Chapter 3
Edward Quan ·
The wood splintered under that terrifying grip.
He threw the sharp fragments like darts.
Whistle after whistle cut through the air.
They struck Wang Ba with dreadful accuracy, leaving him with severe injuries below the waist.
His scream echoed down the corridor.
He rolled on the floor, but the splinters kept coming.
Officer Zhang and I instinctively pressed our knees together.
“Do you think he'll ever be able to pee normally again?”
Officer Zhang had a distressingly vivid imagination.
The thought formed before I could stop it. I laughed.
08
“Still running?”
The brother sauntered over and stood before Wang Ba, resting the hammer on the floor.
“Go on. Try it again.”
Wang Ba lay in a crumpled heap, his clothes soaked and filthy.
His eyes rolled back. He was barely breathing.
The brother prodded him with a stick. Finding him about as lively as a dead worm, he smiled.
“Little sister, I've caught your mouse. Come and play.”
The cruelty gradually left his eyes.
“Wow! You're amazing, Brother! You found him so fast!”
Xiaomei was all wonder and delight.
She raised the forty-kilogram hammer.
“Mister, the game's starting! If you don't dodge, you'll die!”
The prospect of death wrung one last burst of strength from Wang Ba.
He pointed frantically behind her and struggled to speak.
“What?” Xiaomei asked.
“There's... someone!”
She fell for it and turned.
Wang Ba spent the last of his strength rolling down the stairs.
Thump!
He fell from the third floor onto the balcony of a second-floor room.
“Brother!”
Xiaomei stamped in fury.
“He tricked me!”
The brother returned at once, raised the hammer, and started down the stairs after him.
An old voice spoke from the stairwell.
“Boy. You don't get to break the rules.”
The brother stopped.
He shrugged, sounding put out.
“Didn't expect to wake the old man.”
An elderly face poked out of a room.
The old man's first glance went to the brother's feet. Seeing that he hadn't crossed the red line painted across the stairs, he relaxed a little.
“Such exceptional bones! A rare talent for the martial arts. Why not become my disciple and join me on the path to immortality?”
The brother had one word for him.
“Lunatic.”
Then he turned and left.
A lunatic calling another lunatic a lunatic.
Perfectly logical, and yet somehow wrong.
09
“Who's that?”
Officer Zhang studied the old man in his tattered Daoist robe, patterned with the Eight Trigrams.
“A Daoist priest?”
“We call him Master Kaixin.”
“Cheerful name.”
“Yes. He was a notorious gambler, obsessed with the occult. Then he gambled away everything and lost his grip on reality. He stabbed the man who'd won his money and cut him open right there in the street. Insisted there was a little demon inside, sucking away his luck.”
“So the 'open heart' part of Kaixin is literal.”
Officer Zhang's mouth twitched.
10
The old fraud circled Wang Ba, inspecting him from head to foot.
The longer he looked, the more delighted he became.
“Those bones of yours are extraordinary. You must be a natural martial artist. Why not become my disciple?”
Wang Ba's right arm bent the wrong way, his fingers were broken, and his trousers were smeared with filth.
Extraordinary was certainly one word for his skeleton.
He rolled his eyes.
The fraud produced a shiny black pill from his pocket.
“Take this divine elixir. It will prolong your life!”
He forced Wang Ba's mouth open and pushed it in.
Wang Ba had no intention of swallowing, but he no longer had the strength to resist.
A little later, he lifted his head from the floor and cried out in delight.
“It doesn't hurt anymore!”
“How is that possible?” Officer Zhang exclaimed. “An actual divine elixir?”
His uncomplicated faith in science had suffered a serious blow.
I pointed at a table in the corner of the screen.
“See that? An entire bottle of ibuprofen.”
“But the pill was round and black! And shiny!”
“Round because he rolled the tablets into a ball. Black because of the dead skin off his feet. The shine comes from years of dedicated... polishing.”
Officer Zhang gagged.
11
Wang Ba had no idea he'd been tricked. Convinced the fraud was a celestial master sent down to earth, he crawled up, clung to the man's leg, and wailed.
“Master! Save me!”
The fraud lifted his chin, narrowed his eyes, and tried to look inscrutably wise.
“Very well. Heaven has ordained our meeting. In obedience to its will, I shall accept you as my final disciple.”
Overjoyed, Wang Ba promptly knocked his forehead against the floor three times.
A born lackey.
The fraud was pleased by such cooperation. He held the initiation ceremony on the spot.
“What century is this?” Officer Zhang curled his lip as Wang Ba knelt to serve his new master tea.
“They wouldn't get along so well otherwise,” I said, smiling.
The fraud stroked Wang Ba's head. Suddenly his expression grew solemn.
Wang Ba started.
“Master? What's wrong?”
The old man glared at him. After a long pause, he pronounced:
“Just now, my spirit traveled to Tiananmen, where I consulted Lord Taibai about your fate. He tells me a great calamity awaits you within the next two years. I fear there will be blood!”
No kidding. Was there an uninjured patch left on him?
Wang Ba's intelligence seemed to have been perforated along with the rest of him.
His ugly face crumpled.
“Master! You have to save me!”
“We are master and disciple now. No need for such formality.”
The fraud thumped his chest.
“Get up. I shall teach you a divine technique. Master it, and neither blades nor spears will pierce your flesh!”
Wang Ba flushed with excitement and bowed.
“Please instruct me, Master!”
The fraud inhaled deeply.
“Watch carefully! The first form!”
He raised both hands above his head, palms inward. Keeping his lower body still, he turned his waist left, then right.
“The second form!”
He made two fists, bent his elbows, brought his arms level with his chest, then extended them four times.
After watching a while, Officer Zhang frowned.
“Why does this look familiar?”
“The national school exercise routine.”
I felt a deep surge of nostalgia.
“I used to do it as a kid.”
Officer Zhang looked wistful too.
“Ah... my lost youth.”
Even Wang Ba, who'd somehow slipped through the net of nine years of compulsory education, seemed to recall a few of his rare school days.
“Master,” he ventured, “I think I've seen these moves before.”
The fraud glared and stroked his beard.
“Impudent tongue! Do you want to master the divine technique or not?”
Wang Ba fell silent and obediently followed along.
In a gloomy building that never saw the sun, an old man in ragged Daoist robes led a blood-soaked bastard through a perfectly earnest set of school exercises.
The scene was uncanny beyond description.
Xiaomei watched curiously from the third-floor balcony.
“Brother, what are they doing?”
The brother shut his eyes.
“Something filthy. We don't look at that.”
Xiaomei stubbornly opened them.
“No! I want to watch!”