Blood Rose's Ration Center was far bigger than Eileen's — at least three times the size. It had ordinary restaurants and bars, proper rest rooms, and even a huge hot spring at the very back. But since Seven had driven most of the miners underground, the whole place felt emptily vast.
Wuchang led the fat woman deep into the Ration Center, ignoring the empty guest rooms on either side. When he brought her into the room next to Blood Rose's office, before she could even start undressing, a knife-hand chop to the back of her head dropped her; she hit the floor without so much as a grunt.
Wuchang shut the door, undid his cloak, and revealed the miner's jacket underneath, hung with several sets of precision tools. Alloy wall panels came off one after another, exposing dense tangles of wiring and mottled pipes. A portable terminal on his wrist kept working away, old Lane remotely directing Wuchang's hands.
Before Wuchang moved, Lane and the others had run the analysis for him: Blood Rose's office would certainly have at least a basic security system, and a violent break-in would likely bring Guard soldiers down on the place.
It wasn't an impossible scenario. On a hellhole like Huang'e, miners' lives were cheap as grass, but contractors still had human rights — and a big merchant with money and influence like Seven was all the more a protected person of Huang'e City. If Blood Rose came under attack, the Guard would absolutely not sit by.
How to take down the security system in Blood Rose's office came down to old Lane's skill. The filthy old man was universally acknowledged as a technical ace; as long as Wuchang's hands were steady enough, a little security system was no problem at all.
Fortunately, Lane's skills really were ace-grade, and Wuchang's hands really were steady. In a short while several key circuit boards had been pulled, and the office's security system finally went dead.
"See? Told you long ago, a beginner-level system like this is just a deaf man's ears — decoration, nothing more." Lane's self-congratulating voice came through Wuchang's earpiece — but just then, voices on the far side of the alloy wall caught Wuchang's attention.
"Is that brat A Yun's intel reliable? If Seven comes back from this trip empty-handed, I'm the one who gets beaten again." It was Blood Rose speaking.
"Relax, boss. I've got that little dog A Yun wrapped around my finger — there's no way he'd lie to me."
Wuchang froze at that. A Yun, that little dog? Who is this woman? Is she A Yun's mother?
Wuchang had judged it right: inside that room was A Yun's fake mother. And now that the security system had failed, the soundproofing that formed part of it had naturally stopped working too.
The intel that Wuchang held a crystal over fifteen centimeters long was something he himself had deliberately let A Yun leak — precisely to lure the tiger off its mountain, to pull Seven away first, and then have Wuchang turn up and collect a little interest from Blood Rose. If Seven could use A Yun to gather intelligence, then Wuchang could just as well use A Yun to leak false intelligence. Spycraft was give-and-take from the start.
What Wuchang had not expected was that A Yun's own mother would call her son a little dog behind his back. That was not something a mother ought to say. And from that woman's voice he could not sense the slightest bit of family feeling.
Sure enough, the conversation that followed confirmed his guess. When the two women began discussing how much use A Yun still had left in him, it finally dawned on him.
"Once Eileen's whole bunch are dead, A Yun won't be worth anything anymore. To keep the secret, I'll have to stuff him down a mine shaft. While you've still got him, squeeze out as much as you can." Blood Rose's voice was cold.
Sister Jing had never imagined that Blood Rose had arranged a dead end for A Yun. She was quiet for a few seconds, then said, "Send him down the pit? He's so small — what if he dies down there?"
"Huh? What's that supposed to mean? Sending him down the pit means sending him to die. Or do you want to keep him around so he exposes our secret? Has your brain gone soft?"
"No, it's just — feels like that kid pulls in a few dozen gold coins every day. It'd be a shame to shovel him down a shaft like that."
"Fuck, your brain really has gone soft. A few dozen gold coins, or our necks — which matters more?" A loud slap rang out in the room. "Fuck, you really think you picked yourself up a son? You think he's going to support you in your old age? Don't kid yourself — you're a fake, you're just there to put on a show..."
By now Wuchang had it straight: A Yun had been fooled, and so had everyone else along with him. Quick-minded as he was, he went straight to the key point. A Yun had once sobbed it all out down in the mine tunnels — how his mother knew he didn't like fish, how his mother knew he kicked off the covers in his sleep, talked in his dreams, and all the rest.
Putting the two halves together, Wuchang finally understood. A Yun must have let slip details of his childhood without realizing it, and Blood Rose had made use of them. A birthmark was nothing — any half-decent tattoo artist could produce one. And A Yun's habit of talking in his sleep was very likely the source the intel had leaked from in the first place.
A nameless rage burned in Wuchang's chest. He yanked loose the last two surveillance wires, wrecking the security system for good, then swaggered off toward Blood Rose's office.
Blood Rose was straddling Sister Jing and slapping her with both hands, left and right. Partly she was furious at Sister Jing's hesitation and backtalk; partly it was because the pressure Mine Supervisor Roda had been putting on her lately was too great, and she badly needed to vent.
"You cheap whore. A one-gold-coin piece of trash like you, still dreaming of having a son? A drug-raddled wreck like you, thinking anyone's going to support you in your old age? Dream on..."
