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 their equal.

No money.

No background.

No connections.

And yet he’d done it.

How?

That came down to Wang Zhuangyuan’s drive. He wasn’t just sharp—he was extraordinarily good at working every angle life offered him.

Six years ago, in July.

Li Ruotai, twenty years old, still in college and about to begin his junior year, arrived in Donghai carrying a sum of money that could only be called astronomical, backed by a family network more frightening still.

Pick the site. Raise the building.

Under the original plan, pushing construction at full speed regardless of cost, it would still take at least two years from breaking ground to finishing the interior.

Two years later, Li Ruotai would graduate.

Through those two years, though he remained in school, he flew his private jet into Donghai constantly, meeting people, building ties.

He was an outsider muscling into someone else’s turf—but the kind of outsider even the local powers were reluctant to cross, and eager instead to befriend.

Li Ruotai built his own network in Donghai fast.

It laid the groundwork both for Crown Entertainment’s opening and for the expansion of the Li family’s reach.

It was during those years that Wang Zhuangyuan got to Li Ruotai before Crooked Zhao and the others did.

At the time, Wang Zhuangyuan already carried some weight, but nothing close to those three. Even so, Crooked Zhao and the rest wouldn’t move against him lightly—even crushing Wang Zhuangyuan outright would have cost them more than they cared to lose.

Wang Zhuangyuan was the first to forge a bond with Li Ruotai.

Li Ruotai, in turn, gave him a leg up.

Four years ago, Wang Zhuangyuan rose fast enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with Crooked Zhao and the others, turning Donghai’s underworld from a triad of bosses into a quartet.

In the years since, these four top figures had been locked in constant maneuvering—open rivalry laced with quiet sabotage—each hoping to bring down the others, grow bigger, and maybe even end up standing alone at the top.

The conflict came to a head this past April.

A massage hotel under Yan Jiu’s control was rocked by an explosion.

It made the news. The official account blamed a gas leak in the basement pipes, an accidental blast, several employees injured, one seriously, described as a pure accident.

It was no such thing.

No one died, but the blast still put one of Yan Jiu’s most trusted proxies—the hotel’s nominal owner—straight into prison.

He was still there.

The incident sent Li Ruotai into a fury.

By all logic, he should have favored Wang Zhuangyuan. Wang Zhuangyuan was the man he’d personally lifted up, years in the making now—if Li Ruotai had truly thrown his weight behind him, Wang Zhuangyuan should already have overtaken Crooked Zhao and the rest, maybe even claimed sole dominance by this point.

But he hadn’t.

Li Ruotai never let that happen.

Because what he wanted was balance.

A core heir of a family at that level couldn’t afford to be some reckless playboy. Li Ruotai had his own kind of wisdom, and he understood clearly enough: if any single force rose to dominate the rest, whether he could still hold the reins became a real question.

There was a second problem too—the tallest tree draws the axe.

In this day and age, anyone who actually tried to build a one-man empire in a major city was courting his own destruction. If it all blew up and the authorities came down on Donghai hard, it wouldn’t just be the underworld figures who paid for it. Li Ruotai himself would find it impossible to stay clean.

What Li Ruotai wanted was balance. And stability.

So even though Wang Zhuangyuan had known him first, over the past few years all four men had ended up in roughly the same standing with him—each of them, in a sense, a trusted contact, and yet each held at a distance he never quite let them close.

Li Ruotai’s business ran on pleasure and vice, which meant dealing with Donghai’s underworld was unavoidable. To grow bigger, to do better, he needed them.

Take, for instance, the astonishing roster of top-tier hostesses and staff under his operation—where did they come from?

From below, naturally, funneled up through these very men.

If it hadn’t been necessary, Li Ruotai would never have bothered with this crowd of thugs at all. However grand Crooked Zhao and the others talked themselves up, their wealth and standing landed them, at best, among local tycoons worth under a billion. Any tier above that, and they weren’t even in the same conversation.

But thugs were still thugs, running the least secure trade there was. With Li Ruotai’s background and reach, if he’d wanted any of them ruined, he could have ruined them.

That was exactly how an outsider like him had become the boss above Donghai’s own underworld bosses.

He stayed close to them and kept his distance from them both at once. He held the balance among the four, understood them, and controlled them.

After April’s explosion, in early May, Li Ruotai summoned all four, along with the underworld’s most respected old hands and hardcases, and let his fury loose. He made his position final.

Whoever struck first would be cut down by his own hand.

That secret meeting was what Wu Chen had referred to yesterday, borrowing Li Ruotai’s name on the phone with Crooked Zhao, as the “May gathering.”

…

Wu Chen went back to his room for his laptop, returned to the living room, and settled onto the sofa to scroll through the news.

He hadn’t given much thought to Wang Zhuangyuan’s tail. He understood the man’s temperament and methods well enough to know exactly why.

Put plainly, Wang Zhuangyuan wanted to hitch himself to Wu Chen’s line. Most likely he meant to get a read on Wu Chen first, then wait for the right opening—or manufacture one—to get close to him privately and build a connection.

That connection, once made, would give him an edge over Crooked Zhao and the rest.

Which was exactly why Wu Chen had known he was being followed and hadn’t bothered doing anything about it.

Because he knew there was no danger in it.

Not only no danger—Wang Zhuangyuan was, if anything, likely to come bearing gifts. Generous ones.

At eleven that night, Wu Chen shut his laptop and went to bed.

He slept straight through.

A new day.

July 9, 2020. Seven in the morning.

Wu Chen woke right on schedule, picked up his phone, and looked at the date that hadn’t reset. A smile crossed his face.

He’d long since confirmed time wouldn’t reset on him passively anymore, and still, every time he saw a fresh date, the smile came anyway.

Because having a future ahead of him felt, honestly, incredible.

He’d trained the day before, and his legs ached a little, though not enough to slow him down.

He got up, washed, dressed, and went downstairs for breakfast.

The moment he stepped out of the building—

A man in glasses, leaning against the wall by the entrance smoking, straightened at once. He dropped the cigarette, crushed it underfoot, waved the smoke away from himself, and looked toward Wu Chen.

“Mr. Wu, about yesterday, I—”

“Bored, are you?” Wu Chen cut in, turning his head toward him.

It was Wang Zhuangyuan.

Cigarette butts littered the ground. No telling how early he’d come, or how long he’d been waiting there at the door.