The muffled thud of the blackboard eraser striking the board still echoed through the conference room.
Chalk dust swirled up and down in the shafts of light filtering through the ventilation fan.
Xu Hu stared fixedly at the grid-marked map on the blackboard.
He had forgotten to flick the ash from the Hongtashan cigarette between his fingers.
A glowing red fleck of ash fell onto the back of his hand, burning a small red spot, but he didn’t even furrow his brow.
Xu Hu’s eyes grew brighter and brighter.
Bloodshot veins spread across the whites of his eyes like a spiderweb.
He thought he had grasped the Boss’s deeper meaning.
This was no map of Songjiang City.
It was clearly the future power map of the Dingsheng Society!
Jiang Che picked up the tea mug on the table and moistened his parched throat.
“If we’re going to do food delivery, we need Wolf Culture.”
He rapped his knuckles against the solid wood tabletop, making it ring.
“What does it mean to have a wolf’s nature?”
“It means locking onto your prey and never letting go.”
Jiang Che looked at the hotheaded young men below, trying to explain the modern corporate spirit of hard work in the plainest terms.
“The customers are the prey.”
“Rain or shine, once a customer places an order, you’ll run your legs off if you have to, but you must get it delivered on time.”
Jiang Che set down the tea mug with a heavy thump, splashing water across the table.
“Business warfare is a battlefield. It’s either you die or I do.”
Xu Hu sucked in a sharp breath.
The muscles in his chest bulged, stretching his shirt buttons to the point of bursting.
He turned his head and muttered to Baldy Chen Dao in a low voice.
“Did you hear that?”
Xu Hu’s voice was brimming with barely contained excitement.
“The Boss said to lock onto the prey and never let go.”
“He’s telling us to seize the turf of those little gangs and kill them in one strike!”
Chen Dao rubbed his shiny bald head and swallowed.
“The Boss went to Aodao and came back with a much more ruthless streak.”
“When Brother Biao was around, we still gave them a chance to settle things peacefully before taking territory by force.”
“Now it’s straight-up you die or I do.”
Standing at the lectern, Jiang Che couldn’t make out what they were muttering. He assumed they were taking notes attentively.
He turned around, picked up a piece of chalk, and drew a big red X beneath the map.
“I mentioned earlier that we’ll conduct KPI assessments every month.”
“That brings us to a rule.”
Jiang Che turned around, his expression serious.
“Bottom-Rank Elimination.”
The moment those words were spoken, the air in the conference room seemed to freeze.
Several Hall Masters all stopped breathing for a beat.
Lei Bao pinched his chin as cold sweat seeped through his floral shirt.
“Boss, what’s Bottom-Rank Elimination?”
Lei Bao’s voice trembled slightly.
Jiang Che braced both hands on the lectern and leaned forward.
“It’s simple.”
“At the end of the month, we’ll tally everything. Whichever District delivers the fewest orders and gets the most bad reviews—”
“In other words, whichever one ranks last in performance.”
Jiang Che raised a finger and pointed toward the door.
“That department’s manager will be fired on the spot and sent packing.”
“The employees under him will be broken up and reassigned to the top three departments.”
“That’s survival of the fittest.”
Jiang Che had intended to use the most common capitalist rhetoric from his previous life to push these hooligans into working hard.
But he had completely underestimated how devastating that rhetoric would sound in the language of the underworld.
Lei Bao’s hand shook, and he nearly knocked the glass ashtray in front of him onto the floor.
He stared wide-eyed at the red X.
Fired? Sent packing?
In an underground syndicate like Dingsheng, there was no such thing as resigning.
The only way to leave the jianghu was to have the tendons in your hands and feet severed—or to be sunk straight into the Songjiang River.
His underlings broken up and handed over to someone else?
This damn well wasn’t any kind of elimination system.
It was a blatant case of the underworld devouring its own! An internal kill order!
If a gang branch failed to seize new territory, its boss would die and its underlings would be swallowed up by another gang.
Ruthless.
Too ruthless.
Chen Dao and Lei Bao exchanged a glance, seeing deep fear and murderous intent in each other’s eyes.
No one wanted to be the last-place loser sunk in the river.
The atmosphere turned instantly hostile.
The Hall Masters who had been calling each other brothers moments ago now looked at one another as if they were sworn enemies.
Xu Hu sat in his chair, gripping the armrests tightly with both hands.
His knuckles had turned pale blue.
He wasn’t afraid at all. Instead, he was trembling with excitement.
“What about first place?”
Xu Hu shot his head up, his voice hoarse as a cracked gong.
Jiang Che looked at Xu Hu’s “eager to learn” expression with satisfaction, thinking that at last, someone had caught on.
“The department with the best performance.”
Jiang Che held up five fingers and waved them in the air.
“The department manager gets a personal cash bonus of one hundred thousand that month.”
“Every employee under him gets double commission and double bonuses.”
“The company’s best resources and the most lucrative Districts will all go to the first-place department’s choosing!”
One hundred thousand in cash!
In 2008, that was about enough for the down payment on a two-bedroom apartment in Songjiang City.
And that was before even mentioning “first pick of the most lucrative District.”
