Life in the pit was monotonous, one day exactly like the last. Every day the miners burrowed underground, risking quakes and cave-ins, and the crystals they dug out bought them a pittance in wages — wages that quickly turned into good liquor on the bar counter, whores on duck-down beds, and Phantom Mist, the most popular drug on all Huang'e.
The people here had no future and no hope. The brutal conditions guaranteed no proper miners could ever be recruited, and over the years the place had become a paradise for criminals, a playground for the small-time. Everyone drifted through their days in a muddle, one after another, until they died.
But lately the abandoned pit had grown a little restless. The endless sameness was being stirred up by rumors, and every one of those rumors had to do with a single legendary miner — Boss Pan's number-one man, Ghost Wuchang.
The rumors had actually started half a month ago, when a shocking piece of news leaked out of the Governor's Office: someone had sold four crystals, each more than ten centimeters long, to the Governor in one go — and at a price only thirty percent above the official purchase rate.
The Governor was overjoyed. Once top-grade crystals like that entered official procurement, there was little skim to be had from them; but if he could buy them privately, he had ten thousand ways to ship them off to the auctions on Three Seas Star, where the price would multiply at least tenfold.
For a secret deal like that, the Governor should never have breathed a word — but this time it was simply too big. Four crystals over ten centimeters long in a single sale was a move rarely seen in a decade.
A deal with that much profit in it can never stay buried. In just three days the rumor had spread through the whole of Huang'e City. At first people merely guessed wildly, but as the story traveled wider, one figure gradually surfaced: a badass miner in Boss Pan's crew named Wuchang.
At first no one dared believe it. Then another bombshell dropped, and the entire population of Huang'e was struck speechless.
According to a reliable source, the esteemed Governor Ye Fei had three days ago purchased another rainbow crystal, a full sixteen centimeters long — and more than one man had wagered his life on the claim that this crystal came from Wuchang's hands.
From that moment on, Wuchang was tagged with the nickname Ghost Wuchang, and the abandoned B1313 pit became, all at once, a treasure ground in the eyes of ten thousand people.
"Damn it, it has to be that quake last time. Pit B1313 must have hit a main vein." In a dark room, Coyote Seven paced in circles, scratching at his bald head.
"Quiet. Don't be so jumpy. What you've got is your own analysis, nothing more — you have no proof." The speaker, a fat man, was Roda, Huang'e City's Mine Supervisor.
"Oh, my dear Mine Supervisor, you actually believe the miners' ghost stories? Talking about possession, no less — saying he's possessed by that mine god who died ten years ago. What kind of garbage is that?"
The mine god Seven was talking about was the man who had smashed a crystal and killed himself more than ten years ago. Later miners, admiring his guts, had taken to calling him the mine god of Huang'e — though really it was just the drunken rambling of a bunch of illiterate, filthy rats.
Mine Supervisor Roda and Seven were hardly going to believe the nonsense of a pack of drunks — Roda least of all. He was a top graduate of the Three Seas Star Imperial University, with a major in rainbow crystal extraction.
"Ghosts and gods is definitely nonsense. So only a few possibilities are left. One: your inside source is wrong — but you guaranteed it with your life..."
"That's right, I guaranteed it with my life, and the intel is absolutely correct. Every one of those crystals came from Wuchang's hands. That's beyond doubt." Seven pounded his chest as he swore it.
Roda kneaded the flab on his belly and said in a low voice, "Then it's hard to explain. How is this Wuchang's luck so good? The finest crystals in the world all come out of his hands? Could he have some secret method? No — definitely not. Humans have been finding rainbow crystals for a million years, and I've never heard of any secret method."
"Oh, my dear Mine Supervisor," Seven said impatiently, "there's only one explanation — it has to be a main vein! We can't just sit on the sidelines anymore. We have to move early, or there'll be nothing left for us."
Then Seven's eyes lit up, and he leaned in to Roda's ear. "Think about it. On Huang'e, what do we have the most of besides black snow? Earthquakes! What if another quake comes and buries that main vein? Then we won't even have a place to go cry."
"Fuck it!" Roda slapped his thigh. "We're doing it. Get the men organized, fast — I'll go smooth over our other connections."
"OK, just leave it to me..."
While Seven and Roda were holding their secret council, over in the B1313 pit's Ration Center, Wuchang was playing with a boy of thirteen or fourteen.
"A Yun, you think your little tricks can fool me? Take a good look at this coin." A gleaming gold coin rolled back and forth across Wuchang's fingertips, nimble as the yellow-tailed rats that were the commonest thing in the pit.
The boy was staring at it without blinking when the coin suddenly vanished with a swish. He was struck dumb; he searched and searched and couldn't find it anywhere.
Wuchang let him hunt for a full ten minutes before fishing the coin out of the corner of the boy's filthy miner's robe.
"Whoa! How did you do that? Your hands are faster than any thief I know. Come on, teach me!" The boy latched onto Wuchang and wouldn't let go.
Wuchang seemed to be in a fine mood today — in good enough spirits to tease a child. Behind the bar, Eileen watched the boy with a smile, and after a while she said, "A Yun, stop pestering him. You ought to learn to be good, too — do you really want to be a thief your whole life? Come and eat..."
