7 - I'm quite glad to have been able to meet you here

Wu Fengrong physically pushed himself to grab Zhou Xintao’s shoulder and stop him to thank him profusely.

“I admit that I have a selfish reason for this. Zhou has influenced my ability to judge impartially. I don’t know why, but against him I just lose to my feelings quite easily. However, I can guarantee you that I am not teaming up with passengers to play a joke. I will not throw away my conscience and I also won’t throw away my professional ethics. Today, you helped me first, so likewise I, Wu Fengrong, owe you a favor. The next time you need me, I will risk my life to aid you.”

He grasped that those words spoken in this manner were meant seriously. It was as though a lump of iron was tied to the pit of Zhou Xintao’s stomach, dragging his heart, causing it sink down. Zhao Xintao certainly did not want anything to happen that would require Wu Fengrong to risk his life to help. When people live well, being mutually indebted to one another was a normal matter. It wasn’t necessary to exchange a life for a life to pay a debt.

“You just need to tell me what I should do, okay?” Zhao Xintao said.

Wu Fengrong held his cigarette and took a drag to finish it off: “You can stand in for me to arrange teams of personnel. Regardless of where they go, ensure that they go in pairs. One man and one woman would be the best arrangement. If there’s not enough people for that, at least group two women together. Do not let a female crew member go out by herself. The dining car, the electrical room, the conductors’ cabin, these are a few special areas where the transit police should be allowed to make regular checks. Do not allow anyone to be able to take advantage. Tell them to look out for any passengers carrying an edged weapon on their person, male, between 175 to 180 cm tall, with a large black suitcase, alone, and definitely not a student.”

Zhao Xintao fished out a work notebook to write this down one by one. Wu Fengrong thought about it for a moment and added a sentence: “The number of people in the dining car, the tea room and the kitchen should be clearly counted. All items with a sharp flat surface that can be carried, including plastic tableware, should be assigned to a specific person to be overseen. If any are lost, even a knife or a small fork, to the hands of a criminal, let me go and investigate. I will hand the mastermind over to the police.”

He took hold of each work item and arranged is so that it was neat and tidy, not missing any minor details whatsoever. Zhao Xintao beside him occasionally put forward additional points. After finishing, the two men again re-checked to confirm the assigned duties, and only after that did they part ways. Zhao Xintao’s footsteps as he departed were relaxed and cheerful. His disheartened expression had changed instead to one full of energy and valor. He liked to work together with Wu Fengrong and liked obeying Wu Fengrong’s arranged plans. His faith in Wu Fengrong 1 was growing more and more strong. Because of the clear objective and the precise demands, from the point of view of the subordinates, it was best to continue to work together because the tasks were sure to be simple and it was unlikely for there to be more pressure. Precisely because of working together 2 for a long time, he and the rest of the team depended on Wu Fengrong a little too much.

Having walked a couple of paces, Zhao Xintao returned again to seize the cigarette butt out of his hands: “You need to smoke less. How many have you had already this early in the morning?”

Wu Fengrong smiled casually and crushed his cigarette butt out, throwing it away into a pool of water.

The two men walked away in opposite directions. Wu Fengrong continued to car 6 to patrol. He looked at his watch. Arranging the tasks together with Zhao Xintao had wasted 20 minutes. There wasn’t much of his time left and he was worried that Zhou Yanling might be discovered in the conductor’s office.

Cars 6 and 5 were less crowded and one couldn’t hear any sounds of conversation. Wu Fengrong first identified the rapid beat of someone typing on a computer keyboard, and only then did he look across the laptop to see this stock trader. He was of short stature with a bulging belly, wearing a sweater that appeared small. One could say he resembled a sesame seed being thread through the eye of a needle. Below his left eye there were still faint traces of swelling, turning a greenish-black and unable to be completely concealed by his glasses.

On the computer screen, thin red lines hung densely packed together on a black background, moving forward somewhat slowly at a speed that was clearly visible to the naked eye. The investor saw the conductor approach and didn’t speak. He kept his lips pursed, turning them into a thin white line. His brows were puckered, looking as though he were intolerant of and vexed that someone would disturb him while he was making money. Wu Fengrong saw that next to his computer lay a business card that was torn in half. Put back together, one could read the words “Client Manager Sun Xu”. Wu Fengrong picked up both sides of the business card to look them over. This Mr. Sun’s gaze remained only on his computer screen, two fingers incessantly clicking the mouse, sounding like a mouse grinding its teeth.

