The so-called "factory" the proprietress referred to with such wounded pride was, in truth, a monument to grit over glamour. It was a small, fenced yard, leased for a pittance in a dusty, forgotten corner of the city's industrial fringe—a place where the urban sprawl gave up and surrendered to scrubland. Her "workforce" consisted of three formidable aunties from the neighboring villages, women with forearms like seasoned hams and a practical disdain for mess. Their business was the humble, pungent trade of "kitchen gold": collecting, processing, and repackaging restaurant slop.
To the uninitiated, it was a distasteful affair. But to the shrewd proprietress—whom Michael knew only as "Boss Lady" for her formidable presence behind her diner's counter—it had revealed itself as a vein of pure profit. A new, city-mandated food waste disposal company, holding a monopoly on the service, had begun chargingrestaurants for the privilege of having their greasy refuse carted away. Michael, blissfully unaware of this municipal shift, was still happily payingher for the same material. She was, in effect, collecting a toll at both ends of a very smelly bridge, plus a packaging fee. The math was beautiful in its simplicity.
Her dream had been growing, tangible. She'd envisioned an empire of grease, expanding from the southern districts to conquer the entire city. Then, the real world intruded.
The waste disposal company's owner was not a man who tolerated competition, especially not from a diner owner with a few aunties and a backyard. He had connections at City Hall and, more pertinently, a reputation on the streets that discouraged polite negotiation. A brief, efficient inquiry revealed the location of her operation, the flimsiness of her backing. Official channels were deemed unnecessary, a waste of guanxi. A dozen young men with baseball bats and a singular lack of sentimentality paid a visit one moonless night.
The cost of the lesson, as itemized by the sobbing Boss Lady to Michael, was as follows: two vacuum packers, smashed beyond repair; four enormous cast-iron cauldrons, rendered concave; a small mountain of plastic barrels, splintered. The message, delivered not with a letter but with the final swing of a bat against the last standing vat, was clearer than any legal notice: Stay in your lane. Next time, it won't be the equipment.
Faced with this blunt economics, and keenly aware her own enterprise skirted several regulations, the Boss Lady did not call the authorities. She called Michael, her voice a raw wound on the other end of the line, and shattered his supply chain with a few choked sentences.
Michael stared at his phone after the call dropped, the bustling sounds of the city suddenly feeling distant and absurd. "For God's sake," he muttered to the uncaring air inside his cab. "I just wanted some slop. It's not gold. It's not diamonds. It's grease. Who starts a turf war over grease?" The sheer, ridiculous pettiness of it was almost impressive.
But annoyance was a luxury. The reality was a problem that needed solving. The people of Sweetwater Gulch, his people now, depended on the steady supply of that processed, nutrient-rich… concoction. It was their "Eight-Treasure Porridge," a staple that kept bellies full and morale from crumbling. He couldn't let a pack of street thugs with a sanitation monopoly cut that lifeline.
His mind, trained by the Wasteland to assess threats and allies, immediately turned to the most obvious solution: Brother Dong. The man dealt in grey areas. He had to have the necessary… leverage. And, Michael reasoned with a client's entitled confidence, Dong had made a tidy sum off him recently. The least he could do was provide some concierge service for a valued patron. Even Second-hand Car Ah-Juan checked in regularly, offering to run errands and bring him "special, cooling soups." Service was everything.
He called. Once. Twice. The line rang into a hollow, electronic void. No answer. It was as if the man had vanished, or was deliberately ignoring the world.
With a frustrated sigh, Michael set the immediate problem aside. His stockpiles would last a little while. He'd corner Dong during the next gold transaction. For now, he had a delivery to make. The diesel wouldn't wait.
The private fuel depot on the city's outskirts was a ramshackle affair, all rusting tanks and the heavy, chemical smell of hydrocarbons. The transaction was brisk, familiar. The attendant, a man with grease permanently etched into his fingerprints, helped him fill the auxiliary tanks in the back of his unremarkable white van. Everything was normal. Routine.
It was on the drive back, as the urban sprawl began to re-encase the road, that the first prickle of unease touched the back of his neck. It was a vague thing, a subconscious pattern-recognition. At a red light, his eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. A motorcycle, a cheap, garishly modified thing known locally as a "ghost fire" for its noisy exhaust and reckless riders, idled a few cars back. He'd seen one, he was almost sure, before he turned into the depot. An hour had passed. Could it be the same one?
