So this is what catching a stray bullet while lying down feels like? He had holed up in a corner and she still hadn't let him off. The woman in front of him who called herself "Momma" had actually used him as her pretext for attack.
Wuchang felt rather embarrassed. A woman shamelessly insisting, right in front of her own sons, on claiming a strange man as her son — that struck him as downright immoral.
Maybe some bad habit from his past life was acting up, because Wuchang suddenly spoke in a strange, snide tone.
"Now, big sister, you shouldn't go claiming just anyone. Your two fat sons are right here beside you — why do you want to claim me as a son too?"
One sentence, and the whole hall went dead silent. Blood Rose's eyes bulged wider than an ox's, and she pointed at Wuchang, trembling, unable to get a single word out.
Everyone in the room was stunned; no one had expected Wuchang to blurt out something so brainless. Everyone knew Blood Rose was Coyote Seven's mistress and wasn't even thirty yet, while the two thugs behind her were chubby twins already in their twenties. Had she given birth at ten?
People looked at Wuchang as though he were an idiot. Just look at what you've done to Blood Rose. Wait till Seven gets his hands on you.
Wuchang looked around at everyone, baffled. Can't you people see something this obvious? Those two fat twins are plainly Blood Rose's sons. He had learned plenty from his master, and physiognomy was the most basic of skills. If he couldn't even read a mother-and-son resemblance, his master would be so furious he'd come back to life.
Blood Rose gradually calmed down, but the cold killing intent in her eyes was impossible to hide. She had no interest in wasting words now; she looked over the people present and said:
"I offer you face and you slap it away. This is your last chance. If you won't value it yourselves, then don't blame me." With that, she turned and left with her four bodyguards.
The moment Blood Rose was gone, the filthy old man Lane came running over. "You stupid boy, how did you go and offend her? That's Blood Rose, Coyote Seven's mistress! Between the two of them they control the B1314 pit west of us, and they've even got a high-grade pit, A332. They're absolutely rolling in money."
"And Seven has a full three hundred-plus thugs on his payroll. He's the biggest damn boss in ten pits around — the whores and the drugs in this whole area are all their monopoly. That's a man we can't afford to cross."
"And another thing — Blood Rose isn't even thirty yet. How can you say she has sons? Never mind her not wanting to hear it, Coyote Seven wouldn't want to hear it either."
Now Wuchang understood. Blood Rose had hidden her age and deceived her own man besides. A woman plainly in her forties had disguised herself as a woman not yet thirty — she had even kept her illegitimate sons from before right at her side.
Wuchang scratched at his hair in frustration. Talk about trouble coming out of his own mouth. It was the filthy old man Lane who took pity on him and murmured in comfort, "Don't be scared. So long as you keep your head down and stay careful, don't go wandering off for no reason, they can't just break in here after you. That would be breaking the taboo..."
Just then Boss Pan walked over and cut Lai En off. "Don't you go being afraid of them either. With Captain Ye Tian of the guard in charge, they wouldn't dare break in here openly. But your identity is a big problem. If you don't get an identity tattoo soon, then once the guard steps in, nobody will be able to save you."
Here Boss Pan paused. "But a black-market identity tattoo costs five rainbow coins apiece — a full five hundred gold coins. How many years would it take you to earn that?"
So the crux of the problem had been found. For Coyote Seven and Blood Rose to move against Wuchang, they had to use the lawful side's muscle, and their only pretext was a sweep for unregistered residents. To get through this disaster, Wuchang had to obtain a black-market tattoo — but one cost a full five hundred gold coins, and by the look of things that was a truly enormous sum.
With Lane and Boss Pan explaining, Wuchang finally got it. So a tattoo was this world's ID card! Using liquid mithril as ink, they tattooed a QR code packed with information onto a person's skin — that was a person's identity data for life.
You could choose where the tattoo went, and afterward you could cover it with other patterns. No wonder every person Wuchang saw in the bathhouse had tattoos. No wonder Lai En had been so curious about the patterns on his back. So tattoo culture in this world was that widespread.
"Then I understand. I have to earn five hundred gold coins, or five rainbow coins as you call them, as fast as I possibly can — and only then am I temporarily safe?"
Lai En and Boss Pan nodded, and Wuchang went on.
"And if the guard catches me before I've earned it, then all I can do is accept my bad luck?"
Lai En and Boss Pan nodded again, and Wuchang said, thoroughly embarrassed:
"Then... then could the two of you lend me a little money first?"
"Oh, would you look at that — nice weather today..."
"Right, right — how about the two of us have another drink..."
The pair of them didn't even bother shaking their heads; they simply went off to the bar to drink, leaving Wuchang stranded there alone.
Wuchang had only been joking. He knew his identity was unclear and that nobody was going to lend him money. The only way out of this dead end was his own hard work.
From noon that day on, apart from eating, sleeping and using the toilet, Wuchang spent every hour by the tailings heaps, from sunrise to sunset, tirelessly searching the dim pit for rainbow crystals.
One day, two days, three or four, all the way to ten. Wuchang worked a miracle for all of B1313: one man earning five gold coins a day out of the waste heaps. The results left even Gopher Pike, the mining king, dumbstruck.
"The man's insane — a total lunatic. With grit and skill like that, why doesn't he go down the mine?" Many people had the same question. In their eyes, scratching around in the tailings for luck was what newbies and weaklings did; a tough sort like Wuchang belonged down in the pit.