“Would Mr. Sun like to ask for a compress for his eye? Tsk, tsk. This didn’t come about from working until late at night, ba?” Wu Fengrong said: “Are you able to put a call through? I also have a little money in the stock market. How about you give me some pointers? What is this stock of yours that is rising so tremendously?”

Wu Fengrong did not speculate in stocks. All his earned money was used entirely to make each mortgage payment. He’d bought a 2000 square meter apartment in Tongding, a 30-year mortgage with a monthly payment of 6000RMB. Zhao Xintao had laughed a lot at his situation, that of a young single person owning a large apartment like this. Wu Fengrong felt that since there were no other large purchases he wanted to make, he ordinarily seldom spent money, if he left his money in a bank it wouldn’t be able to keep up with inflation. He was not clever at logarithms and didn’t have any financial sense whatsoever. Furthermore, his aforementioned knowledge of finance stopped at buying insurance.

He didn’t know that what he’d said would cause Mr. Sun to be unpleasant 3 . Mr. Sun 4 mumbled to himself saying: “No need.” After saying that, his gaze held a meaningful expression and he sized up Wu Fengrong from top to bottom, his smile exposing his contempt: “If you want to hear a few words, that’s fine. Usually, I charge by the hour. Just for today I will let you have a free lunch. I see a lot of people like you with a monthly income of, at most, a little over 10,000RMB. Most goes to the mortgage, to send the children at home to school, and the rest is sent to a married woman as spending money. You want to turn a profit on your personal savings? I advise you to buy a new coat; it’s better to be able to meet relatives with pride when celebrating the New Year than anything else.”

He had a very poisonous mouth. But when talking about being cruel, Wu Fengrong knew that not many people were able to beat himself. Just listen to the conductor laugh —

“Mr. Sun is in finance and doesn’t appear as cheap as us in the countryside. Look at you (9), you look portly with big arms and a vulgar waist, appearing like this prodigal boss. Not sure what coat is being worn, ya 5 . But even wearing a kasayap 6 in a Tangzi 7 wouldn’t turn you into a Buddha 8 .”

“What did you say! Who are you cursing to death, ne?”

“I said Buddha. What kind of immortal are you pretending to be?”

After saying this, the conductor waved with the hand still clutching the business card, clothes swaying to and fro as though with the wind as he walked. In a corner at the end of the car, he made a call to this firm. The person who answered said that Mr. Sun had already left his job half a month ago and that he didn’t work there at this time. Wu Fengrong thought to himself that he probably didn’t retire but that he’d lost his job.

In this carriage, Wu Fengrong also saw a female teacher. She was wrapped up in a down-filled garment, her head was completely covered with a woolen hat. Her right foot was sheathed in a woolen slipper. The instep of this foot was bound very thickly with gauze and was all together as big as a swollen fist.

Her red ink pen halted naturally for a minute at the second paragraph of a student essay. Wu Fengrong knocked on the top of the table, and then her head lifted. The expression on her face made her look as though she had received an enormous fright, and she almost jumped out of her seat. Wu Fengrong saw her face was extremely thin, almost skeletal (14), resembling a sheet of birch bark being blown about by the wind. Even before Wu Fengrong opened his mouth to speak, her throat slipped open and her eyes at once turned red, pooling with tears that looked like they would overflow. Wu Fengrong was also shocked. It looked as though he had taken advantage of her. He hastily looked to see where his hands were and, was glad to discover that both hands were still well-behaved in his trouser pockets.

“Ma’am, may I see the ticket?”

The woman’s fingers trembled, then she stretched her hand into the bag to her side and rooted about for a long time without taking anything out. She panicked even more. Taking things out, her trembling hands caused them to fall. Tears flowed down her cheeks. During Wu Fengrong’s many years and rich experiences on the train, he had never seen anyone weep out of anxiety over not finding their ticket.

“If you didn’t have time to buy a ticket, you can follow me to go and get one. Where are you going? First sit down and you can tell me what I can do to help.”

“I’m going to Baihe. I’m really, so sorry. I really bought a ticket. It’s just…..it’s just I don’t know where I managed to put it. You see, I’m this person who’s always careless and I can never do anything right……I’m truly sorry……”

“Can you give me your name? You still have your ID, ba. Don’t worry. If you have your ID, then it’s easy to fix.”

