Seven-Tenths and Three-Tenths

1,224 words

“Alright, stop it. Now’s not the time for this.”

Seeing their voices rise, Qing Wanglai stepped between them. He shot Li Huowang a meaningful glance, then turned to Zhao Lei.

“Zhao Lei, tell me. What do you want Li Huowang to give back? As long as I can give it to you, we can discuss it.”

“Two… two magnets! And… and my eyes!!”

Hearing this, Li Huowang’s anger flared. This guy had just ambushed him, and he’d only been forced to retaliate.

And now this bastard wanted him to pay for his eyes? That was blatantly refusing to negotiate.

Just then, Zhao Lei suddenly stiffened his neck, staring straight at Li Huowang. “You think just because you forgot, you don’t owe me? Think hard! Think harder! What really is real? What is fake? Don’t you think everything around you is too abrupt? Don’t you think it feels too fake?”

Li Huowang’s brow tightened, a surge of irritation rising in his chest. His hands, almost of their own accord, reached for the other man’s throat.

“Heh, want to kill me? Fine. Murder and robbery go hand in hand anyway! What wouldn’t you do? All of you! Stop pretending! And you call me the traitor?”

Li Huowang’s hand dropped from his neck to his collar, hoisting him up. “What did you just mean? Say it clearly! No riddles!”

“I’ve already said it plainly! You’re the one who can’t hear or see clearly. Heh. Saying I’m sick? You’re the one who’s sick, not me!”

“I’m not sick! I’ve been cured a long time ago!”

In a flash, Li Huowang pulled a sharp awl from his pocket and, before anyone could react, drove it through Zhao Lei’s clothes into his abdomen.

Feeling the pain in his belly, Zhao Lei showed no sign of backing down. He roared at Li Huowang, “It’s all fake! Can’t you tell yet? Everything is fake! You being cured is fake too!”

At Zhao Lei’s words, as Li Huowang looked at Zhao Lei’s mismatched eyes—one blind, one seeing—some strange, surreal images flickered through his mind. Memories of a boat.

“Why did I go on that boat back then?” Li Huowang strained to recall his original purpose, but at that moment, the answer eluded him completely.

Seeing the confusion in Li Huowang’s eyes, Zhao Lei’s own eyes widened, a smirk curling at his lips. “Remembering? You’re remembering, aren’t you? Think hard! You started it!”

“Give it all back to me! Or don’t expect any help from me!”

“I started it?” Li Huowang let out a brittle, nervous laugh. He paced back and forth in front of Zhao Lei, breathing rapidly.

Suddenly, he stopped. He raised his right index finger and pressed it against Zhao Lei’s forehead, grinding his teeth. “Don’t you bullshit me! I started it? It was you! It was—”

He cut himself off halfway, as if he’d forgotten what he was about to say. He paced faster in front of Zhao Lei, breathing raggedly, struggling to remember.

He was trying so hard to recall what he was about to say. The room around him began to tremble, just slightly.

Then he stopped again. His finger pointed once more at Zhao Lei. “It was—it was you!! It was—!”

The words were right there, on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t grasp them. The sensation of almost having the words but losing them drove the rage in Li Huowang’s chest to its breaking point. He needed to let it out.

His face twisted in a snarl, Li Huowang reversed his grip on the awl and drove it into his own stomach. “Ahhhhhh!!”

“Huowang!”

Seeing Yang Na rush forward, the others quickly followed, grabbing Li Huowang and pulling him back.

“Don’t stop him! Let him think! Let him really think!! If you do this, he won’t remember!” Zhao Lei watched from the sidelines, eager for the chaos.

“Take a break. Don’t relapse. I’ll handle this.” Qing Wanglai patted Li Huowang’s shoulder and walked over to Zhao Lei.

Leaning against Yang Na, Li Huowang tried to think, his breath coming in short gasps. His eyes darted around the room, a nervous tic, searching for something. He felt as if his surroundings were changing, but they weren’t.

