The moment Ning Zhe's hand moved toward his waist, the young man's face changed at once, and he stopped in his tracks, taking a step back. "Sir, please don't worry, I'm not a bad person!"
"Who you are is none of my business. Just stay back." Hearing this unprompted confession, Ning Zhe slowly drew his knife.
"I'm afraid you've really got the wrong idea. I came here on purpose, looking for the two of you." The young man unrolled the burlap sack, revealing a long loaf of bread inside. "This is a gift I brought for you."
"Gulp!"
The chubby young man stared at the loaf, swallowing hard. Wheat flour products were a real luxury out here.
"I don't take gifts I haven't earned. I don't want it." Ning Zhe stayed wary, worried the bread might be drugged the same way the roasted meat Li Bin had given them once was. He wasn't the kind of man who believed good fortune fell out of the sky.
"Earlier, back in the settlement, I saw what you could do, taking out several thugs in one go. Actually, I'd been following you the whole way, but lost track of you outside, and only just now managed to find out where you were." The young man forced out as friendly a smile as he could manage. "I really do need your help. And of course, I'll pay for it."
"You want to hire me to work for you?" Ning Zhe sized him up. The man looked frail and weak, and didn't seem to pose much of a threat.
"That's right! I came to this settlement looking for someone, but I let it slip that I had money on me without meaning to, and now someone's got their eye on me. I need someone to keep me safe." The young man nodded rapidly.
"We'll talk inside." Ning Zhe thought it over, and decided in the end to hear the young man out. Winter was drawing closer by the day, and hunting was only getting harder. With a brutal season bearing down on them, ready to cut down lives left and right, they still had no real plan for how to survive it. In an age with prices this high, the few dozen yuan taken off the thugs wouldn't keep them going for long.
The group soon made their way inside and sat down around a table made of stacked stones. The young man poured a cup of water for each of them from his own waterskin, then began telling Ning Zhe his story. "I came to this settlement to look for my younger sister. Actually, a long time ago, I lived right outside Stronghold 87 myself, but later I went out to a mining site far from here, did a bit of small business out there, got lucky and made some money, and now I've come back."
"You came back from a mining site? Then have you heard of Li Dongbao? He's my brother! He got taken away just a few days ago!" The chubby young man asked eagerly.
"I'm sorry, the mining sites are a long way from here. I didn't dare travel alone, so I paid to hitch rides with various transport convoys, and it took me a full month of winding around before I finally made it back. And besides, the stronghold has more than a dozen mining sites, each one with several thousand people. I don't know all that many people out there." The young man shook his head with regret, and the chubby young man's face fell.
"You came to us so we'd protect you?" Ning Zhe looked at him. "You just watched me kill people. Aren't you worried I'll rob you instead?"
"If you were really a bad man, you wouldn't have been standing at a roast meat stall, letting yourself get shaken down for protection money." The young man smiled. "This time I've come back to find my sister and give her a good life. If the two of you are willing to protect me until I find her, I'll pay you for it. By the head, ten yuan a day each. How does that sound?"
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"Fifty." Ning Zhe glanced at the loaf of bread the young man had brought as a gift, sensing the man had money to spare, and raised the price.
"Fine. But I only want the two of you." The young man thought it over for a moment, then pointed at Ning Zhe and Lin Xun.
"Hey! Who are you looking down on here?" The chubby young man was thoroughly offended. "Even if you hired me, I couldn't go with you anyway, I've got my stall to run!"
"Right, exactly, I didn't want to get in the way of your stall." The young man quickly gave the chubby young man a graceful way out.
"Fine, I'll take the job. Starting now, you can stay here with us. You're on your own for meals, and lodging's ten yuan a night. And one more thing, our wages get paid up front, every day." Ning Zhe added another condition on top. Since this was a business arrangement, interests came first, plain and simple.
"No problem. I'll give you a hundred and fifty right now, that covers tomorrow's wages plus five nights' lodging." The man pulled out a thick stack of bills.
"Starting today, you'll stay in that room, sharing with the fat guy here." Ning Zhe pointed toward the chubby young man's room.
"Sure. You all talk, I've been out looking for someone all day, I'm exhausted." The young man gave a nod and went off to his room to rest.
"Brother Zhe, are you two hungry? I'll go rustle something up!" The chubby young man got up, ready to get to work.
"We've already got food right here, no need to bother." Ning Zhe handed the bread the young man had brought over to him. "You eat first."
"Brother Zhe, you should eat with me too!" The chubby young man looked touched.
Ning Zhe shook his head. "Once you've finished eating and five minutes pass without anything happening, we'll know the bread's not drugged. Then we'll eat."
The chubby young man's face went blank. "Don't you think that's a little too blunt to say out loud?"
"Out of the three of us, you're the weakest fighter. If something goes wrong with you, the two of us can still handle whoever's in the house. But if something happens to us instead, you don't have the strength to do the same." Ning Zhe answered plainly, then went on, "Do you know where I could find Li Bin?"
"Why are you looking for my cousin? Did my brother leave you a message for him too?" The chubby young man blinked, then shook his head. "Honestly, I have no idea. My cousin's been living on his own ever since he was sixteen, after our parents died. I've barely seen him in all these years. It was my brother who kept in touch with him more."
Hearing this, Ning Zhe felt a flicker of frustration. If even the chubby young man couldn't lead him to Li Bin, his hunt for revenge had just been set back even further.
But no matter where in the world Li Bin had run off to, he would drag the man out sooner or later. His brothers hadn't died for nothing.
Early the next morning, Ning Zhe and Lin Xun set out for the settlement together with the young man. Through conversation, they learned the man's name was Zhuo Mingyuan, and that he'd been away from this area for nearly ten years. After so much time apart, Ning Zhe didn't hold out much hope for finding a lost relative, but since there was money to be made, he figured they might as well tag along and see.
Just as Ning Zhe had expected, Zhuo Mingyuan spent the entire morning asking around and turned up absolutely nothing.
As noon approached, Zhuo Mingyuan generously led the two of them to a restaurant in the settlement, striding into the main hall without a hint of hesitation.
"What can I get for you gentlemen?" The restaurant owner, noticing how well Zhuo Mingyuan was dressed, hurried over eagerly to greet them, then caught sight of Ning Zhe and instinctively looked away. Almost no one in this part of the east gate dared cross that particular walking disaster.
"Whatever fills us up is fine. Try to get the food out quick, I've still got business to take care of after we eat." Zhuo Mingyuan opened his wallet and pulled out ten yuan, holding it out. "Here, a tip for you."
"Oh! Thank you so much, sir!" The owner took the money with a broad grin, his face creasing up like a blooming flower. "Right this way, please. I'll get your food out right away!"
"Brother, this guy's awfully free with his money. What do you think he does for a living? Why's he so generous with it?" Lin Xun watched Zhuo Mingyuan's easy spending, his eyes full of surprise.
"He's not a merchant." Ning Zhe glanced at Zhuo Mingyuan as he walked toward the table with the owner, and lowered his voice. "His clothes are clean, but there are mended patches over his chest and lower back, the kind you'd get from being run through with something sharp. And when he pulled out his wallet, I caught sight of a blood-stained gold ring inside. That kind of jewelry, only city people wear it. Unless I'm badly mistaken, that outfit of his, and the money in his pocket, both came from killing and robbing someone."
"He's a predator?" Lin Xun's eyebrows shot up. "If that's true, then why's he lying to us?"