The ID card was actually there. Wu Fengrong took it to look it over. The female teacher’s name was Cao Min, 42 years old, from Tongzhou, and of the Han ethnic group. Wu Fengrong first wrote down this personal information but didn’t immediately return the ID card to her. In passing, he picked up the homework that was being blown about by the wind.

“Teacher Cao is still marking homework even on the train, you work hard. Is your injured foot okay? Otherwise, do you want someone from medical personnel to come and take a look?”

“It’s alright. I sprained my ankle while riding my bike. It’s already as though it hadn’t happened. I don’t want to bother any of you. I’m so sorry for being an inconvenience……”

The woman hid her feet in the narrow space underneath the chair, apologies spilling from her mouth like it was her job and she was talking shop. Wu Fengrong tried to find out more about the injury on her foot, but unexpectedly she clearly didn’t want to talk about this subject. Wu Fengrong did not want to force her, but he was secretly curious. Shouldn’t a teacher of the people be quite glorious and quite accomplished? What’s with this lack of self-confidence? It was unlikely that she also talked in this manner in class, ba? What type of students was she teaching then?

“In addition, there were two people who both had quite small injuries. One had their injured finger tightly bandaged. The other was a young girl who said that she’d had to go to the hospital to get her face acne under control. However, the treatment hurt her face over which she was especially broken-hearted. It seems it’s better to have a pimply face and have it one piece. This trip to check for bodily injuries returned quite a lot: one migrant worker with both hands damaged, college students who had fought others, a financier broken up over losing his job, a female teacher who had sprained her ankle…..still the only one who had been injured from being scratched by a fingernail was just that one elderly lady which, in comparison, corresponds the most closely to the autopsy report 9 . First, shall we look up these five individuals to see if their names are on the List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement 10 ?”

Wu Fengrong handed paper with the written names to Zhou Yanling. Zhou Yanling then compared each name to the blacklist.

“Only this ‘Huang Ye’ is on the List.”

“Who is Huang Ye?” Wu Fengrong thought for a while, then recalled the laborer who was making a phone call: “Oh, that migrant worker. What did he do?”

Zhou Yanling laughed: “If you’re asking me how I know, I don’t know him personally. I can’t say for sure if he has a criminal record, but it’s quite easy for people working construction to break the law by defaulting on payments and trying to forcefully expedite funds, by getting drunk and brawling, by trying to defraud insurance by pretending to have died……” speaking up until this point, he suddenly paused, eyebrows faintly wrinkled: “Could it be him?”

“Who is it?”

“This migrant worker, it was possibly him who stabbed me. I remember that, when he ran into me, for a moment his body smelt of lime. At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to it. When the knife stabbed me, the whole of my attention was focused solely on my stomach. I had just felt that the scent was a little familiar, but now I remember. You said that the backs of his hands were covered in lime powder, isn’t that right? At construction sites, I’ve seen a lot of it and that’s the smell.”

Wu Fengrong didn’t answer right away and toyed with the business card in his hands, the one that Mr. Sun had torn in half. Zhou Yanling sensed that something was wrong, and his gaze fell to the appearance on his face. At once, he saw Wu Fengrong lifted the corner of his eyes, both eyes deeply gloomy, compressing his heart.

“You deceived me, Zhou. You still haven’t fucking told me the truth.”

Zhou Yanling was stunned: “What did I say?”

Wu Fengrong threw the business card onto the table: “After I followed up with Sun Xu’s company after, I thought of your business card and took advantage of the situation to give it a call. Can you guess what? You coworker told me that one week ago you were injured on your left side underneath your ribs. It was from when you made a mistake while investigating a fraud case; after leaving work that night, you were stabbed. This injury was absolutely not from being stabbed at the station! Right away, I felt it was odd. Simultaneously having you board the train and stabbing you with a knife. If by any chance you were stabbed because you made a mistake, were they also not worried that you might die without being able to investigate the case? It was you who reopened the wound by yourself to pretend to have been stabbed. The first text message only wished you well and didn’t say explicitly that you were injured from being stabbed. I even believed it.” He showed an angry expression: “Let’s go, ba. I’m not going to talk nonsense with you. Right now, I’m going to have you be interviewed by the transit police.”