Yang Na reached into his pocket, pulled out a few blister packs of pills, and took a cup of water from Chen Hongyu. She carefully helped him swallow them down.

Seeing Li Huowang calm down considerably after taking the medication, the others gradually dispersed.

Wu Qi picked up the pack Li Huowang had just taken, looked at the foil backing, and put it back.

“Wait.” Li Huowang shook his head hard and stood up again. “Let me talk to Zhao Lei properly.”

“Alright, alright. Take it easy. Don’t push yourself.” Wu Qi quickly supported him, pulling him back down to sit. “If you’re sick, don’t force it. Let Qing Wanglai handle this.”

“I’m not sick!”

“Fine, you’re not sick, you’re not sick,” Chen Hongyu chimed in.

Just then, a commotion came from the doorway. “Hey! This isn’t the time for talking! We need to go! Someone’s coming—that gunshot might have been too loud!”

Qian Fu rushed down from the entrance, passing the news to everyone inside.

Hearing this, Qing Wanglai didn’t waste a word. He grabbed Zhao Lei and led the others toward the door.

Once everyone had filed out, they locked the place up tight, got into Wu Qi’s RV, and sped away from the remote area.

Wu Qi whispered something to Qing Wanglai, who then turned to Li Huowang. “It’s caused a bit of a stir. To avoid suspicion, you two head back and wait for now.”

“If anything comes up on your end, send me a WeChat message.”

Li Huowang glanced at Zhao Lei, who was squatting on the floor. He nodded silently.

Qing Wanglai walked over to Li Huowang and patted his shoulder again. “Don’t worry. If they’re trying to be sneaky, they’re not about to do anything to you in broad daylight.”

Li Huowang looked up at him. “Get me a gun, too.” After seeing Qing Wanglai’s weapon, he wasn’t interested in cold steel anymore.

“Sure.” Qing Wanglai pulled a gun from behind his back and handed it over.

Li Huowang took it, examined it with a frown, and tossed it aside. “I don’t want a lighter.”

“Heh.” Qing Wanglai picked the gun up and pocketed it. “You haven’t trained with one of these. You’d only hurt yourself. I’ll teach you when I get the chance.”

The RV didn’t stop at the entrance to Li Huowang’s housing complex. It dropped them off a street away. Arms linked, Li Huowang and Yang Na walked toward the buildings.

“Huowang, you okay?” Yang Na was still worried.

“I’m fine. What could be wrong with me? I’m perfectly fine.” Li Huowang said, quickening his pace. But his gaze, fixed on the retreating RV, had gone cold.

“Even if we’re allies with them… don’t fully trust them. Only believe seven-tenths of what they say. Keep three-tenths for yourself.”

“What?”

“Zhao Lei wasn’t wrong. Qing Wanglai is clever. What he says is one thing; what he’s thinking… probably only he knows.”

“As for the rest of them, I don’t know their history. But I do know this: in a psych ward, even the crazy ones have their own hidden agendas.”

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Reading Guide Decoding

The Safe House Trap: Trust, Memory, and the Weaponized Idiot

Cultural / Xianxia Notes

The Weaponized Idiot & The Art of “Counter-Knowledge”: Zhao Lei’s tactic is a brutal, real-world form of psychological warfare. He doesn’t just deny Li Huowang’s version of events; he forces Li Huowang to doubt the very foundation of his own memory. This is not unlike the classic Daoist riddle from the Zhuangzi: “Was Zhuang Zhou dreaming he was a butterfly, or is the butterfly now dreaming it is Zhuang Zhou?” Here, it has no philosophical elegance—it is a blunt instrument used to crack a man open. Zhao Lei weaponizes the core uncertainty of the novel’s setting: “What is true? What is false?”
The “Safe” Institution as Co-conspirator: The hospital—the very structure designed to protect and heal—is now the backdrop for an ambush by a wire hanger. This taps into a deep vein of classical Chinese “fox spirit” or “ghost story” anxiety, where a familiar, trusted space (one’s own home, a temple, a courthouse) is revealed to be the hunting ground of a predator. The betrayal of place is more chilling than any monster’s roar.
Fraternity & Schemes (帮派与心计): The dynamic between Qing Wanglai, Wu Qi, and Zhao Lei echoes the coded language and mutual suspicion of the ancient jianghu (rivers and lakes, or the martial arts underworld). Everyone is a potential traitor, every alliance is provisional, and every word is a gambit. Qing Wanglai’s offer to mediate is a classic “peacemaker” role, but Li Huowang’s instincts, damaged as they are, tell him it’s just another power play dressed in polite clothes.

