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

The sweet, metallic taste of blood mingled with the broken tooth enamel, spilling from the officer's lips.

The warlord's ferocity, honed by years of working alongside Lu Yongxiang amidst piles of corpses, still imbued his bloodshot eyes with the ruthless, desperate nature of a villain.

"Um...uh..."

The officer choked back a sob, grabbing Wen Xiao's wrists as he tried to pull the gun out. He glared at Wen Xiao, his eyes revealing the shrewdness of a seasoned veteran.

In Shanghai during this era, the Anhui clique warlords were like local emperors entrenched in the Chinese-controlled area.

These soldiers, dressed in gray-blue uniforms, routinely set up roadblocks to pump water, forcibly sell opium, and suppress strikes, treating the lives of ordinary people as worthless.

In the eyes of ordinary people, they were a group of heartless "grey dogs" who would devour people without spitting out the bones. But in the face of real guns and bullets, even the foreigners in the concessions usually had to give them some face.

Wen Xiao looked at his bloodshot eyes, gripped the gun handle in his hand, and slowly and cruelly stirred it half a circle in the officer's mouth.

The scalding hot barrel slowly tore apart the delicate oral mucosa and surrounding tooth enamel, causing the officer to convulse in pain.

"You think I won't dare kill you just because you're wearing that grey dog ​​skin?"

The sound of laughter carried a chilling calmness.

He slowly pulled out the gun barrel and stood up.

The officer finally caught his breath. Clutching his mouth full of blood, he lay prone in the mud, coughing violently and grinning maliciously between coughs: "Cough cough... Go ahead and kill me today! I'm a regular soldier of the Anhui clique! If you kill me... Marshal Lu will slaughter every last one of Gong Hexiang's men! He'll take over the French Concession..."

Wen Xiao didn't even listen to him finish his harsh words.

He pulled a white handkerchief from his coat pocket and wiped the blood and saliva off the gun barrel, his voice carrying clearly down the street:

"Meng Huai".

"Here!" Meng Huai strode forward, submachine gun in hand.

Wen Xiao raised his eyelids and glanced at the dozen or so military police officers who had been responsible for loading ammunition and keeping watch behind the sandbags.

"Kill everyone who touched the machine gun."

The officer's sinister grin froze on his face, his pupils dilating in utter astonishment: "You dare—!"

"Da da da da da—!"

Without uttering a single wasted word, Meng Huai unleashed a torrent of fire from his Thompson submachine gun!

Less than ten seconds.

The dozen or so military police officers who hadn't even had a chance to raise their guns fell behind the sandbags, covered in blood, like cut wheat.

They couldn't believe it even when they died: a detective from the foreign concessions actually dared to massacre the governor's regular troops in public on the streets of the Chinese-controlled area!

Lawless!

On the long street, the military police officer lay alone amidst the corpses scattered on the ground.

Only at this moment, looking at his men lying dead on the ground with their eyes wide open, did something called "fear" truly seep out from the butcher's very bones.

"You...you're a madman..." the officer trembled. "The commander-in-chief won't let you get away with this..."

"Then we'll wait for him to come to me in person."

Wen Xiao tucked the cleaned gun back into his waistband, then casually tossed a bloodstained handkerchief at the officer's face. "Cuff him and drag him back to the French police station dungeon. Without my permission, no one is to be released."

"yes!"

Wen Xiao turned around.

The violent power brought by the power of battle was receding from his bones like a tide.

What remains is emptiness and a chilling cold that penetrates to the core.

He waded through the puddles, walking step by step toward the alley entrance. The blue bricks on the long street, which were originally gray, had now turned into a sticky, dark red.

Winter rain fell, pounding into the blood-red puddle, creating tiny pink bubbles.

He walked over to the nearest body, which had been cut in half by a machine gun; it was a boy who was only seventeen years old.

The upper body was at this end, the lower body two steps away. The intestines were flowing in the muddy water, already washed white by the cold rain.

Wen Xiao took off his expensive black overcoat, slowly squatted down, and covered the boy's gruesome corpse with it.

The coat wasn't long enough; it covered my head but not my feet.

Ah Jiu knelt beside him, while he was just a teenager.

