After that bizarre game match, Cao Dongfeng stopped going out of his way to make trouble for Jiaming. Only now and then, when they ran into each other at school, Jiaming would feel that resentful stare circling over him, and it left him thoroughly uncomfortable.
By October it was deep autumn, puffs of cloud drifting overhead and everything gold. As the three of them walked home from school, the plane-tree leaves came down one by one, and in a season like this, Shasha seemed to have quieted a good deal too.
In fact, lately she was no longer the violent little tyrant she had been; unless someone provoked her the way Cao Dongfeng did, she could be quite demure.
Ever since they came back from the martial arts tournament that summer, she spent whole days with her nose in a romance novel, and whenever she found a good one she would lend it to Lingjing to share—with the fine excuse that it was tactical reference material for her.
Each of the girls had her own little schemes, never guessing that in Jiaming's mind he had already decided the two of them were a couple. Whenever the three were together and the girls turned away from him to whisper, their cheeks flushing pink, Jiaming thought, Those two really are close. Still, girls as a species are honestly impossible to understand.
On the fifth day of the ninth lunar month that year—October twenty-eighth—Shasha turned fifteen. That birthday was spent, as ever, in the company of her two good friends, Jiaming and Lingjing; her father had not even shown up, being tied down by business.
Word was that gang warfare in Jianghai City had turned vicious lately, and if you went looking for the cause, it probably traced back to Jiaming: that battle over Marilyn and her daughter had left several dozen dead, and Tang Jingyao—a heavyweight in political circles—had been killed among them. Guns and bombs both, in the end.
What followed was the harshest crackdown on organized crime in Jianghai City's history.
The crackdown had lasted almost half a year. Now the heat had died down, every gang had shrunk, and after a few small outfits had been made examples of and pulled up root and all, the vacuum they left behind became the prize everyone fought over. As one of Jianghai City's three great gangs, the Sand Bamboo Gang naturally could not afford to fall behind. These days, whenever they left school, Jiaming could always spot posturing thugs trailing around Shasha—naturally, men Liu Zheng had sent to guard his daughter in secret.
She put on a show of not caring, but both Jiaming and Lingjing could tell it weighed on her. The three of them spent the day as usual, messing around at the Liu villa, until that afternoon Lingjing's mother called to tell them to come home for dinner—and to celebrate Shasha's birthday while they were at it.
The little girl who was usually as stubborn as a boy already had red-rimmed eyes by the time they walked in the door, and when Dad Ye said over the meal that Shasha might as well just have her dinners at their place from now on, her tears came pouring down.
"Uh... doesn't that make me the bridegroom of two child brides?"
Seeing Shasha start to cry, Jiaming cut in from the side. It was a joke that had become habit in the Ye household, but it was the first time the usually well-behaved Jiaming had come out with it himself.
Mr. and Mrs. Ye burst out laughing in perfect unison; Lingjing gave a soft scoff of disgust, went red, and hit him hard. Shasha stopped crying on the spot, jumped down from her chair, and came after him.
Jiaming's escape skills did not hold out long this time—after about ten laps around the little practice platform outside, she brought him down on the ground and gave him a sound beating. But at least it put the crying out of her head.
Then, on the day after Shasha's birthday, something happened.
That day after school, Lingjing stayed behind to help a teacher sort some materials, so Jiaming and Shasha went on ahead and waited for her outside the school gate. They had been standing at a little stall for only a moment when two vans came tearing at them and boxed them in.
The men shadowing them from both sides charged over at once, but the vans, coming in hard, cut them off. Men in black hoods leapt out and were already dragging Shasha toward the van.
If I made my move now, I could gut every one of these bastards. But... there are too many of them...
By sheer strength, even Jiaming and Shasha together could not have matched several grown men. His mind racing, Jiaming clamped on to Shasha's hand for dear life—and then he was thrown into the van with her.
The van tore away. In moments the two children had their hands bound, cloth stuffed in their mouths, and their eyes covered. But in the time it took them to tie his wrists, Jiaming had already palmed a razor blade; working free would be child's play. Lying in the van, he carefully tracked the direction they were driving. Shasha, terrified, pressed hard against him, struggling with all her might and moaning through her gag.
"Fuck—Brother Feng said to grab the three of them together, didn't he?"
"How do you grab three when there's only two of them? You want to pull over and snatch some random kid to make quota? 'Brother Feng,' my ass—he's a half-grown brat. I take my orders from Brother Hao, and Brother Hao said grab one. If this boy here hadn't been hanging on for dear life, I wouldn't have taken him either." So saying, the man kicked Jiaming.
