Zhang Lei started watching.
The next morning, on his way to the trade market, he rode his electric scooter for a few blocks then pulled over. Took out his phone, pretended to check a message. Thirty seconds. Casual glance back.
Nobody. Just a woman pushing a stroller and an old man on a rusted bicycle, pedaling slow as death.
He let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
At the market he spent two hours browsing the rows of parked vehicles, checking prices, talking to sellers. Then he picked up a white Toyota Levin—2020 model, bought for seventeen thousand yuan. Good condition, clean interior, no mechanical surprises when he popped the hood and ran his eyes over the engine bay. The tires still had tread, the odometer looked honest, and the AC blew cold. He figured he'd clear five or six thousand on it. Standard operation.
He drove it out of the market lot into pale afternoon sunlight. Paused near the exit gate, engine idling. Scanned behind him—the row of cars, the guard booth, the road stretching back toward the highway overpass. Still nothing out of place. No gray scooter. No figure lingering where they shouldn't be.
Maybe he'd been overthinking it. Zhao Si sent a messenger, demonstrated he knew the address—probably just psychological pressure. A show of force with no substance behind it. The equivalent of a dog barking behind a fence. Loud, but toothless.
Zhang Lei relaxed. A fraction.
Day three passed clean. He went out, came back, checked his mirrors obsessively at every intersection. Nothing. Day four—same routine, same result. The streets behind him stayed empty of anything suspicious.
Day five—Tuesday afternoon—Zhang Lei drove the white Levin to the north side of the city to hand it off. The buyer wanted to meet at a shopping mall. They completed the title transfer in the parking lot, cash changed hands, and Zhang Lei pocketed his profit. Clean deal.
He came out of the mall into the late afternoon sun, feeling good. Twenty-some thousand in his account, another successful flip. The parking garage smelled of exhaust and rubber. He found his electric scooter where he'd chained it to a pillar, unlocked it, and headed home.
The route back cut through the commercial district—wide boulevards, bus stops, noodle shops with their folding signs on the sidewalk. Normal city noise. Normal Tuesday.
At a red light on Zhongshan Road, he glanced left on reflex—
A gray electric scooter sat two positions behind him. The rider wore a black helmet with the visor down, hiding the face completely. Dark blue jacket. Tall and thin.
Zhang Lei didn't react. The light turned green. He pulled away normally.
Two hundred meters later, he took a left turn. Not toward home—deliberately away from it.
Ten seconds passed. He checked his mirror.
The gray scooter turned left too.
Five seconds later, the gray scooter turned right.
Following.
Zhang Lei's hands tightened on the handlebars. His mind raced through the situation—it was just past four in the afternoon, broad daylight, cars and pedestrians everywhere. This wasn't an ambush setup. The tail was gathering intelligence, not preparing to jump him in the street.
He decided to confirm it beyond any doubt.
He twisted the throttle to the stop. The scooter surged from thirty to fifty kilometers per hour. Wind blasted up his sleeves, cold against his wrists. He blew through two intersections without slowing, weaving around a delivery truck.
In his mirror—the gray scooter accelerated too. But hung back further. Fifty meters. Maintaining distance. Professional enough to not close the gap.
Confirmed. Someone was on him.
Zhang Lei didn't go home. He couldn't lead this person to his exact building—the "Building Six, Unit Three" that Gold Chain had mentioned might have been a bluff, a guess designed to rattle him. If the tail didn't actually know his precise door, Zhang Lei wasn't about to hand him that information.
He had to lose him.
Zhang Lei cut into a narrow alley in the old part of the district. The kind of passage barely wide enough for a single scooter—brick walls on both sides, laundry lines overhead, that particular smell of damp concrete and cooking oil that defined these back lanes. He'd grown up in these alleys. Knew them the way a rat knows its maze.
Left. Right. Left again. Through a corridor where someone's quilts hung like curtains from a second-floor railing. Out the other side onto a parallel lane.
He killed the engine at the exit. Waited thirty seconds. Listened.
No motor sound. No tires on grit.
Nobody came through.
Lost him.
Zhang Lei leaned against the alley wall, one hand flat on cool brick. His heart was coming down slowly—the heavy thump-thump-thump settling back toward normal. His palms were slick with sweat.
A tail. This story is hosted at g.com.
Zhao Si had escalated. This wasn't just messages and intimidation anymore. He was having Zhang Lei watched.
Why?
If all he wanted was to invite him for tea—there was no need for surveillance. You follow someone to collect information. Where they go. What they do. Who they see. How they earn.
Zhao Si was mapping his life.
Zhang Lei waited five full minutes. Then took a long, circuitous route home—doubling back twice, approaching from the opposite direction. At the building, he didn't go straight in. Parked in the bike shed downstairs and stood there for two minutes, scanning. Looking for unfamiliar vehicles, unfamiliar faces.
Nothing. Just the usual clutter of neighbors' scooters and bicycles, a few bags of recycling piled by the wall, the flickering motion-sensor light that had been broken for months.
He went upstairs. His mother was in the kitchen—he could hear the sizzle of something frying, smell garlic hitting hot oil. She called out asking if he'd eaten. He said yes. Went to his room and closed the door.
Sat on the edge of his bed. Hands on his knees. The sounds of the apartment—his father's cough, the television news, water running through pipes—felt impossibly distant. Like he was underwater and the world above the surface couldn't reach him.
Thinking.
Zhao Si knew his address. Zhao Si was having him followed. Zhao Si was mapping his operations.
What came next?
Zhang Lei wasn't sure. But one thing was clear—he couldn't keep being passive. Reacting. Waiting for the next shoe to drop.
He needed to do something.
But what?
His phone buzzed. A message from Su Qing: "Going to the market tomorrow? It's Wednesday."
Zhang Lei stared at the screen for a long moment. Then typed three characters:
"Not yet."