"Fifth Master..." Ah Jiu's voice was hoarse, "They're using newspapers to insult you. They're plastering posters all over the streets and alleys... calling you a eunuch and saying we're traitors."

Ah Jiu held a wad of rotten paper pulp in front of Wen Xiao, his fingers trembling like a leaf: "Brothers, we're sticking to our principles. Fifth Master has been good to us, we can't just watch others smear his reputation. We wanted to smash up that newspaper office... we didn't know there were soldiers at the intersection..."

Wen Xiao lowered her head, looking at the crumpled piece of paper in A Jiu's palm. The ink had long since smudged, turning into a dark, illegible mess.

All for a few sheets of shoddy paper that are too hard to even wipe one's bottom.

Seventeen lives were lost.

He reached out, took the wad of tattered paper from A-Jiu's hand, and expressionlessly stuffed it into his soaking wet pocket.

"Ah Jiu." Wen Xiao stood up.

The winter rain pelted down on his back, which was covered by only a thin white shirt.

"Hey..." Ah Jiu responded, lying in the mud.

"Have the surviving brothers do some work, pick up the pieces of flesh and limbs on the ground, and put them back together neatly, so that no brother is missing a piece." Wen Xiao looked at the scattered corpses on the ground: "Then go to the coffin shop in Shiliupu and get seventeen cypress coffins. The money will be drawn from my account."

He turned his head and looked towards the dark, rain-soaked direction of the concession. His deep black eyes held no light whatsoever.

Rainwater washed away the scraps of meat on the long street, flowing through the cracks in the bluestone slabs into the dark sewers, making a soft "gurgling" sound.

Glug, glug.

Glug, glug.

The sound traveled through the cold, rainy night, gradually changing tone, becoming the soft sound of boiling water pressing against the lid of a purple clay teapot.

Zhang Sulin, the tycoon of the Qingmen Clan, lay on his side on the opium couch. Listening to the sound of water boiling on the small stove, he gave a contented smile: "Ah, the tea is ready."

Sitting opposite him in the armchair was Lu Yongxiang's intelligence officer in a white suit. Upon hearing this, he put down his jade-mouthed pipe, leaned over, picked up the purple clay teapot, and poured boiling water into two cups of Imperial Dragon Well tea.

The tea leaves swirl and release a delightful aroma.

"The gunfire over in Nanshi should have stopped by now." The man in the white suit picked up his teacup and leaned back comfortably in his chair. "Boss Zhang's 'luring the enemy into a trap' tactic was indeed a brilliant move. A few innocuous articles drove that Wen guy into a mad dog. Today, he beat the military police captain to death in the street, which is tantamount to washing his own head clean and handing it over to the warlord."

Zhang Sulin took a deep drag of his cigarette by the dim blue flame of the lamp, and thick white smoke billowed from his nostrils.

He fiddled with his cigarette butt and asked slowly, "Wen Xiao is, after all, a detective in the French Concession. If Commander Lu makes trouble, will the French... hand him over readily?"

"The French?" The man in the white suit sneered. "Would the French consul and the chief of staff like a Chinese detective appointed by a mixed-race British woman? A Chinese man has overstepped his bounds and broken so many foreign rules. With the commander-in-chief at the gates, a little pressure will be all it takes for the French to be happy to kidnap Wen Xiao and send him out. That way, they can appease the commander-in-chief's anger and use him to get rid of this disobedient thorn in their side."

Zhang Sulin chuckled twice. "Young man, he thinks he can protect those peasants just because he has some brute strength. He's still too green. He's destined for hard labor, like weeds on the street, you cut one crop and another grows back."

The man in the white suit put down his teacup: "It's not just him. That Miss Xue from Jardine Matheson, she's always so arrogant. This time, her lover has caused such a huge political mess that the board of directors of the British Empire will probably strip her of her power tomorrow. Once her funding chain is cut off, our two families can rightfully divide up the assets of the Sixteen Shops and the French Concession."

The two smiled at each other and clinked their glasses.

The seventeen lives lost on the long street were nothing more than a few tea leaves in a pot of fine tea, which, once boiled, became the lingering aftertaste of dividing the spoils.