Xu Hu slammed his fist onto the table.
The solid wood table shook violently, and all the water spilled out of the tea mug.
“The west side!”
Xu Hu sprang to his feet, his chair scraping across the floor with a piercing squeal.
“That commercial street on the west side is mine, Xu Hu’s!”
“Anyone who dares to fight me for it can forget about brotherly ties!”
Chen Dao wasn’t having it. He kicked the tea table in front of him aside.
“Bullshit! The west side is the most profitable. What makes you think you can have it?”
“I have just as many brothers as you do!”
Lei Bao stood up too and yanked open the collar of his floral shirt, revealing a scar on his chest.
“May the best man win! We’ll see who comes out on top at the end of the month!”
The conference room erupted into chaos.
More than a dozen Hall Masters, red in the face and shouting, pointed at one another and cursed.
To avoid being “eliminated” and to get that one hundred thousand in “severance pay,” these Outlaws had completely lost their minds.
Standing at the lectern, Jiang Che looked at his employees, fired up like they’d been injected with adrenaline, and nodded with satisfaction.
Wolf Culture.
At last, it had taken root in these uneducated hooligans.
Jiang Che picked up the blackboard eraser and rapped it twice on the lectern.
“All right, stop arguing.”
“Go to accounting to collect your money. Buy clothes and secondhand electric scooters.”
“Tomorrow morning at eight, meet downstairs.”
Meeting adjourned.
Three in the afternoon, at the Baima Clothing Wholesale Market in North City.
The portly shop owner, Li Zheng, sat in his stall, digging into a boxed lunch.
The braised pork had just reached his mouth when a huge shadow blocked out the light.
Li Zheng looked up, and his hand shook.
The lunchbox fell to the ground, and a piece of braised pork rolled under the sewing machine.
Outside the stall stood forty or fifty hulking musclemen, packed together in a dark mass.
At their head, Lei Bao had a scar running across the bridge of his nose and clutched a wad of crumpled hundred-yuan bills.
“Boss, we’re here to buy suits.”
Lei Bao slapped the money onto the glass counter, which creaked under the strain.
Li Zheng swallowed, his legs turning weak.
“B-Boss, what style do you want?”
“Black. The cheapest kind.”
Lei Bao turned to look at the hulking brothers behind him.
“The fabric’s got to be sturdy. We can’t have it splitting the moment we get into a fight.”
Li Zheng didn’t dare ask any questions. He scrambled off to the storeroom to haul out the merchandise.
Several hundred cheap polyester black suits were piled up in front of the stall.
The musclemen stripped off their shirts on the spot, revealing tattoos all over their bodies, and began pulling on the suits.
Their two-hundred-pound bodies were crammed into the cheap suits.
The fabric stretched taut across their backs. They only had to lift their arms slightly for the suits to dig deep into their armpits.
Lei Bao checked himself out in the mirror.
The collar was choking his thick neck, so he tugged his tie loose and undid two buttons.
He looked at the reflection of his own brutish face in the tight black suit.
Lei Bao grinned with satisfaction, showing a mouthful of yellow teeth.
“This outfit’s got style. We’ll look great going to—going out for food delivery.”
Similar scenes played out at used-car and clothing markets throughout Songjiang City.
More than three thousand men swept up every cheap black suit in Songjiang City.
The next day.
Seven-thirty in the morning.
A thin layer of mist still lingered over the concrete plaza in front of the Ding Sheng Company building.
Jiang Che stood before a floor-to-ceiling window on the second floor, holding a cup of instant coffee as he looked down.
The coffee cup nearly slipped from his hand.
More than a thousand secondhand electric scooters of all different brands were parked in the plaza.
Yadea, Aima, Luyuan.
A makeshift delivery box, cobbled together from cardboard and plastic sheeting, was tied to the back of every scooter.
That wasn’t the point.
The point was the people astride those electric scooters.
More than a thousand hulking men.
Every one of them wore an ill-fitting, cheap black suit.
To hide their scars and menacing expressions, they had even gone out on their own and bought two-yuan-a-pair bargain-bin sunglasses at the night market.
A sea of black.
Not a single person spoke or smoked.
Everyone sat bolt upright, both hands resting on the handlebars of their scooters.
After yesterday’s “Bottom-Rank Elimination” indoctrination, everyone now looked at the brothers beside them with wariness and murderous intent.
These weren’t food delivery riders.
They were clearly an army of suit-clad thugs preparing to carry out an assassination.
Eight o’clock sharp.
Xu Hu wore a pair of oversized sunglasses that covered half his face and twisted the throttle of his electric scooter.
“Beeeep—”
A shrill horn split the morning mist.
More than a thousand electric scooters started up at once.
The motors buzzed and roared in unison, shaking the very ground beneath them.
A black tide surged out of the plaza, splitting into more than a dozen streams and pouring into the streets of Songjiang City.
On the streets during the morning rush hour.
The first batch of “food delivery riders,” dressed in tight black suits and wearing sunglasses, rode their secondhand electric scooters onto the streets.
The killing intent radiating from them was so intense that even the dogs by the roadside didn’t dare bark.