Wire-hanger ambush

A specific form of attack referenced in the glossary, where a common, mundane item (a coat hanger) is used as a garrote. This transforms a domestic object into a weapon of betrayal.

Chapter Overview

Welcome back, fellow travelers on the twisted path! This chapter is a masterclass in pressure cooker tension—a raw, claustrophobic confrontation that takes everything you thought you knew about “allies” and grinds it into dust. Forget monsters and ghosts for a moment; the real horror here is the human mind, fractured and weaponized against itself. We’re inside a safe house that has stopped feeling safe, caught between a paranoid protagonist, a manipulating provocateur, and the gnawing suspicion that everyone is playing a game you can’t see the rules for. Li Huowang is pushed to the very edge of his sanity, forced to confront a question that has no good answer: can you ever trust someone whose reality is fundamentally different from your own? Buckle up—this one is a gut-punch.

Key Plot Points

The confrontation immediately escalates from verbal accusation to physical violence. Zhao Lei, injured and one-eyed after his previous ambush attempt, refuses to de-escalate, demanding Li Huowang return his “two magnets” and his eye.
Zhao Lei’s words are deliberately provocative, pushing Li Huowang’s most sensitive buttons: his sanity, his memory of a “boat,” and the very nature of reality. He insists Li Huowang started the fight, a claim Li Huowang can neither confirm nor deny as his own memory proves unreliable.
Li Huowang’s attempt to force clarity through violence backfires. In a moment of overwhelming frustration, he stabs himself in the gut, a desperate act that shocks the room into action.
Yang Na, Chen Hongyu, and Wu Qi intervene to calm Li Huowang down after his self-harm, while Qing Wanglai takes over the negotiations with Zhao Lei.
The chapter’s rhythm is broken by Qian Fu’s urgent warning: a gunshot has drawn unwanted attention, forcing the entire group to flee the scene in Wu Qi’s RV.
Qing Wanglai advises Li Huowang to lie low for a while. Li Huowang, distrustful, asks for a gun but rejects Qing Wanglai’s lighter-gag, exposing the underlying tension between the two “allies.”
The chapter ends with a quiet, devastating conversation between Li Huowang and Yang Na. He warns her to trust none of their “allies” completely, revealing a deep-seated paranoia born from a lifetime of betrayal and delusion, even within the walls of a psych ward.

Reading Guide

This is a chapter that rewards a second read. Pay close attention to Zhao Lei’s dialogue—is he a genuine victim seeking recompense, or a master manipulator using truth as a weapon? He makes a tantalizing, terrifying claim: Li Huowang started it. If true, it undermines everything we know about Li Huowang’s past actions. If false, it’s a pitch-perfect cruelty designed to send a man with fragile sanity into a spiral of self-doubt.

Also, note the chapter title, “They” (他们). It’s a wonderfully ambiguous pronoun. Who is “they”? Qing Wanglai and his crew? The nebulous enemies? The other patients? The people Li Huowang can’t trust? And speaking of trust, Li Huowang’s final warning to Yang Na is heartbreaking. It shows he knows he’s unreliable, and he’s trying to protect her the only way he can: by making her as distrustful as he is. That’s the novel’s real horror—the infection of suspicion.