Chapter 041: Donghai’s Underworld Currents

Chapter 041: Donghai’s Underworld Currents

Wu Chen was honestly starting to lose his patience. The man had no sense of boundaries at all.

“Hm?” The voice on the other end stalled for a beat, then placed the unfamiliar number and turned flustered. “Ah—Mr. Wu, you might have the wrong idea. I wasn’t—”

“It’s late. I’m turning in. If you need something, call me directly. Stop putting men on me.” Wu Chen didn’t wait for a reply. He hung up.

Phone still in hand, he glanced once more out at the alley below, then drew the curtains shut.

In truth, he knew perfectly well the man posed him no danger whatsoever.

Because the one who’d had him tailed and watched was, in a sense, already on his side.

Wang Zhuangyuan.

Wu Chen had driven off in his white Lamborghini yesterday, run into him again that morning at Li Ruotai’s place, and handed the key back to him in passing. From Wang Zhuangyuan’s side of things, he could barely claim to know Wu Chen at all—they’d only crossed paths.

And yet he’d still put men on him.

Wu Chen could guess why.

Because he was Li Ruobing’s man—brother-in-law to “Young Master Li” of Donghai, Li Ruotai. And Li Ruobing was already carrying his child.

Donghai’s underworld currently had four figures who qualified as top bosses. Besides Crooked Zhao and Wang Zhuangyuan, there was Yan Jiu of North City and Yuan Erbao of the Development Zone.

Between them, these four controlled more than ninety percent of the city’s entertainment and leisure trade, with fingers in quarries, logistics, and more besides.

Donghai had only ever seen one man rule the underworld outright, back in the nineties, when things were messier—a figure who might fairly have been called a godfather of Donghai.

After the new century turned, the old guard died off, went to prison, or simply survived long enough to wash their hands clean and move above ground. New blood always rose to fill the gap when the old cleaned up, but the era was different now, the environment different, the rule of law stronger.

It had grown nearly impossible for Donghai to produce another godfather-level figure—someone who could act with total impunity and absolute dominance.

The more developed a place became, the harder it was for such a man to exist.

Donghai had developed plenty. It couldn’t compete with the country’s handful of true top-tier super-cities, but it was still a first-tier metropolis of over ten million people.

And yet—

Wherever there were bars, KTVs, bathhouses, saunas, there was no escaping connections, networks, and the underworld’s own tangled business.

Which was how the current four had come to be: Crooked Zhao, Wang Zhuangyuan, Yan Jiu, Yuan Erbao.

Of the four, Yan Jiu was oldest and carried the deepest seniority—men on the street called him Master Yan Jiu, and he’d already passed fifty.

Crooked Zhao came next, then Yuan Erbao. Neither had reached fifty yet.

Wang Zhuangyuan, though, was only thirty-three.

Look closely at the shifting fortunes of Donghai’s underworld over the past twenty years, and one fact stands out as genuinely startling: Wang Zhuangyuan was a frightening man. The speed of his rise defied belief.

At eighteen, he’d topped the science track on Donghai’s gaokao. Then, avenging parents who’d been bullied and pushed around, he’d stabbed a man, served three years for it, and only after his release had he stepped into the underworld.

He’d once been an outstanding student—a prodigy, the golden child every parent held up as the standard, the kind other kids got compared to and came up short. He’d believed, once, that knowledge could rewrite a man’s fate. Then came the summer he turned eighteen, and everything changed.

Not just the direction of his life. His whole sense of what mattered had warped along with it.

So he went into the underworld instead.

Twelve years later, Wang Zhuangyuan had caught up to the old guard—Crooked Zhao, Yan Jiu, Yuan Erbao—despite being twenty, even thirty years their junior, and now stood as…