave mysteriously appeared on vacant urban land, the corpse would be exposed the very next day.

The two looked at the mound and discussed for a while. They had no experience in digging pits to bury corpses. Finally, Liu Zhi suggested driving the car over to flatten the mound. He got into the Land Rover, positioned the tires over the mound, and moved back and forth. Before long, Fang Chao outside the car urgently called for him to stop. When he got out to look, he was even more dumbfounded. The mound had indeed been flattened considerably, but the corpse was completely exposed, and jelly-like chunks of bloody flesh from multiple limbs had been scraped off by the tires and stuck to the nearby soil—extremely disgusting.

Fang Chao thought for a moment and told him to stop trying to save effort and quickly dig a deeper pit nearby to rebury the corpse. Liu Zhi could only comply. This time, he spent a full hour or more digging a new large pit nearby, pushed the broken corpse back in, filled it with soil, and compacted it with the car. He even ingeniously ran off to a distant spot and brought back a section of yellow cylindrical cement post, which he inserted into the pit. On the post was a warning phrase: “Buried cable below, strictly forbidden to excavate.”

He clapped his hands together, quite pleased with himself: “Brother Chao, how about this?”

“You’ve learned the art of protesting too much, haven’t you.” Fang Chao had completely lost confidence in him, but after observing the surrounding environment, he couldn’t help but feel that this arrangement actually looked quite natural, so he didn’t object.

Having finally dealt with the corpse, Fang Chao’s eyes turned to the Land Rover. Now that a life had been lost, the car would have to be ditched sooner or later, so they needed to hurry up with Zhou Rong’s business. They shouldn’t stay in San Jiang Kou much longer!

The southern part of San Jiang Kou was the heart of the city’s transportation network. Located here were the train station, bus terminal, freight distribution center, and various other stations.

Areas near stations were generally dirty and chaotic, and this place was no exception. The nearby area was filled with uneven old buildings, with some factories on the outskirts and several urban villages nearby, inhabited by all kinds of people.

Two kilometers south of the bus station was a chemical zone. Mixed among several factories were some scrap collection stations, one of which was operated by Brother Gang and Little Mao.

Brother Gang’s real name was Xia Tinggang. He was a thirty-year-old bachelor whose only aspiration in life was to get rich. He had no real skills and couldn’t endure hardship; his main path to wealth depended on dreaming.

Brother Gang came to San Jiang Kou purely by force of circumstances. He was born in a rural village. In recent years, other young men from his village had gone out to work, earning money to build houses and buy cars back home. He wasn’t envious at all—he just preferred staying in the village. Because the other young men from his village had gone out to work, only the elderly, weak, women, and children remained in the village, so he became like an emperor, specializing in having affairs with the village’s left-behind wives. Several women even competed jealously over him, and eventually the matter became known throughout the entire village. So when the left-behind wives’ husbands returned home, they collectively came after him and nearly broke all three of his “legs.” After this incident, he no longer dared stay in his hometown and fled to another region overnight.

He mixed around in the local county town for some time and met a distant cousin from a neighboring village named Little Mao, who was equally lazy and worthless. So the two hit it off and began a career of swindling and cheating. They had staged car accidents, broken into homes, pickpocketed phones, and extorted people. Although their business scope was extensive, they ultimately didn’t save much money, and several times they provoked tough characters who nearly beat them to death.

After several years of this, the two drifted to San Jiang Kou, where they met a kindhearted fellow villager. The fellow villager ran a scrap collection station—the business wasn’t large, but at least it was legitimate work where they could make a living. The fellow villager was very righteous. Seeing that the two had nowhere to stay, he told them he was planning to return to his hometown and would transfer the scrap collection station to them, including the house and scrap materials, for thirty thousand yuan—half sale, half gift. Brother Gang and Little Mao thought it over and felt it was quite good, so they signed a simple contract and paid thirty thousand yuan—most of their savings—to take over the scrap station.

The day after they took it over, the kindhearted fellow villager’s phone became disconnected. The landlord of the scrap station came out to notify them that the house owed a full six months’ rent totaling thirty thousand yuan, and if they didn’t pay, they couldn’t move anything out. The two had already paid out thirty thousand, so in the end, they could only grit their teeth and scrape together another thirty thousand to pay the rent.

In the yard was only a pile of scrap metal and various bottles and cans, plus one scrapped taxi. The two processed all the various scrap materials and exchanged them for over ten thousand yuan. The remaining scrapped taxi could still be driven, so they were reluctant to dismantle it directly for scrap metal. Instead, they got some parts and tinkered with it, planning to sell it as a used car to some sucker.

Today, Brother Gang and Little Mao were repairing the car in the yard when the sound of “dong dong dong” knocking came from outside the gate, along with an anger-filled voice: “Xia Tinggang, get your ass out here!”

“Who is it?” Brother Gang crawled out from under the car and looked at Little Mao, who was working on the window seal. Little Mao shook his head to indicate he didn’t know.

“What’s all the shouting! What’s all the shouting!” Brother Gang, gripping a large wrench, walked to the gate with a displeased expression, yanked the door open, and glared outside. “What do you want?”

