Huang Mao shot a quick glance toward the night market street, then immediately lowered his head and said, "Her surname is Zhu—the Zhu that means 'to speak'—and her given name is Ling. 'Lord' is what we call her out of respect. Sometimes we also call her 'Miss.' Anyway, she's a really good person and has always looked after us."
"Was what you did instigated by her?"
Huang Mao looked deeply offended and raised his voice: "How could that be! Our Lord of All Spirits is a rich young lady, okay? Her family owns a company that sells imported wine and Western food ingredients—all big brands! Hormel! Riesling! Sauvignon Blanc! Blue Frog and Saizeriya are both her family's clients! Her family is loaded, and the company is over by Metro City! Otherwise, what do you think she uses to take care of us?"
"Then, was that text message your own doing?"
Huang Mao's voice dropped a full octave as he stammered in explanation: "That text wasn't written by me either—I copied it off the internet. But I had a reason, it wasn't for nothing. It's just that the Lord of All Spirits has her birthday coming up next month, and I've been wanting to buy her a nice gift, but I don't have any money in my pockets…"
Huo Shize let out a snort through his nose. After a long pause, he asked again, "How old is your Lord of All Spirits, anyway?"
Huang Mao's eyes darted around, and he glanced back toward the night market before speaking in a low voice: "Next month, she turns nineteen. Bro, I know I was wrong, and you didn't lose anything, so just let me go, alright? I promise I won't do it again. Please don't hold a grudge against a minor like me…"
Huo Shize exhaled a puff of smoke without saying anything, opened the car door, and got in. Seeing that he didn't seem like he was going to press the matter, Huang Mao relaxed inwardly. He turned to slip away when he suddenly heard the man's voice from behind: "Hold on."
When the boss spoke, Huang Mao didn't dare not stop. He froze in place and turned back to look. Under the shadow, through the half-open car window, the man's obscure, unreadable face appeared: "I still have questions for you."
On Wednesday, Zhu Ling received a declaration of war from her rival Shang Xianzi. The letter was full of grand boasts and vicious mockery about her failure to show up at their last appointment, saying she was "a mouse that trembles at the sound of a cat's meow—timid as can be." Zhu Ling was furious. That afternoon, she skipped a class and gathered her underlings once again to head to Caoxi Park for a showdown.
This time, Huang Mao had somehow gotten his hands on a beat-up moped and invited the esteemed Lord of All Spirits and Milia to ride on it. Huang Mao's clothes looked like they hadn't been changed in days, and Zhu Ling had no intention of wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing up against him. So she made Milia sit in the middle while she took the back seat.
Huang Mao drove a few meters before the handlebars started wobbling wildly, forcing him to stop. He asked Zhu Ling and Milia to swap positions, but Zhu Ling refused.
Huang Mao patiently reasoned with her: "The heaviest person has to sit in the middle to keep the balance. Otherwise, the center of gravity is at the back, and my weight can't hold down the front. Once the speed picks up, the front wheel gets floaty and lifts off the ground."
Zhu Ling rolled her eyes: "I'm standard slim build, okay!"
Huang Mao said, "But you're still the heaviest out of all of us—I'm not wrong about that."
Zhu Ling insisted on sitting at the back. Huang Mao had no choice but to call over one of the slightly heavier girls to sit in his lap for balance, which finally steadied the front. The four of them were pressed chest-to-back, squeezed into one lump—that was fine, just a bit hot. But the moped couldn't take it. Before long, black smoke billowed from the engine, and the bike tipped over and died on the spot.
Zhu Ling crawled out from the pile of people and found her knee scraped and her clothes dirty. She was wearing a jacket today—a men's Balenciaga, one she really liked. Her heart ached for the jacket, her leg hurt, and she was furious.
Huang Mao had been crushed at the very bottom and nearly broke his bones. He wasn't afraid of breaking his own bones—the real problem was the moped. He'd borrowed it and still had to return it, so he was both aggrieved and heartbroken: "I've carried four people before, and nothing happened."
The moment Zhu Ling heard that, she exploded: "What are you trying to say—that a fatty snuck in today, and that's why we flipped over, right!"
Milia snickered: "The rest of us are so skinny our stomachs touch our backs. But you—pampered and well-fed, plump as a juicy peach."
Milia was a literature enthusiast with a bedside table full of world classics. Having read so many books, she knew a little about everything under the sun, and her tongue was sharp as a blade. In the eyes of the younger underlings, she could practically compose poetry on the spot. A couple of years ago, armed with a fake IELTS score report and a silver tongue, she'd swindled two hundred thousand yuan in study-abroad fees from her divorced, single mother—who to this day still believed her daughter was studying at a university abroad. Anyway, the girls all thought she had a way with words, and her metaphors were both apt and hilarious. They burst into raucous laughter.
Zhu Ling was angry: "I'm 170 centimeters and 54 kilos! Every school physical says I'm underweight, okay? How am I a peach? Seriously!"
Milia was dying of laughter and kept going: "The three of us are all as thin as paper. But you—chest in the front, hips in the back—just now, it was literally two peaches pressed against my back."
In a fit of rage, Zhu Ling declared, "I'm not going!"
The second arranged fight also failed to happen as planned—he got angry midway and ran back home.