Cao Dongfeng again. So the Cao father and son mean to throw in with the Linghai Gang—or to set up on their own? Jiaming turned it over in his mind. Ever since he had made an enemy of Cao Dongfeng, he had looked into the pair's background as best he could.
In the Sand Bamboo Gang, Cao Jinghao had always considered himself founding-father material; after some of the gang's old-timers died, he had decided he ranked second in the Sand Bamboo Gang, with a barely veiled ambition to stand first. The man did have real ability, though, and some of his connections reached as far as foreign powers.
For one thing, Jiaming had never taken him all that seriously; for another, working alone, a real investigation would be a huge hassle. And now, before he had even gotten to the bottom of it, the other side had made the first move.
Jiaming knew this city inside out, and by his reckoning the van had finally stopped at a lumber yard on the western outskirts. A moment later he and Shasha were each carried out over a man's shoulder, their blindfolds pulled off—and it was indeed the timber yard he remembered.
Lumber was stacked all around; they stood in a small open square at the center, with a row of single-story tile-roofed sheds to one side and a two-story building to the other. A crowd of men stood close by, staring down at the two children on the ground—mostly at Shasha, of course.
"Little niece! Haven't seen you in ages. How have you been lately?"
The leader was a somewhat pudgy middle-aged man. Shasha fixed him with a cold stare. "I knew it was you, Cao Jinghao! You'd better watch your back—my dad will be coming to find you any minute now!"
"Haha, and it's just because I was afraid your daddy would come looking that I invited my niece Huaisha here to put in a good word for me. Oh—and this boy looks like that boy from your little trio, doesn't he? What was he called again? Right, and where's the other girl?"
As he asked, Cao Dongfeng, standing off to one side, put in: "Yeah, where's Ye Lingjing? How come you didn't grab her too?"
"We only saw these two together outside the school gate. Liu Huaisha matched the photo, so we moved in."
"Hmph, Cao Dongfeng." Tied up on the ground, Huaisha was still fierce. "Still dreaming of toad wanting swan meat? Look at you! Even a real toad wouldn't take a liking to you!"
"One more fucking word out of you, woman, and I'll rape you." A spark of fury flashed in Cao Dongfeng's eyes. "Not good enough for Ye Lingjing, am I? I'm still a damn sight better than this little punk! Heh heh. Lingjing didn't come, but you did. Good, that's good. If I don't do you to death, my name isn't Cao!"
"Don't be scared, Jiaming." Shasha was trembling all over; after hearing the word rape, she no longer dared speak too loudly, but she still did not forget to buck him up.
"It's fine, I'm all right," Jiaming said with a nod, glancing around a little distractedly. Two figures in a small bamboo shed across the way caught his attention. One was a Japanese old man of perhaps fifty-odd, holding a bamboo practice sword and dressed in Japanese samurai garb. The other was a girl sitting on the ground in a loose red kimono, about the same age as Jiaming and Lingjing, looking for all the world like a porcelain doll carved of pink jade. She sat there without moving a muscle, like a thousand-year-old iceberg.
The old man said something in a loud voice, got no answer, and brought the bamboo sword down on the girl with vicious force. Jiaming could tell it was a real blow, struck with full strength and no mercy, yet the girl only swayed slightly. The look on her face did not change in the least; only in her eyes flickered the mark of pain.
The old man was speaking Japanese, which the others could not understand, but Jiaming caught it: "I've given you two days, and you still don't want to talk... Fine. If you still won't talk tomorrow, hmph—then don't blame me for ruining your whole life!"
That girl... Jiaming searched his memory for a matching face. So it was her. In that other life, eight years on, he had seen her grown—the one and only time. In a room she was said to have lived in for eight years without once stepping outside, the girl had cut her own wrists; the blood had flowed out and spread into an enormous cherry-blossom petal. She had worn a vivid kimono that day too, elegant and immaculate, her gaze as calm as ice.
At the time he had marveled that the Japanese really were twisted: a girl who looked so very beautiful could take her own life with that much composure. Even he, trained a thousand ways over, doubted he could keep that look in his eyes at the moment of death—let alone by his own hand.
Now that he thought back on it—eight years. If the butterfly effect of his arrival in this world was not strong enough to change that, then whatever happened to her must have happened right here. It came back to him: that Japanese family was named Tsukiike, and they knew a strange branch of ninjutsu called Chisakura Senkan.
Her name was... Kaoru.