Standing at the gate were three men. The leader had a protruding beer belly, wore a tight T-shirt and jeans, had a gleaming gold necklace hanging on his chest, and both arms were covered with tattoos of coiling dragons and crouching tigers—though the tattoos were done when he was young, and now they had become a fat dragon and a fat tiger. He glared with a fierce expression. Behind him were two thin men wearing floral shirts—one with his hands in his pockets, the other with his arms crossed over his chest, both looking at him sideways with lazy expressions.

These three looked like street thugs at first glance, but they definitely weren’t gang bosses. Real gang bosses had long since passed civil service exams and were wholeheartedly serving the people. Only these clueless small-time punks would ostentatiously wear floral clothes and endure the pain of getting arm tattoos, thinking that standing on the street would make others fear them. Fear them? Not a chance.

“You punk are Xia Tinggang, right?” The lead fatty twisted his mouth corner and sneered at him with contempt.

“I’m your Grandpa Gang, so what!” Seeing the other party came with ill intentions, Brother Gang showed no fear whatsoever and instead stepped forward, blocking the doorway.

“Hey yo, that’s quite a name—really quite ‘Gang’ indeed.” The fatty turned back to laugh with his underlings, and all three burst into laughter.

“What the hell do you want?” Brother Gang stepped forward again, raising the large wrench in his hand.

The fatty, seeing his large wrench, retreated somewhat. He waved his hand backward, and an underling behind him handed him an envelope. He threw the envelope onto the ground in front of Brother Gang and continued with his head held high: “Xia Tinggang, this is the bill for the money you owe. It’s been six months, and the bank has called you countless times. You’d better be smart and pay the money back quickly!”

“Pay back what! When the hell did I ever owe money?!” Xia Tinggang was about to explode in anger when Little Mao behind him gently touched his arm. He turned back and saw Little Mao’s guilt-ridden expression, and he couldn’t help but demand: “Did you owe money to the bank?”

Little Mao nodded his head timidly and bent down to pick up the envelope.

“I—” Xia Tinggang glared at Little Mao, too angry to speak.

The fatty snorted coldly and pointed his finger at Xia Tinggang: “I don’t care which of you two owes the money. In any case, you remember this: one week. I’m giving you one final week. If you don’t pay back the money, I’ll cripple you both!”

His fat finger was pointing around in front of Brother Gang. Brother Gang was instantly enraged. This fatty was as fat as a pig ready for slaughter, and the two sidekicks behind him looked like they’d been injected with lean meat essence. This kind of trash dared to point at him? He struck the fatty’s arm with his wrench and kicked out directly: “Keep your chicken claws away from me!”

“What the hell!” The fatty’s eyes went wide. In all his years of debt collection, this was the first time the debtor struck first. The three thugs instantly roared in anger: “You’ve got guts, you’ve really got guts! You just wait! Just wait!” Their voices grew more distant as the three men retreated while issuing verbal warnings.

After the three left, Brother Gang closed the door and slapped Little Mao on the head: “Why the hell do you owe money to the bank?”

Little Mao cowered fearfully to the side, holding the envelope in one hand while touching his head with the other: “I… I went to buy scratch-off lottery tickets. I was always just a bit short, so later… later when I ran out of money, I used the bank’s credit card.”

“You’re a professional con artist and you went to buy lottery tickets?” Brother Gang was furious. “How much do you owe the bank?”

“Not… not that much.” Little Mao stammered.

Brother Gang extended his large hand: “Give me the bill!”

Little Mao hesitated for a moment, then handed over the envelope.

Brother Gang opened the envelope and looked at it briefly, then laughed coldly: “With your qualifications, you could still get thirty thousand from a credit card? Won’t this bank go bankrupt sooner or later? Hmm… ‘Xia Tinggang, you are 180 days overdue.’ Bank work is so casual these days—you owe money but they put my name on it.”

“I… my ID is on the blacklist, so I couldn’t get a credit card. I borrowed yours to apply for one.”

“I—” Brother Gang froze for a moment, then the next second raised his wrench and chased after Little Mao.

Little Mao took off running, circling around behind the taxi, with the two chasing each other around the vehicle.

Brother Gang wanted to grab something to throw at him but was afraid of damaging the car they’d worked so hard to fix, so he could only point at him from a distance: “You get your ass over here!”

Little Mao hid on the opposite side and pleaded: “Brother Gang, calm down! Even if you beat me to death, it won’t help—we still can’t pay back the money.”

“Not being able to pay it back has nothing to do with me! What does your lottery ticket have to do with me!”

“But… but the name is still yours.”

“I’ll beat you to death today!” Brother Gang chased again.

Little Mao dodged while shouting: “Brother Gang, I’ll definitely pay you back this money. Please help me settle the account first, otherwise they’ll definitely come again. If you get on the bank’s blacklist, you won’t even be able to buy train tickets in the future.”

Brother Gang stopped, panting and gasping for breath. Looking at Little Mao’s pathetic appearance, he cursed: “Where the hell would I get thirty thousand yuan to pay your debt? Even if I skinned you and sold you, you wouldn’t be worth thirty thousand!”

“Let’s… let’s think of a long-term plan. There’s always a way to get thirty thousand yuan. If we’re lucky, we could get it in one go.”

“What do you mean ‘get it in one go’?”

Little Mao pointed at the taxi in front of them: “Use this car. Let’s switch to a different way of making money.”

“This car would sell for six thousand at most.”

“We’re not selling the car! This is a taxi, isn’t it? Right now we can only burn our bridges—let’s go for one big score!”