Wuchang rubbed A Yun's head, then planted a kick on his backside. "Go eat."
The boy and Eileen went a long way back. This orphan, A Yun, had been picked up by Eileen when he was six. He didn't know where his parents were, or even whether they were alive or dead. Eileen took pity on him and let him stay at the Ration Center — nominally a little odd-job boy, in truth just another mouth eating for free.
As time went on A Yun grew, and in a hellhole like the abandoned pit there was nothing good to be learned. By the time he was eleven, the little brat had run off to Huang'e City and got himself a very promising career as a thief.
And "promising" was no flattery. His first job netted him eighty-eight gold coins, which left his fellow thieves gaping. Eighty-eight, they said to themselves — in Chinese, eight sounds like "to prosper," so double eight meant fortune upon fortune, a beautifully lucky start.
Eileen had tried to talk A Yun out of thieving too, but his answer left her speechless: "If I don't steal, you want me to go be a miner? How many people die down those shafts?"
Eileen thought it over and had to admit he was right. On this godforsaken Huang'e there wasn't even a school to be found; anyone who survived here was lucky just to stay out of the shafts. Chasing after moral crap in a place like this was a pipe dream.
After that A Yun rarely came back. He spent most of his time in the city, dropping by only once every week or two to give Eileen some money to keep for him.
This time, though, A Yun had stayed for many days — because the little fellow had met Wuchang.
Having heard Wuchang's story, A Yun worshipped him and was burning with curiosity. The little runt actually decided to test him, and tried to steal from Wuchang three times in a row — and every single time he was caught.
A Yun couldn't take it. He was a famous thief in Huang'e City — how had he failed three times running today? Little did he know that Wuchang's Dragon-Tiger Rush kung fu came packed with clever, tricky moves that put these thieves' fundamentals to shame. They weren't even in the same league.
And on top of that, Wuchang had been a bandit in his early days, so the tricks of the trade were no stranger to him. A Yun's showing off was like waving an axe before Lu Ban himself.
After Wuchang let a few little tricks slip, A Yun was utterly won over. From that day on he stuck to Wuchang and begged him for lessons. Today was no different — but Wuchang still had his principles, and teaching a child to be a thief struck him as far too immoral.
A Yun went off to eat, disappointed. The Ration Center was calm as ever. The sky darkened bit by bit and the miners trickled back one after another; Huang'e's nights were bitterly cold, and no one wanted to be out wandering at this hour.
Time wore on, and the empty bottles on the tables multiplied. By now some of the drunken miners had found their bunks, though a few who'd made a little money were pestering Eileen to find them some pretty whores.
Just when everyone's guard was at its lowest, none of them could have imagined that outside the Ration Center, a band of black-clad men in skull masks had already crept close.
Military button explosives were set in place, high-energy rounds chambered. Fifty-odd armed men had the Ration Center surrounded. When the watch hands touched ten o'clock sharp, a violent explosion tore into the alloy wall — over sixty button charges blew a three-meter-wide gap in the B1313 Ration Center.
"Get in there! No quarter!" The black-clad men charged in before the smoke had even cleared.
By then the Ration Center had descended into utter chaos. The miners near the blast were all dead, their torn bodies scattered across the floor. Even Wild Bull, who had been too close to the charge, was injured by the blast, coughing up mouthful after mouthful of blood.
"Raid! We're under attack!" The first to react was actually Wuchang. Before the smoke had thinned, he was already snatching up metal chairs and hurling them at the gap.
With Dragon-Tiger strength poured into both arms, Wuchang threw chairs the way other men threw knives. The heavy alloy chairs hurtled into the smoke at high speed, flattening one attacker's skull on the spot and, on the way, slicing open the throats of two more.
"Fuck, they're putting up a fight! Shoot! Shoot now!" Outside the smoke, a familiar voice was directing the assault, and at its command the assault rifles spat energy light, dense high-energy rounds streaking toward the Ration Center in blazing beams.
By now the people in the hall had snapped out of it too. Boss Pan, in a rage, flung open the weapon crate behind the bar and tossed light arms to everyone. "Fight back! Don't just stand there!"
Wuchang got a pistol and two magazines as well, but he had never handled such high-tech weapons; he fiddled with it for ages without figuring it out.
"Stop messing with that thing — just throw your chairs!" old Lane shouted beside him, both pistols in his hands firing out without pause. He had barely finished yelling when another violent explosion came from the wall on the opposite side, blowing open an even bigger gap.
Once bullets were pouring in through gaps on both sides, the miners in the Ration Center could hold out no longer. Who knows which one led the way, but a young fellow suddenly dropped down hugging his head and shouted, "I surrender! Stop shooting! I surrender..."
The wounded Wild Bull, a pistol in one hand, kept firing and cursing: "Are you idiots? They're here to wipe us out! Don't you see they're using army-issue weapons? They're not going to leave a single one of us alive!"
Wild Bull's name was ugly, but the man himself was no fool. That one sentence hit the nail right on the head.