We agreed on the twelve zodiac animals, but you've transformed into the Monkey King?

A black Ford sedan sped through the rain, the narrow cabin filled with the stench of blood.

Wen Xiao leaned back in the seat, his face deathly pale from blood loss. Shelly tore open the expensive silk scarf and pressed it hard against the bullet hole in his left shoulder, from which blood was still gushing. She was trembling violently, tears streaming down her face.

Wen Xiao's dark gold vertical pupils, which were originally on the verge of going berserk, finally softened little by little when they met the woman's bloodshot eyes.

He wiped his right hand, which was covered in mud and blood, and then gently wiped away the tears and mud from Shelly's cheeks, bit by bit.

"Miss Xue..." Wen Xiao forced a pale smile, "Using the entire Xue family and Jardine Matheson & Co. as a shield for a thug... You really are a crazy woman."

"Shut up!"

Shelly bit her pale lips, glared at him with red eyes, but the tears flowed even more fiercely.

"It's none of your business to tell me how to do business."

Wen Xiao didn't say anything more, but instead reached out and tightly grasped her trembling hand.

"Wen Xiao, remember this: the money I'm betting on you today is the lifeblood of the Xue family. I want you to pay me back with interest, using Pierre's head as collateral..."

Outside the car window, the winter rain in Shanghai was getting heavier and heavier.

……

Back street of Avenue Joffre.

"Take another route." At the end of class, a classmate handed the short-haired girl an oil-paper umbrella, her brows furrowed in a deep frown. "That policeman in the black leather jacket has been hanging around your route home these past few days. He's just a sycophant obsessed with climbing the social ladder, willing to do any dirty work to curry favor with the French. You're an innocent girl; stay away from that kind of scoundrel."

The girl didn't say anything, took the umbrella, and pulled her collar up a little.

She didn't take her usual street today, but instead wandered into a dark alley filled with coal ash and rotten vegetable leaves.

Just as she turned the corner behind Avenue Joffre, she heard a dull thud of flesh hitting flesh.

At the back door of a French bakery, the tall French owner was kicking a fourteen or fifteen-year-old boy hard with his leather boots.

The child was clutching half a baguette covered in mud, his face covered in blood from the beating, unable to even scream.

A police officer in a dark blue uniform strode over.

He grabbed the child by the hair and dragged him out of the mud like a chick.

"Sir, please calm down." The constable turned to the French boss with a fawning smile. "This filthy wretch doesn't deserve to soil your shoes. I'll take him back to the police station, lock him in a dark room, and break both his hands to vent your anger. I guarantee no beggar will dare show their face in this area again."

The boss spat and slammed the heavy mahogany door shut, cursing under his breath.

The police officer's face turned cold. He grabbed the child by the collar and dragged him into the depths of the alley like a dead dog.

The girl stood at the corner, trembling. She gritted her teeth, glanced left and right, picked up half a jagged brick from the ground, and silently followed them inside.

The alley was dark and a dead end. The girl pressed herself against the moss-covered brick wall and raised the broken brick in her hand.

There were a few faint metallic clanging sounds.

"Take this. Go to the North Station and buy a train ticket back to your hometown. Don't ever come back to Shanghai again." The policeman's voice rang out in the darkness, low and irritated.

The girl froze. She peeked half her head out from behind the wall.

The policeman threw the child against the wall, took out two heavy silver dollars from the pocket of his uniform, and roughly threw them into the child's arms.

"Listen up, these two silver dollars are what I've been saving up for half a month, meant to buy a job from that bald bastard tomorrow!"

He pointed at the child's nose, gritting his teeth and cursing, "The French will remember your face. If you dare beg around here again tomorrow, I'll skin you alive without the foreigners lifting a finger. Get lost!"

The child escaped death, grabbed the money, kowtowed in the mud, and ran away in a panic.

Only the policeman remained in the dead end. He pulled out a crumpled cigarette, put it in his mouth, and struck a match.

The dim firelight illuminated his furrowed brow.

"Clang." The half brick in the girl's hand fell onto the bluestone slab.

The match went out instantly. The policeman whirled around, his hand instinctively reaching for the baton at his waist, his eyes fierce.