Blood Rose cursed as she struck, and several dozen slaps later she had actually worked up a sweat.
Still, hitting people really did feel good. When she rose from the floor and let out a long breath, she looked thoroughly satisfied with the venting.
"What a show. I always figured big-chested women had no brains, but here you are — big chest, and not a bit stupid either..." While Blood Rose was completely off guard, Wuchang's voice came from behind her.
"Who's there?" Blood Rose whipped around and instinctively lunged for the pistol on the table. As if Wuchang would give her the chance — his left hand flashed out and caught her across the face; the slap spun her a full three hundred and sixty degrees and dropped her to the ground.
Wuchang scooped up the exquisite little pistol from the table, tucked it into his waistband, and said coldly to the two women on the floor, "Don't play dead. Sit up nice and proper. In front of me, your lives aren't worth a chicken's."
Hearing that familiar threatening voice and looking at that detestable face, Blood Rose was so frightened she tried to burrow into the corner. "Are you a man or a ghost? Didn't they say the cannibals ate you? How are you still alive?"
Wuchang curled his lip; he couldn't be bothered wasting words on these two women. He merely pointed at Blood Rose. "You took over Eileen's Ration Center, and from the look of it you didn't pay a single coin for it. Now be a good girl and hand the money over. If you show real sincerity, I don't mind letting you live this once."
"Money? How much do you want?"
"All of it, of course — how much is your life worth, after all..." As he spoke, the corner of Wuchang's eye easily caught Blood Rose's little move: the woman was gently twisting the ring on her right hand with her fingers.
Lane's voice came through the earpiece. "Silly bitch, still trying to trip the alarm on the sly. Doesn't she know that when Lane does a job, no dumbass hole like that gets left behind?"
Wuchang smiled too. He walked abruptly to the wall right beside Blood Rose, said nothing at all, and drove his right fist into the alloy wall like lightning.
The power of a single-shot Nail Fist was not to be underestimated. A dull, heavy impact boomed through the thick alloy plate, and a huge fist print was stamped clearly into it.
"Don't get clever. You think I don't know about the security system in your room?"
When Blood Rose saw that Wuchang's eyes were fixed on the ring on her right little finger, she knew she had run into a real expert today.
With a deadly enemy in front of her, staying alive came first. Trembling, Blood Rose opened the safe hidden in the wall cavity and pulled out a large leather pouch.
"This is all of it. It's all here..."
Wuchang weighed the money bag in his palm and said doubtfully, "Are you insulting my intelligence? Coyote Seven, a man of his standing, and all he's got is two hundred rainbow coins? Shit, what you grabbed from Eileen's Ration Center alone was more than that."
"There isn't any more, I really don't have any more!" Blood Rose screamed hysterically. "Renovations cost money! Bribing the officials costs money! I'm just a weak woman running a shop — I really have no money. I just don't have money..."
Wuchang didn't listen to her mad shrieking at all. He shoved her face-down onto the table, clamped his left hand over her mouth, and pinched the little finger of Blood Rose's left hand between the thumb and forefinger of his right.
"You forced this on me. I'm a kind man at heart, and you're the one forcing me to do evil..." Before he finished the sentence, his right thumb and forefinger clenched hard. A crisp crack, and Blood Rose's little finger was crushed.
"Mmph—" Unable to scream, Blood Rose sweated through from the pain and rolled her eyes up to the whites. Wuchang kept her mouth clamped shut, wolf-like eyes fixed on the woman.
Blood Rose trembled all over for a full ten minutes before she gradually went still. Then Wuchang took his hand from her mouth and said with a cold smile, "Now you know I wasn't joking, don't you? Care to try that flavor again?"
That one sentence had Blood Rose frantically shaking her head. She scrambled on hands and knees to a floorboard in the corner and started prying at it. The woman really was terrified, and really was in pain; tears rolled down like a spring, and she pried at that board for the longest time without getting it up.
"You. Get over there and help her pry it up." Wuchang hauled up Sister Jing — who had already wet herself in fear — and flung her over.
The two women worked at it for a good while, and finally got the safe under the floor open, pulling out a soft black leather money pouch.
"Woo... this is my last asset, my whole fortune..." Blood Rose choked, so heartbroken she was close to fainting, her worthless tears streaming freely.
When Wuchang opened the pouch, a silvery light blazed through the room — so bright that even the ceiling lighting couldn't overpower it.
Inside the black leather pouch lay quietly a handful of silver-white round coins: liquid like mercury wrapped in a thin energy barrier to take the shape of a coin, and in the center of the mercury the faint outlines of many people's heads showed through. Wuchang estimated roughly that there were about a hundred of these strange coins.
"What is this stuff?" Wuchang muttered to himself, puzzled.
But then Smith Pan's voice came through his earpiece. "You dumb kid, we're rich! Those are liquid-mithril coins — real liquid-mithril coins..."
"Huh?" Wuchang was stunned. So this is the legendary liquid-mithril coin — one of them worth ten thousand gold coins?