That evening, after showering and while blow-drying her hair, she suddenly realized she hadn't received a single message from her boyfriend all day, even though he was off work and at home. A jolt shot through her mind, and she feared he might be cheating behind her back. After all, he was so handsome, his circle was so chaotic—nightclubs and bars full of all sorts of disreputable women. And his willpower was weak; he couldn't resist any temptation.
Behind her residential complex ran a small creek. She lived downstream, and her nightclub-singer boyfriend lived upstream, not too far—just two kilometers apart. Anxious, she dashed out of the bathroom, threw a jacket over her loose pajamas—no panties, no bra—and like a salmon swimming upstream, ran the two kilometers to his place. She stopped at his door and peered through the window. His rented room was on the first floor, only about thirty square meters, visible at a single glance.
She saw her boyfriend safe and sound at home, along with a few other friends, all male voices by the sound of it, discussing something in the room. Finally relieved, she felt a chill on her skin, pulled her jacket tighter, and ran the two kilometers back home.
On Thursday afternoon, her boyfriend messaged her, saying he was cooking at home and wanted her to come over for dinner and watch a movie together. Her boyfriend was obsessed with gaming, while she had many hobbies and often went out with her younger siblings and friends when free. Add to that their completely opposite schedules—one attending classes by day, the other singing at night—and their naturally indifferent temperaments, their dates weren't exactly passionate. About two or three weeks prior, her boyfriend had started frequently meeting friends to discuss business. When he finally had free time, he'd been flirting with someone and accidentally sent the message to her phone instead. They'd had a fight over it and gone cold for several days, which meant they hadn't had a proper date or even a decent meal together in a while.
Even though she'd gone to find him, the moment they met, she said, "If you want my forgiveness, slap yourself in the face."
He refused: "A man's dignity is something precious!"
She said, "Then I'll do it for you." And she delivered two resounding slaps across his face. That finally dissipated all her anger, and they officially made up.
Over dinner, chatting casually, she asked what he and his friends had been discussing over the past few weeks.
He said, "They're all businessmen, and they're planning to bring me in as a partner."
Knowing the kind of circle he moved in and the sort of people his friends were, she asked, "Baby, are your friends and their business reliable?"
For her sake, he'd gotten into a brutal fight with a gang leader, sustaining a head injury that left a permanent scar. They'd been through a life-and-death ordeal together—you could call them friends forged in hardship. She was grateful to him and trusted him. During the time she accompanied him to the hospital for treatment, her pity for him blossomed into love, and she began calling him "baby"—a name she never changed even after they became lovers.
"A business without risk doesn't exist in this world. If you want to make big money, you have to take on corresponding risks. But you don't need to worry about all that." He kissed her lips soothingly and said, "Sweetheart, don't worry. They're all my good friends, and they run very big operations. Once I make big money, the first thing I'll do is buy a big house so we can move in together. Then I'll buy you all the jewelry you want and make you the happiest young lady in the world."
Perhaps because he was always active at night and lacked yang energy, her boyfriend had a soft, brooding temperament. Yet his personality was impulsive, and the things he said carried a certain childish naivety, like a kindergartener's.
The world was cruel, and one shouldn't hold hope in it—Zhu Ling had learned that lesson deeply in high school. And yet he naively believed that those gangster friends he'd met at the bar would help him make big money, always feeling like some great opportunity was waiting for him out there. The phrase "big money"—even her father, a second-generation rich kid himself, had stopped mentioning it in recent years. In his fifty-plus years of life, he'd never earned any.
But what did it matter? Her boyfriend's voice was so gentle, his face so captivating. With him by her side, whether money was made or not hardly seemed important.
She teased him for being a daydreamer, yet she reveled in his sweet words, gently kissing the scar at the corner of his eye—a medal from the fight he'd had with the gang leader to protect her. Every time she saw it, she remembered how good he was to her, and tenderness welled up in her heart.
Humming a tune, she spun around and around with him in a dance until they both tumbled onto the sofa. As she pulled off his shirt, she suddenly exclaimed in surprise: "What's happened to you lately? Have you been eating properly? You've gotten so thin—I can feel your bones."
His movements froze, and he said, "I've been dieting lately."
She noticed a subtle shift in his expression and pressed further: "You were already skinny to begin with. Why would you diet? If you keep losing weight, your bones will stick out. What's attractive about that?"
"I just felt like losing it." He avoided her eyes, rolled off the sofa, and said, "I just remembered I need to make a phone call."
A few cold, perfunctory exchanges swept away the sweet atmosphere from moments before. Her boyfriend went off to the side to smoke, and she put on her coat, said a quiet "sorry" to him, told him to eat well, then got up and left.
He walked her to the door and gave her a hug. After all, they hadn't seen each other in a while, and it felt strange to part like this, so he fumbled for something to say: "That new tattoo of yours looks great—what is it, a cat's paw print?"
"Mm."
"Your birthday's next month, and it'll be almost a full year since we met. Is there anything you want as a birthday gift?"
She said, "Nothing in particular."
"Alright, let me know when you think of something—there's still time."
As she was leaving, she turned back and asked her boyfriend, "Baby, you haven't touched anything you shouldn't have, have you?"
His voice carried an unmistakable note of exaggeration and tension: "Don't talk nonsense!"