Chapter 6

In the years that followed, the abandoned building became an obsession for Mr. Huang.

Built with substandard materials, it might collapse at any time.

Yet he left it untouched. He didn’t know what to do with it.

Then, in 2022, his son returned from studying abroad and asked about the abandoned development.

Mr. Huang intended Huang Yun to take over Xincheng Group.

He also realized that unless he dealt with that building, he would never feel comfortable handing the company to his son.

So, in October 2022, he declared Xincheng Real Estate bankrupt.

He hired a demolition team to blast the unfinished building down and compensated every buyer at the price stated in their original contract.

It wasn’t much money, but it was better than nothing.

...

It seemed everything had ended.

Until that day...

Someone knocked on my door.

I opened it a crack and saw Wang Changping.

I quickly opened it wider, meaning to pull him inside.

Only then did I see the police standing behind him.

He had developed cancer in Malaysia. He didn’t have long left.

Before dying, he wanted to see his daughter. So he contacted the embassy.

After that...

I was arrested.

...

“Officer, that’s everything I know.”

THE END

This is my first attempt at a series of short stories told from multiple perspectives.

I spent eighteen months working on it.

It really wasn’t because I was lazy. Look:

The five stories total 108,000 Chinese characters.

That may not seem like much, but the discarded drafts add up to over a million.

Writing in the first person makes it difficult to give the comprehensive view an omniscient narrator could offer.

After all, no character is present from beginning to end to see the whole picture.

Each person views events from a different angle, but they are looking at the same events.

How do you keep the same incident compelling when it appears from different perspectives? That question has given me the most trouble over the past two years.

Across hundreds of abandoned drafts, I still haven’t found the answer.

The Black Building series is not an outstanding work.

But as a personal experiment, it has taught me a great deal.

When I write my next series, I should find it easier.

In this series, I created two contrasting pairs of brothers:

Zhang Ping and Zhang He; Lu You and Lu Gong.

You may have noticed how similar Zhang He and Lu Gong are.

Both study law.

Both come from poor families.

Both are very intelligent.

Both suffer a major upheaval in their third year of university.

But they have entirely different older brothers.

After Zhang Ping’s parents died, leaving a pile of debts, he quit school to work. He repaid the debts while raising Zhang He, becoming an example for his younger brother.

Lu You’s father, on the other hand, left him some money.

He gambled it all away, ruined the family, and forced Lu Gong to conceal his identity and flee far from home.

Zhang He risked everything to find Zhang Ping.

Lu Gong was willing to kill and bury a body to escape Lu You.

Originally, I planned an ending in which Zhang He won completely and Lu Gong rotted in prison.

On reflection, I abandoned it.

That ending felt too much like fate.

I write about reality.

In the end, Zhang He still died.

I truly can’t imagine...

How hard must an ordinary person fight to defeat capital and power?

I like the other characters very much too.

In my mind, every one of them has a life of their own.

Those lives simply have little connection to the main plot of Black Building, so I didn’t write them.

Perhaps they’ll make cameo appearances in other works someday.

...

Readers have already spotted some details. I’ll list them all here as a small gift.

Easter egg 1: In The Final Truth, the first gift the principal gives “Gourd Bottle” is a pair of sneakers. Another boy working part-time in the cafeteria wears a different pair every day of the week. Perhaps “Gourd Bottle” wasn’t the first victim.

Easter egg 2: In The Final Truth, Oscar Wilde was gay. The girl actually took those books from the principal’s office. They belonged to him—a hint.

Easter egg 3: “Gourd Bottle” inherited his depression.

Easter egg 4: In the end, “Gourd Bottle” chose hanging rather than jumping from a building because he didn’t want his parents to find a mangled body when they came to collect him.

Easter egg 5: In Living in a Vacuum, Zhang He doesn’t actually know whether Zhou Qian is the killer. He only wants to use the act of identifying a murderer to carry out his plan to find Zhang Ping. It doesn’t matter whom he names. What he doesn’t know is that whoever he accuses, Mr. Huang will kill that person—because a homicide case in this country has to be solved.

Easter egg 6: Zhang He ultimately receives two years in prison for perjury.

Easter egg 7: In Brotherly Harmony, Lu Gong’s father cleans the outside windows of high-rise buildings while suspended on a rope. The safety rope is secured on the roof. His whole weight hangs from it. Normally, someone on the roof is responsible for checking the rope. If an accident happens, there are usually only two possibilities: either the rope is substandard... or...

Easter egg 8: Lu Gong didn’t kill Xu Bing. Lu You beat him to death with the edge of a chopping board.

When Lu Gong wakes, he is beside the doorframe, while the knife rack is in the kitchen. He couldn’t have taken a knife and killed anyone.

What really happened that day was this:

Lu Gong saw Xu Bing strangling Lu You and rushed to help. Xu Bing shoved him. He struck his head against the doorframe and passed out.

Lu You seized the chance to break free. He picked up the chopping board and hit Xu Bing in the head, then realized he had killed him.

Lu You knew his younger brother had had enough of him.

If Lu Gong learned he had killed someone, he would certainly call the police.

To avoid prison, Lu You took a knife and made it look as though Lu Gong was the killer.

He dealt with the scene so neatly afterward because he had already thought everything through while pretending to be unconscious.

There is another detail.

When Lu Gong enters Xu Bing’s home, the front door is ajar.

Later, Lu You crawls out from beneath the body to close the window and draw the curtains, but doesn’t close the front door.

He has already closed it.

He, too, is afraid someone might walk in while he pretends to be unconscious.

Easter egg 9: Their mother did not die a natural death.

I repeatedly mention her social insurance contributions.

Here is a piece of relevant information:

If someone paying into social insurance dies before retirement, their family can go to the human resources authority to claim back the insurance funds.

Lu You killed his mother for that money.

Easter egg 10: “Paying for prostitutes with public funds” happens in real life.

The most outrageous bill I ever saw was 6,500 yuan for a hotpot meal.

Easter egg 11: In Brotherly Harmony, Xu Min uses a PHS handset at school, but a mobile phone when traveling to another province. PHS did not support interprovincial roaming then.

Easter egg 12: The household-registration fingerprint system at police stations was actually introduced in 2012 and rolled out nationwide in 2013.

I changed it to 2011 to get past censorship.

Easter egg 13: In Driven to Desperation, when Li Fang first becomes pregnant, her father is too concerned about losing face to take her to a proper hospital for an abortion. He chooses an unlicensed clinic instead. This leads to Li Fang later dying in a difficult childbirth.

Easter egg 14: When Li Fang is pregnant, she says her father wants a son because she once had an older brother who died.

Easter egg 15: Hongtashan cigarettes really are a decent brand. They haven’t raised their prices in decades.

There are a few more details I can’t remember. I’ll leave it there.

See you in the next series.

END