But when he saw the short-haired girl standing at the alley entrance with an umbrella, his fierce and menacing aura vanished instantly.

He instinctively stood up straight, frantically taking the cigarette out of his mouth and hiding it behind his back. The glowing cigarette butt burned his palm.

The girl took in his awkward, embarrassed, and even somewhat comical appearance.

She kicked the bricks on the ground a little further away. Holding her umbrella, she walked up to him. She stood on tiptoe and tilted the oil-paper umbrella towards him. The cold rain that had been pelting his shoulder stopped.

"You saved me last time, and I still don't know the officer's name." The girl looked at his awkwardly placed hands and smiled like a warm stove in winter. "My name is Panpan. My pseudonym at the newspaper is Wenjing."

The police officer stared at her blankly, his Adam's apple bobbing violently. He had never been this nervous, not even when he was hacking people to pieces or fighting for territory in the streets.

"I...I'm called Meng Huai." He grinned, revealing a standard smile with 36 teeth. "Meng in Mencius, Huai as in 'heart' and 'mind'."

……

Meanwhile, deep within the Chinese-controlled area, there was an old house.

In the main room, where the fragrance of sandalwood wafted, only two dim gas lamps were lit.

"Lord Yama, something's happened. The French police have broken the rules; Uncle Biao was hung outside the iron gate of the concession and tortured to death... Fifth Master, in order to retrieve the body, bravely endured bullets from the foreigners and was shot through the shoulder!"

"despair."

The sound of fiddles with the prayer beads abruptly stopped.

Dead silence. The only sound in the main room was the patter of cold rain against the banana leaves outside the window.

"Crack—!"

The priceless sandalwood beads from Laoshan scattered all over the ground with a crackling sound.

"Go and deliver a visiting card to Huang Jinrong."

"Tell this Chinese inspector general that the Green Gang has been watching the show in the French Concession for so long, it's time they bought their tickets. I need the French police station's phone number; they can't get through to the garrison barracks."

……

On the afternoon of the eighth day, in the wilderness behind Gonghexiang Mountain.

The yellow mud had been trampled into a pulp by straw sandals.

Five hundred men, with burlap sacks tied around their waists and bareheaded, stood in the rain. Rainwater streamed down their rough necks and into their sweat-soaked backs.

The pit had been dug; it was square and very deep. At the bottom was a pool of murky yellow water. The heavy cypress coffin sat beside it.

Ajiu pulled a paper package from his pocket. He knelt in the mud and peeled back the layers of the paper package. Inside were pig's head meat and pig intestines, which were still slightly warm from being kept close to his body.

"Uncle Biao, eat some meat." Ajiu's voice was muffled in his throat. He placed the meat on the coffin lid, slammed his head heavily into the yellow mud, and didn't lift it up for a long time.

No one made a sound; only the sound of rain hitting the coffin could be heard.

Wen Xiao reached into his damp clothes and pulled out a cheap piece of candy. He unwrapped it and placed the bright red hard candy next to the pig's head meat.

Wen Xiao had always believed himself to be a dying outsider. He had speculated that it was just a hallucination before his death, a realistic game of chess.

He subconsciously shifted his hand to the side.

When he first came into this world, whenever he coughed or raised his hand, Chen Jinbiao would take out a piece of candy from his tattered cotton-padded jacket and stuff it into his hand, or run over to bring him a jar of steaming ginger tea.

The bald man was always worried that his sickly body would catch a cold again.

Today, he turned his hand to the side, and there was nothing in his palm. Only cold rain pelted his empty palm, flowing away through his fingers.

A gust of cold wind swept across the ground, seeping into the thin linen collar. Wen Xiao shivered.

It's time to fill in the soil.

These rough men, used to wielding machetes, were afraid that the sound of the metal hitting the coffin would be too loud and disturb the people sleeping inside.

Five hundred people bent down and used their hands to scoop up the wet mud from the ground.

Handful by hand, the yellow mud fell silently onto the coffin. Soon, Chen Jinbiao was gone, leaving only a lonely mound of earth.

The crowd dispersed. Only Wen Xiao remained.