The conversation with Su Fei left Ning Zhe feeling as though he'd brushed up against something entirely different, though without any real sense of enlightenment from it. Perhaps it was simply that, with his limited experience of the world, a few sentences from Su Fei weren't enough to give him any real new understanding of it.
Hurrying the whole way home, the moment Ning Zhe stepped through the door, the thick smell of blood hit him. Lighting the oil lantern, he found the attackers' bodies still lying in the room, but there was no sign of Lin Xun or the chubby young man anywhere.
Seeing this, a jolt of alarm shot through him.
Before the attack, he'd already anticipated the Black Banner would come for revenge, which was exactly why he'd set up the night watch. While he'd been out chasing down the attackers, Lin Xun and the chubby young man had been fighting off two men of their own, and given Lin Xun's skill, Ning Zhe hadn't expected either of them to come to any real harm. But their disappearance now filled him with a sense of dread.
Could the Black Banner have come back and struck again after he'd left?
The thought sent him spinning around at once. Lin Xun was the only family he had left in this world. He couldn't let anything happen to him.
"Tramp, tramp!"
The moment he stepped outside, Ning Zhe heard footsteps nearby and had his knife in hand instantly. "Who's there?"
"It's me!" Zhao Yi stepped out of the darkness. "Lin Xun and the fat guy are at my place."
"Whew!"
Hearing this, Ning Zhe let out a deep breath of relief.
Zhao Yi's room was considerably nicer than the place Ning Zhe and the others lived in. Newspaper lined the walls, the coal brazier was made of brass, and a small dish of pickled vegetables sat on the wooden table alongside two coarse-grain buns.
Right now, Lin Xun's wound had already been bandaged, and the chubby young man lay on the kang, blood soaking the bedding beneath him. Beside him, a middle-aged man had just finished stitching the knife wound in his stomach and was wrapping it in gauze.
"A-Zhe, this is Doctor Zhou. He's the factory doctor at the water treatment plant." Seeing Ning Zhe eye the middle-aged man warily, Zhao Yi introduced him.
"How's my friend doing?" Learning the man was a doctor, Ning Zhe's tone softened somewhat. In the refugee zone, rare professions like doctor and teacher genuinely earned people's respect.
"Whatever cut into him was a broken blade, and since he's on the heavier side, the wound didn't go too deep, just flesh and skin. I've already treated it. Whether he pulls through or not, I couldn't say for certain, it depends on whether infection sets in." Doctor Zhou glanced at Ning Zhe. "You know how hard medicine is to come by out here. All I could offer was medical alcohol to sterilize my instruments, and even that I had to save up on the sly. Prescribing medicine gets tightly monitored where I work at the factory."
Ning Zhe looked at the chubby young man, his face waxy and pale, barely clinging to consciousness, and asked, a little uneasy, "If he's not in immediate danger, why does he look like this?"
"Fear! This fat guy passed out the moment he saw blood!" Doctor Zhou answered, exasperated. "All right, I've done what I can here. Nothing more for me to do."
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"How much for the treatment? I'll pay." Ning Zhe had earned a few hundred yuan from helping Zhuo Mingyuan, money he'd originally set aside for buying rice.
"No need. Miss Zhao's already settled the payment for this. We're square." As Doctor Zhou spoke, he cast a sidelong glance at Zhao Yi's pretty face, then continued, "If you want these two friends of yours to pull through, you'd best find some anti-inflammatory medicine for them too. That'll give them a much better chance."
"Zhao Yi, thank you." Once Doctor Zhou had left, Ning Zhe turned a grateful look toward her. He knew she didn't have much money to her name, and he understood exactly what Doctor Zhou's "payment" had really meant.
"You've helped me plenty over the years too. We're neighbors, it's only right to help each other out... You all must be hungry. Let me warm up something to eat." Zhao Yi seemed to bristle at Ning Zhe's thanks, and picked up the coal brazier to start a fire.
"Don't trouble yourself. I need to find some anti-inflammatory medicine for the fat guy and Xiao Xun. Xiao Xun, keep watch here." Ning Zhe left it at that and turned to leave.
"Brother, where are you going, this late at night?" Lin Xun asked, a little worried.
"North Market." With that, Ning Zhe had already walked out the door.
"Hey! Hey!"
Just as Ning Zhe reached the mouth of the alley, someone called out to him. Glancing over, he saw a pair of arms reaching out through a barred window up ahead, and a woman in her twenties watching him closely. Catching his glance, she flashed a strange smile. "Come here, I've got something good to show you!"
"Tramp, tramp!"
Seeing this, Ning Zhe deliberately steered wide and walked past her without stopping.
The woman's name was Jin Zhi. She'd once been an ordinary refugee, but had suddenly gone mad about a month ago.
By custom, when someone in a refugee household went mad or fell gravely ill, they were usually abandoned. But Jin Zhi's parents had kept caring for her, and since both of them needed to work, they'd had no choice but to lock her inside.
Keeping another mouth fed in the refugee zone was no easy task, since laborers' food came strictly rationed and even feeding oneself was hard enough. Over the past month, Jin Zhi's parents had visibly wasted away, and anyone with eyes could see this family would eventually be dragged down along with her.
The North Market Ning Zhe had mentioned wasn't actually to the north, it was just the name of a black market, located on an open stretch of ground near the base of the stronghold wall. Every night, people gathered there to sell all manner of strange goods. Since the North Market belonged to the Trapper Gang's territory, few dared cause trouble there.
By the time Ning Zhe reached the North Market, he could already see rows of oil lanterns propped up on sticks scattered across the open ground, each one marking a different stall, with several patrols moving among them. Every single one of those patrolmen, without exception, was disabled.
Out on the wasteland, factories never hired disabled refugees. If a worker was injured and left disabled in a factory accident, they were simply cast out on the spot, handed a token fifty yuan in compensation. In the old days, a refugee disabled by an accident or a brawl had only one road left ahead of them: starving to death.
That changed once a man called Old Trap organized the Trapper Gang, giving these people a way to survive. Though the gang was made up entirely of disabled men, having nowhere left to fall back on made them fight all the harder to stay alive, and they'd carved out a real reputation for themselves in the settlement because of it. The North Market, the largest black market in the settlement, was their operation.
"Long time no see, A-Zhe!" The moment Ning Zhe approached, a man missing an arm spotted him, and seeing he'd come empty-handed, laughed. "Looks like hunting hasn't been going too well for you lately."
"Yeah, there's a bad drought near the stronghold. The animals have all migrated further out." Ning Zhe nodded, glancing past him at the stalls beyond. "Anyone selling medicine tonight?"
"Nope! Like you just said yourself, it's too dry out there. The bandits on the wasteland keep killing each other off fighting over territory, and it's left medicine scarce as hell on the black market. Amoxicillin used to go for fifty yuan a pill, now it's up to eight hundred, and even at that price it's hard to find!" The man made a face. "There's someone selling herbal medicine inside, though. Want to take a look?"
"Sure, thanks." Hearing this, Ning Zhe sucked at his teeth, troubled. He'd taken a few antibiotic pills off the bandits before, but he'd already used them all up, and the settlement's medicine shops only carried common herbs, decent enough for treating diarrhea, but useless for anything more serious than that.