And then there was his luck, which everyone was eager to see more of. A man who could pull money out of the tailings every day had luck that defied the heavens. If he went down the shaft, maybe he really would work a miracle.
Wuchang didn't keep them waiting long. On the evening of the tenth day he finally asked Boss Pan for leave to go down the mine. The instant he finished speaking, the whole Ration Center fell silent.
"Boss, don't try to talk me out of it. I know what you're going to say — that I'm short on experience, that it's dangerous down there, all of that. But I've worked myself half to death for ten days and made a measly fifty gold coins. Do you really think Coyote Seven will give me a hundred days of peace?"
That one sentence shut every mouth in the room. In the end Boss Pan had nothing left to say either; he turned and fixed his eyes on Gopher Pike.
"Tomorrow, you're in charge of taking Wuchang down the mine."
"Huh? You want me to take him? He's a greenhorn!"
"Who didn't start out a greenhorn? Besides, taking a greenhorn down earns you twenty percent." Then Boss Pan looked at Wuchang. "You should know the rule already: when an old hand takes you down, twenty percent of your take goes to him. That's an iron rule."
Wuchang was not one to begrudge tuition money. Gopher Pike was a capable man, and if it cost money to learn from a capable man, then money it was.
Seeing Wuchang nod, Pike lowered his head and drank in a glum mood. Only after Ailin glared at him a couple of times did he manage a bit of a smile for Wuchang.
"Remember to get up early tomorrow." With that, he stopped paying Wuchang any attention.
Early the next morning, when Pike had just opened his eyes, Wuchang had already eaten breakfast, kitted himself out and was ready to set off. Pike didn't much like Wuchang, but that kind of diligence commanded respect.
When the outermost airlock door of the Ration Center opened, a blast of black volcanic ash struck them head-on and completely plastered the lenses of their masks.
"Fuck," Gopher Pike swore at once. "Bad luck. What rotten luck today — walking out into black snow."
Wuchang was glum too. When he'd gotten up, he'd checked through the viewing port and the weather had looked no different from usual. How had black snow come down in a sky-blotting blanket in the time it took to eat breakfast?
He didn't know that on Huang'e, forecasting eruptions was brutally hard work: the planet was scattered with over eight thousand active volcanoes and more than fifteen thousand extinct ones. On a normal day only fifteen percent of them were erupting, and that passed for the good weather miners talked about.
But once more than half of them erupted at the same time, black snow was a certainty. And today was one of the unlucky days.
Gopher Pike said to Wuchang, "Us miners, what we want is a good omen to start with. Your first day down the shaft and you run into weather like this. Think it over for yourself — are you really going down? My advice is to wait a few days..."
"So tell me, how many days will this black snow fall for?"
"Who knows? It might fall half a day, and a month is just as normal. That's this hellhole Huang'e for you — that 'e' in its name means 'calamity,' doesn't it? Would it be stuck with a trash name like that otherwise?"
Wuchang weighed it in his mind for a good long while, and in the end it was the crisis of sheer survival that decided him. Coyote Seven would not give him much time, and every day he put off was another day of danger.
"Forget it. Let's go down," Wuchang said, and with that he strode off toward the mine shaft. Gopher Pike shook his head and sighed inwardly: Greenhorns never believe in bad luck. Once he gets burned, he'll know my advice was worth a fortune.
The B1313 pit was in fact an abandoned mine. Three contractors before him had gone bankrupt here; Smith Pan had taken it over three years ago and, though he'd managed to break even, he still hadn't turned a profit.
An abandoned mine is an abandoned mine — one look at those cramped tunnels below said it all. In many places only one man could crawl through, wriggling forward like a maggot.
"Listen close. Mining rainbow crystals is brutally hard — you can't use machinery at all. The stuff is far too brittle; a bit too much force and it shatters. So your entire tool kit is one hand shovel and one bottle of liquid foam."
"When you find the trace of a rainbow crystal in the rock, you tap at it with the utmost care. How to break the rock without cracking the crystal — that's pure experience. Even if I wanted to teach it, I couldn't."
Gopher Pike might not like Wuchang, but he was a responsible sort. He held nothing back and poured out everything he knew.
In the faint glow of their mining lamps, two ratlike figures moved two hundred meters underground, surrounded by the fissures left by geological shifting — what the miners called natural tunnels. These were the cracks formed when volcanic lava cooled and contracted: some wide enough for three men abreast, others so narrow that a rat couldn't squeeze through.
"Rainbow crystals have a lot to do with volcanoes. Why are they long strips? Because the lava flowed like water, and when it cooled, the rainbow crystal inside it grew into one long strip too..."
Pike was studying the rock wall and lecturing Wuchang when Wuchang abruptly stopped in his tracks.
"Pike, look — is this rainbow crystal?"
Pike looked, and grinned. "Not bad, kid — you spotted it before I did." There, where the beams of their two lamps crossed, the broken face of a crystal as thick as a thumb glittered with a seductive light.
Before Pike could get another word out, the shovel in Wuchang's hand came smashing down like lightning.
"No—!" Pike roared, so furious he couldn't speak. No wonder everyone calls you an idiot — you really are one! I've said it a hundred times that the crystal is fragile, so why are you still mining it with brute force like that? You're breaking my heart.
But what happened next left Pike unable to utter a single word. Too eerie. Far too eerie. Kid, are you a man or a ghost?