Chapter 192 — The Ruined Shantytown

Uncle Qing had already gotten the driver's license taken care of and handed it to Wei Zhao the day before yesterday, so Wei Zhao no longer feared being pulled over by the police on the road.

The two young misses were at home today watching the Blu-ray of Xu Shilan's concert — the complete version Wei Zhao had gone to the bookstore to buy — so they would not be going out shopping.

On his way out, Wei Zhao called Kang Xiaobo. These days the cheapest knockoff phones cost only a hundred or two hundred yuan, and it was perfectly normal for a high school student to have a cell phone. Probably only someone like Tang Yun went without one...

"Xiaobo, where are you?" Wei Zhao asked.

"I'm at home, haven't left yet. Boss, are you ready to go?" Kang Xiaobo had been looking forward to this day for a whole week. Being invited to eat at the school beauty's house was a rare honor, so Kang Xiaobo had gotten up early and was waiting for Wei Zhao's call.

"Where's your place? I'll come pick you up," Wei Zhao said.

"You'll come pick me up?" Kang Xiaobo was slightly taken aback, not quite understanding what Wei Zhao meant, but he still said, "My home is on Ningshi Road, Boss. Which direction is your place? If it's not on the way, let's just meet at the shantytown?"

"Ningshi Road... then just wait for me."

With that, Wei Zhao hung up.

Shen Yushu's car was equipped with an OP navigation system. Wei Zhao entered Ningshi Road, then drove following the navigation's directions.

The Ningshi Road stop was actually on Wei Zhao's daily route to school, so it was fairly easy to find. Very quickly, Wei Zhao parked the car near the Ningshi Road station.

Wei Zhao called Kang Xiaobo and told him he was waiting at the station. Before long, Wei Zhao spotted Kang Xiaobo, dressed to impress, scurrying toward the station platform, glancing left and right as he ran — clearly looking for him.

"Xiaobo, over here!" Wei Zhao opened the passenger door and waved to Kang Xiaobo.

"Huh? Boss?" Kang Xiaobo looked at Wei Zhao and his car in surprise, then quickly ran over. "This is your car?"

"Heh." Wei Zhao smiled, neither confirming nor denying. With something like this, the more you explained, the harder it became to explain — better not to explain at all.

Sure enough, Kang Xiaobo took Wei Zhao's silence as confirmation and got in. "Boss, I didn't expect your family to be so well off. I thought you'd crawled out of some poor mountain village..." "It's more or less all right," Wei Zhao said honestly. If those missions really paid only a few hundred or a few thousand yuan, as his old man claimed, then his family could only be considered "all right." But if you went by market rates, his family would long since have become millionaires — no, billionaires... Of course, Wei Zhao had no interest in settling accounts too carefully with the old man. If the old man wanted to be a miser, let him be a miser. Wei Zhao had no shortage of food or clothing anyway; he might as well treat it as earning a bit of money to support the old man in his old age.

"But Boss, why'd you buy a car like this? It's a bit... girly. And these seat cushions, this interior decor..." Kang Xiaobo said, looking around the inside of the car.

"Heh." Wei Zhao smiled. This car was Shen Yushu's to begin with, so of course it was feminine... "Huh?" Suddenly, Kang Xiaobo's gaze fixed on a hanging ornament on the rearview mirror. "The photo on this... is that Shen Yushu? Boss, no way? You have a crush on Shen Yushu?"

Kang Xiaobo's eyes went wide as he stared at the ornament in the car, looking utterly incredulous. It was a small photo frame, and the photo inside was actually Shen Yushu.

"Huh?" Wei Zhao hadn't noticed before. Only after Kang Xiaobo mentioned it did he look at the ornament, and several black lines immediately appeared on his forehead. "This ornament belongs to the car's owner—" "Boss, I get it!" Kang Xiaobo wore the look of a man who knew everything, and chuckled. "Boss, I'm a man too, I understand. It's fine, I won't tell Tang Yun!"

"..." Wei Zhao casually plucked the ornament off and tossed it into the passenger-side drawer.

"Yeah, hide it quick, or it'll be bad if Tang Yun sees it." Kang Xiaobo nodded with deep conviction.

Wei Zhao nearly crashed the car when he heard that.

The shantytown actually referred to areas within a city's built-up zone characterized by dense clusters of single-story houses, long years of use, poor housing quality, small per-capita floor space, incomplete infrastructure, inconvenient transportation, major security and fire hazards, and filthy, chaotic, and dilapidated environmental sanitation.

Many developing cities had shantytowns like this. Of course, not everything in a shantytown was single-story houses — there were some buildings too, but these were three-story red-brick structures, not much better than the single-story houses. No gas pipelines, no network infrastructure, and so on... some didn't even have kitchen exhaust vents.

Wei Zhao's hometown was mostly full of these broken-down houses, so seeing them didn't faze him much. But Kang Xiaobo had only ever walked past the shantytown before and had never gone inside to look. Seeing it today, he was thoroughly shaken. He never imagined Tang Yun would actually live in such a poor environment. Filthy piles of coal and firewood, garbage heaps and open sewers reeking of rot... a completely wretched environment.

And yet it was in this wretched environment that Tang Yun had been raised — the commoner school beauty of No. 1 High.

"Boss, this environment..." Kang Xiaobo couldn't help but roll up the car window. He could hardly stand the smell.

"The place I used to live wasn't much different from here," Wei Zhao said with a smile, completely unbothered. There was more he didn't say — that on the battlefield, there were far worse environments. He had lain in ambush for days in open sewers and swamps...

Wei Zhao found Green Grass Alley and turned the car into it. But once inside, it was hard to drive any further — every household's doorway was piled with all sorts of junk.

Wei Zhao had no choice but to park the car at a spot near the alley entrance that wasn't cluttered with junk. The residents in the alley all looked at this brightly colored little car — clearly not cheap — with some astonishment.

Normally, cars rarely came into the shantytown. Aside from taxis, almost none of the residents here could afford a car, and anyone who could afford one wouldn't still be living here — they'd have bought a house somewhere better long ago.

Wei Zhao and Kang Xiaobo got out, locked the car, and followed the house numbers toward Tang Yun's home.

The courtyard gate of Tang Yun's house was noticeably more dilapidated than the others. It had clearly gone unrepaired for a long time — whether because there was no time or no money, Wei Zhao couldn't tell. Seeing it made his heart ache...

Let alone Kang Xiaobo beside him.

For the fastest updates, ad-free reading, please visit.