"Feeling any better?" Dirty old Lane, carrying two bottles of wine, climbed up to the Ration Center's observation deck and sat down inside the semicircular transparent dome beside his nominal disciple, Wuchang.
Wuchang had been sitting in that transparent dome for over four hours already. Apart from a plate of dried meat, his only company was a big wine bottle with a third of cheap liquor still sloshing at the bottom.
"I really don't know what goes on in that head of yours. You come into a bit of easy money and you don't even buy yourself something decent to drink? Here, have some of mine." With that, old Lane held out the wine.
Wuchang didn't stand on ceremony. He swiped the bottle and took a big gulp, then let out a long breath. "Aren't these the two most expensive bottles in the bar? How do you have the money for them?"
"Heh heh. I used the money you left in my keeping."
"What?" The dirty old man's shamelessness left Wuchang speechless. "Don't go spending it however you like. Twenty percent of that belongs to Pike — he's the one who took me down the mine, after all."
"Forget it. Pike already said he doesn't want it. You nearly died this time, and that's because Pike led you wrong. If you two had walked one more hour and come out around through another mining zone, maybe you wouldn't have run into all this trouble."
"You can't blame Pike. He took plenty of punches in that fight too — I can't let him get beaten for nothing. He gets all sixteen rainbow coins, not one less."
Lane thought it over for a moment, then changed the subject. "Pike's business is a small matter. We can take care of it any time. I came looking for you mainly because I want to talk about your identity tattoo. There are some things it's better you decide yourself..."
Wuchang couldn't make sense of Lane's hemming and hawing. "Isn't it just five hundred gold coins? Five rainbow coins, isn't that enough?"
"Heh heh, in theory, yes. But you should know that the five-hundred-gold price just barely fools Huang'e's administrative system. If you go to other civilized planets in the future — especially a capital star ring — that money won't be enough."
Under Lane's explanation, Wuchang finally understood that an identity tattoo packed in an enormous amount of information. The planet, place, and time of birth all had to be encoded into it, along with parents, relatives, even schooling and the rest of one's life history.
If Wuchang only wanted a legal identity in the abandoned mining zone, then five hundred gold coins really was enough, because nobody had any interest in picking a fight with a dirty rat. Everyone on this planet knew that the miners as a group carried no real information on them at all; most of them had secrets they couldn't tell.
Put plainly, the Guard had no interest whatsoever in verifying every single person's real information through the network.
But the fighting strength Wuchang had shown today, his cool head under pressure, and the memorable lines that popped out of him every so often — all of it had astonished both Lane and Boss Pan. After the group got back to the Ration Center, the two of them held a long secret meeting in a corner, and no one knew what they talked about.
"The two of us talked it over for ages, and we figure we ought to get you a real identity. We both have a feeling you won't be on Huang'e for long — there's a faint air of a big man about you. I believe your road ahead is wide, but if you want to walk it steadily and walk it far, you'll need an identity that can stand up to inspection."
"If the chance comes, you'll go to other civilized planets, maybe even a capital star. In places like that, the crude black-market tattoos are spotted as fakes at a glance, and then you'll be the one to suffer."
Wuchang hadn't expected an identity tattoo to have so many tricks hidden in it. He mulled it over and asked, "So how much does a real identity tattoo cost?"
"Ah, a real tattoo takes a lot of manpower. They have to go to your birth planet and fabricate genuine paper documents, and transmit all kinds of information back to your homeworld. In short, they have to turn a person who doesn't exist into a legally real person. All of that costs money..."
"Stop dragging it out. Just tell me how much."
"Mm. Boss Pan and I will pull some strings for you. I figure it'll take at least fifty-five rainbow coins..."
"What!" The usually unflappable Wuchang froze on the spot. Five thousand five hundred gold coins? That expensive? The rainbow coins he had just gotten his hands on would bottom out in an instant. Subtract the sixteen rainbow coins for Pike, and he'd be left with only nine.
"So when all's said and done, I'll only have nine hundred gold coins left? Looks like that beating I took is worth about that much."
Lane looked a little embarrassed. "Can't be helped. This is all the pull we've got. They wanted sixty rainbow coins; it was only after the two of us begged for ages that they knocked off five. In the old days, I wouldn't have had to spend a damn coin on a little thing like this..."
Wuchang shook his head and cut off the old man's self-reproach. "Don't talk like that. You two have helped me plenty. Money comes fast and goes fast; as long as the job gets done, spending it is fine — I can always earn more."
Lane took a drink of wine and let out a long breath. "Pike knows about this too, so he offered to do without the money..."
"No. He takes it. A timid fellow like Pike, sticking with me right to the end — that wasn't easy. I won't let a friend of mine come out on the losing end."
Lane had no idea what Wuchang was thinking. In truth, Wuchang's thinking was simple: if he could pull a crystal that valuable on his very first trip down a mine, then he could surely pull more in the future. Maybe it wouldn't be long before he'd saved up a big pile of money, and then he could leave this planet and go somewhere else to see the world properly.
"Oh, that's right. Tell me the story behind the crystals. Why would Huang'e put a law this strange into effect? Even if crystals are precious, surely not to that degree?"