Coincidence was a currency he no longer trusted. His hands tightened on the wheel. He took the next green light normally, then, a kilometer later, suddenly swerved into a quieter, warehouse-lined side road. In the mirror, the motorcycle's indicator flashed, and it followed, maintaining a cautious distance.
The prickle became a cold drip down his spine. He was being tailed. The question was by whom, and for which of his complicated, overlapping lives? The Wasteland? Dong? Someone else entirely? The rules of the old world, the world of traffic laws and monthly rents, felt thin and brittle. The rules of the new world, the one he carried inside him, took over. Assume the worst. Prepare accordingly.
He didn't panic. He drove, his mind working with a cold, focused clarity. He couldn't lead them to his apartment. The warehouse, his point of transit, was both a risk and an opportunity. It was private, enclosed. A place where questions could be asked without witnesses.
He drove straight there, the familiar, potholed road to the industrial park feeling suddenly like a gauntlet. He nosed the van into the dim, cavernous space of his storage unit, killing the engine. The silence that followed was profound, broken only by the distant whir of a forklift. He left the rolling door open just a crack, a sliver of dusty daylight cutting across the concrete floor. Then he moved, not to hide, but to choose his ground. He positioned himself behind a tall stack of fertilizer bags, the sharp, chemical smell of urea filling his nostrils. From his waistband, he drew the Beretta. The click of the magazine seating home was loud in the stillness. The slide racked, chambering a round. A final, thoughtful pause, and he screwed the long, cylindrical suppressor onto the barrel. It was a ghostly accessory, borrowed from a different kind of conflict. He took a deep, slow breath, the scent of fertilizer, oil, and dust filling his lungs. He waited.
Xiao Dao—Little Knife—was having a run of bad luck so profound it felt cosmological. It had all started that cursed night on Old Trace Mountain, with that idiot Ah-Tu and the "favor" that had ended with his face being used as a doormat. He'd have tracked the runt down and beaten him senseless, but the coward had fled north, supposedly to learn how to drive excavators.
The humiliation of being slapped with a shoe, of having his tires deflated, that he could have swallowed. A man in his line of work expected the occasional indignity. As long as word didn't spread, his reputation—a carefully cultivated currency of fear—remained intact.
But since that night, it was as if a malevolent spirit had taken residence in his wallet and his life. Lottery numbers? Never even close. Mahjong? A financial hemorrhage. His beloved car was a magnet for parking tickets. And then, the final insult: the girl he'd been seeing had taken up with one of his own junior lackeys, gifting him a hat of the most vibrant green.
Desperate, he'd sought the advice of a "consultant," who prescribed a visit to the famous Golden Rooster Temple. A hefty "donation" had secured a potent, blessed talisman. And lo, his fortunes seemed to shift. A job had landed in his lap almost immediately: a simple, lucrative inquiry for that pawnbroker, Brother Dong. Tail a mark, snatch him when alone, ask a few pointed questions about the source of his valuables. A clean, professional job.
Xiao Dao had dispatched two of his newer, hungrier recruits to shadow the target. The mark, a seemingly ordinary young man, had played right into their hands, driving his van into a remote storage warehouse in a half-deserted logistics park. It was perfect. A gift.
Gathering his most trusted enforcers, Xiao Dao had led the charge. They'd slipped past the inattentive security guard, a pack of wolves on the prowl. The warehouse door was slightly ajar. They pushed it open, stepping into the dim interior, confidence a tangible force around them.
And then he saw him. The man standing calmly beside the van, a dark shape against the slatted light from the door. The face, illuminated as Xiao Dao's eyes adjusted, was one etched into his memory with the searing brand of humiliation.
His blood turned to ice water. The world seemed to tilt.
It wasn't just the recognition. It was the object in the man's hand. Not a shoe. A pistol, elongated and sinister with a cylindrical attachment on its end, pointed with unnerving steadiness directly at Xiao Dao's forehead.
In that moment, Xiao Dao's newly purchased luck from the Golden Rooster Temple felt like the cruelest of jokes.