Chapter 1 — The Miraculous Mission
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 3
"Mm. Then off you go. Go to Songshan City, to the Gu Group, and find a man by the name of Gu Pengzhan. He'll tell you what to do next." A faint, barely noticeable crafty smile crossed Old Man Wei's lips. "But think it over carefully. Once you take on this mission, you must see it through to the end. There's no backing out halfway."
"Why? Just because there's danger, you won't even let a man run for his life?" Wei Zhao was hardly the one-track-minded type — anything he knew for certain would end in death, he flatly refused to do.
"Xiao Yi, I, your old man, have fed you and watered you for fifteen years — bought you a laptop, bought you a 3G internet card..." The old man rolled his eyes and launched into a rambling tirade. "I ask you to do one little thing and you come up with all these questions. Don't push me!"
"Damn it!" Wei Zhao's anger flared up at the old man's words. "You raised me for the first three years. From the age of six, I was the one cooking, splitting firewood, and weaving straw shoes to earn money to feed you. Don't you push me either!"
"You secretly watch porn on that computer in the dead of night — don't think I didn't know!" The old man glared and said, "You forced me to say it! And you'd even sit there facing that computer..."
"Fine... I'll go... and I won't run away — is that good enough?" Wei Zhao's face flushed scarlet. He never expected that something he'd done so covertly could have been caught by that old relic. What an absolute disgrace. If he let the old man go on any longer, heaven knew what kind of X-rated scene he'd start describing.
And so, under Old Man Wei's threats and inducements, Wei Zhao shouldered his pack, boarded a northbound train, and, making light of ten thousand li, hurried to Songshan City — that modern, international metropolis.
Sitting on the train, Wei Zhao mused that from now on he would have to encrypt his porn and hide it in the system folders of the computer, and that while doing that sort of thing, he would also have to keep his eyes peeled in all directions and his ears pricked.
Still, Wei Zhao was quite looking forward to this mission. A windfall like this — one mission and you can retire for life — was exactly what he dreamed of. Though he could sense from Old Man Wei's words that this mission was no simple matter. Well, if it wasn't simple, then it had challenge — and challenge was what made it exciting!
"Pop!" A pockmarked man sitting across from Wei Zhao pulled open a can of Coke, then carelessly tossed the pull tab onto the table.
A crew-cut young man beside him, feigning indifference, picked up the pull tab and toyed with it in his hand. After fiddling with it a few times, he suddenly shouted, "Wow! Wow! No way! First prize!"
Though the crew-cut man's voice was not especially loud amid the clamor of the train car, the passengers sitting nearby all heard it, and one after another they turned their gazes toward him.
The pockmarked man was no exception. Seeing that the pull tab in the flat-top's hand was exactly the one he had just thrown away, his expression instantly turned sour. "Give it back, that's mine..."
"What do you mean yours? Is your name written on it?" The flat-top snatched his hand back, clutching the tab tightly in his fist, and glared. "Is your name 'First Prize'?"
"No... my name isn't First Prize... that First Prize tab was the one I threw away..." The pockmarked man, seeing how fierce the flat-top looked, began to feel timid, yet he didn't want to lose what was rightfully his, so he spoke in a trembling voice.
"You just said it yourself--you threw it away. Since you threw it away, whoever picks it up owns it." The flat-top snorted, sneering.
"Hey, how can you be like this?" The pockmarked man grew anxious and called out to a passenger across from him, a bespectacled man sitting to Wei Zhao's left: "Sir, you look like a scholar. Please judge this fairly--how can he do this? Isn't this just being shameless?"