“RongRong, listen to me explain!” Zhou Yanling was tugging on his sleeve.

“I have no time to listen. Zhou Yanling, I believed you the first time. It was you who cut off your own path.”

.”

Zhou Yanling did not speak. With a crash, he suddenly took off his own clothing. All at once, his upper body was bare. Wu Fengrong’s eyes glared. It wasn’t as though he had never seen a man before. Taking off clothes couldn’t intimidate him. Zhou Yanling pulled open the gauze and pried open the two flaps of skin around the wound. Suddenly, the large gash unfurled, blood dripping and then again beginning to flow 11 like red water. Wu Fengrong’s heart was also pulled out. They were at a stalemate for a while before he sat down to carefully examine, wishing he could see each pore and understand clearly. Because it had been opened several times, the edges of the wound were badly mangled, and the situation was tragic.

However, by peeling open the wound and making it a little larger, one might be able to see clearly. The inside was quite shallow, not like a stab wound and more like a laceration.

Zhou Yanling laughed in a bitter way: “Last week I was slashed by someone with a knife. It wasn’t very serious, and it was unlikely to cause me to die. They only wanted to threaten me. Early this morning, after I entered the station, I became aware of someone following me. So, I turned around and tried to find a security guard. I didn’t expect him to be so anxious. Passing through the doors of the kiosk, he directly knocked into me. I’d been somewhat prepared and wanted to pull down his scarf to see his face, but then he fled without delay.”

Zhou Yanling once again re-wrapped the gauze and sighed: “After, I immediately went to the bathroom to reopen my wound. Firstly, at that time, I didn’t know why he was following me. By letting him believe that his running into me had reopened my wound, if I were covered in blood from head to toe and boarded the train he would certainly know and then he would react. From that, I would be clearly able to tell who he was. Secondly, I felt that this would attract your attention and have you help me, well and honestly. By having you see with your own eyes how critical my injury was you would be convinced that this detective game was real, and you might be convinced that I was innocent. Before I boarded this train, I investigated you as a person. Don’t ask me how I was able to do this; I’ve been doing this for ten years, so you know that it wasn’t through any proper channels. Since I was taking this train and I wasn’t certain I could keep you in the dark, I thought it would be better for me to make the first move.”

Wu Fengrong narrowed his eyes.

“So, you had already carefully planned this out. The reason why you allowed the attendant to find you was to lead me to your car to ask me to help you.”

“En. As soon as the attendant left, I immediately went to change clothes and to throw my original luggage off the train. Continuing from there, you already know the rest.”

“For what reason did you not tell me before?”

“If I had told you, then you would be suspicious of that matter with the text messages. You’d be sure to think that this detective game was also a plot I had weaved. I couldn’t take that risk.”

“How could you be sure that luring me in would definitely cause me to help you?”

Zhou Yanling lifted his hand to gently rub his temples: “I’m not sure. I can only try. At that time when you said that you believed me, I was astonished. Unexpectedly, I sincerely don’t want to cause you to be disappointed. RongRong, I am very happy to have met you.”

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The author has something to say.

Mr. Zhou was ready to get on this train and also has a lot of heart = 。 =

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T/N: The only time WFG seems to use a courteous you is when he dislikes someone or is confronted by a woman or someone elderly XD. Also, I get flashbacks to Lavender Brown’s relationship with Ron Weasley whenever I type ZYL saying ‘RongRong’ *shudders*.

added for clarity added for clarity 霉头: literally ‘moldy’ added for clarity 啊 : particle expressing surprise or doubt 袈裟: an outer robe worrn by a Buddhist monl a Buddhist shrine 立地成佛 : idiom for repenting and being absolved of one’s sins added for clarity. The raw just mentioned that the scratch on her neck corresponded comparatively more closely but didn’t specify the basis of the comparison. We learned about the scratches in the autopsy report, so that’s what I’m choosing as the basis of comparison 失信名 单 literally means dishonest list, but refers to people who have been judged to be dishonest debtors ( see here ) and have been ordered to pay money owed and either refused or attempted to violently escape. If you’re one of the distinguished people on this list, there’s a bunch of things you can’t do such as limiting one’s mean of travel. More information can be found here . 咕 噜噜 : an onomatopoeia of the sound of liquid being poured