"What would you know?" The old man took a swig of wine and tossed a strip of dried meat into his mouth. "It happened fifteen years ago. I'd only been on this planet a few years myself back then..."
From the old man's mouth, Liuhuo gradually learned the truth of the matter. In that year, a lucky miner had dug out the longest crystal in history — a full forty-three centimeters, a whole four centimeters longer than Huang'e's previous record of thirty-nine.
How precious a forty-three-centimeter crystal really is, it's hard to measure in money. All we know is that in this universe, the legendary god-tier warships use crystals only a little over fifty centimeters long — and there are only three god-tier warships in the entire universe.
A forty-three-centimeter crystal, however, was already enough to build a sub-god-tier warship, and there were only a little over five hundred sub-god-tier warships in the whole universe. In the entire history of the Horsehead Star Ring, there had been exactly one sub-god-tier warship — His Imperial Majesty's flagship, the Gallop. As for god-tier warships, a minor power like the Horsehead Star Ring had no right to own one at all.
"So you can imagine: the moment this crystal came to light, the Horsehead Star Ring would gain another sub-god-tier warship. No need to waste words on how precious it was."
What followed was too clichéd. Twenty-one mine owners and sixteen underworld bosses tore into each other in a three-day, three-night free-for-all over that crystal. The whole abandoned mining zone became a battlefield; Swarm massed-array strikes even reached Huang'e City, and the flames roaring into the sky outshone the light of the volcanic eruptions.
When the fighting was finally over and the reinforcements the Governor had assembled brought the situation under control, something nobody could ever have imagined happened: that miner, who had lost every relative and friend he had, smashed the crystal to powder in front of more than a thousand people. Then he threw himself off the high tower and died.
"That business really blew up too big. The detailed intelligence was pushed straight in front of the Emperor. At the time, the fighting between the Hunter Star Ring and the Horsehead Star Ring was at its fiercest — our Horsehead Star Ring had already had two mortal stars overrun."
"When His Imperial Majesty heard that a sub-god-tier warship had been destroyed just because of a pack of greedy mine owners and thugs, he was so furious he coughed up a mouthful of old blood on the spot."
"One mouthful of the Emperor's blood, and Huang'e turned into a sea of blood. More than ten thousand imperial guards charged into the abandoned mining zone, and a massacre began. Those twenty-one mine owners plus sixteen underworld bosses, along with their families, friends and subordinates — a full thirty thousand people — were all slaughtered overnight."
"And not just slaughtered. Their corpses were airdropped into the cannibal tribes' territory in the south. Heh — those mutated cannibals finally got themselves a real meal. Thirty thousand corpses were enough to feed them for half a year."
Dirty old Lane's account was brief, yet Wuchang could feel the blood-soaked storm of that year. Thirty thousand lives destroyed over a single crystal — that really was beyond imagining. But then, when you looked back at the wretched fate of those two overrun mortal stars, no one would pity those thirty thousand lives anymore.
"Now you should understand. What saved your life today wasn't me — it was that crystal you dug out. Nineteen centimeters was enough to buy you an amnesty. If the crystal you'd dug out today had been over thirty centimeters, I believe Ye Tian wouldn't have minded at all helping you kill Coyote Seven."
"So you see, the old saying 'the man is innocent, but his jade is his crime' has its own particular circumstances. There are plenty of cases in this world where a treasure saves a life, too."
Dirty old Lane sensed that Wuchang was no ordinary man, but Wuchang likewise sensed that the old man was no ordinary man — especially that last exchange with Ye Tian. That wasn't the sort of thing an old miner could have said. The grasp of the bigger picture in it was something ordinary people simply didn't have.
Wuchang was good at reading faces, and the first impression old Lane gave him was nobility — a nobility tinged with scholarship, a nobility steeped through and through in knowledge. Though he couldn't work out the old man's background, Wuchang knew that this cut-rate master of his was definitely a treasure.
Just as Wuchang and Lane were talking, in the Ration Center of the A332 mining zone, Seven — his face blotched purple and green — sat sighing with Blood Rose, whose neck was wrapped in gauze.
"Ye Tian went too far. If he didn't want it, fine — but why hit people? And hit them this hard?" Blood Rose said indignantly as she helped apply medicine to Seven's bruises.
Seven's daytime arrogance was completely gone. He looked at the gauze on Blood Rose's neck and heaved a long sigh. "This one's on me. I miscalculated. Ye Tian barely counts as a collateral branch of the imperial clan. That kind doesn't have much ability, but they'd die for face. We handed him money in front of several hundred people — how could he possibly take it? He'd have loved nothing better than to beat me in front of a crowd and trade it for a good reputation."
"Then what do we do? We just let the money be fined away for nothing? And lose face on top of it?"
"How could we? You underestimate your man. Today's business was only the opening — the real skill comes later. Get me another forty rainbow coins. Tonight I'll pay Mine Supervisor Roda a visit. I refuse to believe Ye Tian is really so seamless, without a single crack to slip through."
They'd already lost far too much money today, and Blood Rose's heart ached over it, but she didn't dare go against her man's orders. She could only open the safe miserably and take out another forty rainbow coins, stuffing them into Seven's hands.
When the sky had gone completely dark, Seven's land vehicle hurried off into the black snow, heading straight north.