The Gold Scheme

The man’s words caught Li Huowang completely off guard. He stared in stunned disbelief at the fat man wearing the thick gold chain, almost certain he had misheard. “Watching me? What’s there to watch?”

The fat man looked in terror at the bloodstained shards of glass, stammering, “I-I don’t know. A distant cousin of mine told me to keep an eye on you. Said he’d pay me twenty-five hundred a month.”

“I figured, keeping tabs on a lunatic for twenty-five hundred a month, with a boss who wouldn’t care if I slacked off, and I could even play games—it sounded way better than working in an electronics factory. So I took the job.”

Li Huowang reached out and yanked the gold chain. He could tell immediately something was off. He’d handled real gold before; it was far heavier. This was a fake.

The fat man was probably telling the truth. He was just some errand boy sent to watch him.

The fat man forced a fawning smile. “Got this for thirty bucks at a street stall. Where would I get the money for a real gold chain? That bastard Wang Zhilong hasn’t paid me in two months.”

Li Huowang’s gaze grew distant. What was really going on in this hallucination? And who had sent someone to watch him?

He shook his head hard, muttering to himself, his breath quickening. “No! None of this matters. This is all an illusion. What logic does an illusion need? I don’t need to know what’s happening here, and I don’t care.”

“Li Sui!” He turned, shouting at the air around him. “Li Sui! Haven’t you had enough fun? If you still call me Dad, get back here right now!”

Since he had already given up on understanding it, there was nothing left to care about. He didn’t want to stay in this illusion any longer. He needed to go back. There was a mountain of things waiting for him on the other side.

Watching Li Huowang’s bizarre behavior, the bound fat man was so terrified he felt like he might piss himself.

He had been watching for long enough. He knew this guy wasn’t faking it. This was a genuine, bona fide lunatic. And from what he’d heard, this lunatic had already cut someone up before.

The fat man struggled backward, scrambling away as he cried out, “It’s got nothing to do with me! I’m just a hired hand! It was that bastard Dalong who said if anything materialized out of thin air next to you, I was to call him immediately! If you want to find someone to blame, go find him!”

The shouting Li Huowang’s pupils contracted sharply. He slowly turned his head to look at him. “What did you say?”

He walked over, grabbed the man off the ground by his collar, and stared into his pudgy face. “What the hell is going on here? Who is this Dalong? How does he know I can make things appear out of nowhere?”

What had just been a scene of absurd chaos was suddenly beginning to take on a logical shape. And that faint, emerging logic scared him.

“That’s all I know! His number’s on my phone. Call him. I’ll help you lure him here!”

Li Huowang pulled out the fat man’s phone, unlocked it with his face, opened the contacts, and found a nickname: Dalong. He dialed the number.

“Hey—Bro Long! You gotta come quick! The lunatic’s making stuff appear out of nowhere, like a magic trick! He’s pulling things out one after another! Yeah, yeah! There’s gold!” After his performance, the fat man looked at Li Huowang with a face that was seventy percent terror and thirty percent pathetic hope. “Bro, he said he’ll be here soon. I brought him here for you, just like you asked. Can you let me go now?”

Li Huowang threw the phone into the rushing river beside them. Then he took off the fat man’s sock, rolled it into a ball, and stuffed it into his mouth.

It seemed the so-called Dalong wasn’t far away. Before long, Li Huowang heard the screech of brakes outside.

When three men, armed with various objects, hurried into the culvert, a stocky, crew-cut man with a mean face looked in surprise at the fat man tied up in the depths of the tunnel with his own belt and shoelaces.

They rushed over, frantically untying him. Wang Zhilong shook him hard. “Where’s Li Huowang?”

Before the man could even open his mouth, a black shadow shot up from the river beside them. It was holding a cobblestone, which it brought down viciously on one of the men’s heads.

The man dodged in panic. The stone slammed into his collarbone, which began to swell visibly in seconds.

But that was only the beginning. Caught completely off guard by Li Huowang’s ambush, these men had no defense. The four of them were beaten back, step by step, by a single opponent.

“Damn it! I’ll kill you!” A squat, round man, steeling himself, pulled out a dagger and plunged it into Li Huowang’s arm.

The moment he made contact, the man panicked. He let go of the knife instinctively and took a step back.

An instant later, Li Huowang grabbed the hilt without a moment’s hesitation, yanked the blade out, and drove it into the other man’s arm. A miserable scream echoed through the culvert.

With lightning speed, Li Huowang pulled the bloody knife out again and stabbed it into a third man’s thigh.

Seeing this horrifying sight, Wang Zhilong clearly lost his nerve. He had never imagined the man could be this terrifying.

He wanted to run, but with Li Huowang armed and so close, escape was no longer an option. A kick to his back sent him sprawling face-first into the dirt.

In no time, the four men were lying on the ground, their hands and feet bound with their own shoelaces and belts, like pigs waiting for slaughter.

Li Huowang grabbed Wang Zhilong by the hair and dragged him to the riverbank. He shoved the man’s head into the murky water, held it there until his struggles became violent, then yanked him back up.

He repeated this several times. By the end, Wang Zhilong looked half dead.

When he pulled him up again, Li Huowang looked at him and asked, “How did you know I could make things appear out of thin air?”

Wang Zhilong’s eyes were glassy. His voice was faint and broken as he spoke. “I… I found out by snooping around.”

“What else did you do?” Li Huowang loosened his grip, leaving the man’s face just a few centimeters from the water’s surface. The suffocating terror made the words come tumbling out.

“I heard you had some kind of special power! That you could make gold appear out of thin air! So I got an idea. I found a connection and had you stolen from the hospital! I wanted you to make gold for me!” By the end of his sentence, Wang Zhilong was sobbing.

“They didn’t abandon me?” A powerful wave of happiness surged through Li Huowang’s heart. “They didn’t abandon me!”

He had been telling himself all along that he didn’t care. But when he heard that it was this man who had stolen him from the hospital, Li Huowang realized just how much he had cared.

Seeing that Li Huowang’s emotions were stabilizing, Wang Zhilong wailed and begged, “Can you let me off this once? Please! I was completely blinded by greed! I was wrong! I’m so wrong!”

Li Huowang looked down at him. The excitement in his heart faded rapidly, replaced by a surge of intense suspicion.

“You’re lying! If you wanted me under your control to make gold for you, then why didn’t you lock me up? Why just dump me on the street? This is all fake! It’s an illusion!”

Wang Zhilong howled in despair, “I wanted to catch you! But we couldn’t! No matter what we did, we couldn’t hold you! We tied the rope around your hands, but you slipped right out! We locked the door, and you were outside it!”

“If you hadn’t shown me that little trick just now, I’d have thought you were just a regular lunatic! I would have given up long ago!”