Chapter 199: Two Pieces of Dirt

Chapter 199: Two Pieces of Dirt

“You can pick that up right now and put a bullet in me, or the two of us can sit here and talk properly.” Wu Chen smiled at him. “I believe you’re a smart man. You’ll make whichever choice serves you best.”

Wu Chen had given Old Dao a chance. A chance not to be coerced with his own family.

In truth, Wu Chen had given him no chance at all.

At this distance, Old Dao had none.

For fighters at the top level, too close a range makes a gun less useful than a knife, because a gun can only hurt what the muzzle is pointed at.

A blade attacks from every angle.

But.

Old Dao had no way of knowing there was no chance. Wu Chen’s abilities were beyond anyone’s imagining. Even Li Ruobing, as things stood, knew only the tip of the iceberg.

Old Dao would believe this was real.

“You think I don’t dare kill you?” Something shifted uncertainly across Old Dao’s face. The question was thick with probing.

His eyes went to Wu Chen, then to the gun. His fingers tightened on the chair arm, as if gathering himself, ready to move at any moment.

“For you, Old Dao, killing a man is no different from killing a chicken. This isn’t a question of daring. It’s a question of will.” Wu Chen kept smiling. “You’ve got very few weaknesses. You’re willing to gamble your life, so there’s nothing you don’t dare do. The only question is whether you will. Whether you want to.”

“Then why do you think I don’t want to kill you?” Old Dao came back at once.

“You don’t need to talk to break my concentration. It’s pointless.” Wu Chen’s smile stayed easy. “And I know why you haven’t taken the gun yet. You’re wondering whether I got to it beforehand. You’re also wondering whether I’ve already passed your background to anyone else. I’ll answer both directly. I didn’t touch the gun. And I haven’t told a soul what you were originally called, or where your family lives.”

Old Dao stared at him in silence.

He could no longer follow what Wu Chen meant.

Was the man trying to die?

He no longer thought this was a test. It looked like suicide.

Wu Chen might be frightening with a knife, monstrous in close quarters, but Old Dao was the one who could reach the gun first.

Was he gambling? Gambling with his life?

Old Dao genuinely did not understand him. If he had, he would have known that Wu Chen never gambled with his life. He disliked handing unknown outcomes over to uncertain odds.

Old Dao stayed silent, and still did not touch the gun.

Wu Chen had laid it all out plainly. Old Dao had doubts, yes, but he believed he had a straight shot at killing him.

And he did not move.

He did not immediately register what that was, either. It was an instinctive fear of Wu Chen.

The plan to run Wu Chen off the road: decided abruptly, arranged immediately, failed outright. Every man taken.

In the elevator: seven against one. Wu Chen won.

Old Dao broke out of the hospital, and little more than an hour later, the moment he reached the safe point, Wu Chen was there.

And now Wu Chen dared hand him a loaded gun.

Old Dao’s confidence in his own ability to fight to the death with a blade at close range was absolute — and he had the skill to justify it. But Wu Chen had overturned everything he thought he knew, and from that moment his estimation of the man had climbed to somewhere he could no longer picture.

And with it came admiration.

Just as Wu Chen had understood from studying him, there was one precondition to talking with a man like Old Dao.

You had to beat him first.

Old Dao was obsessed with blades. Anyone who could defeat him with one became special in his eyes.

Purely in terms of cold-steel combat, Old Dao would regard such a man as overwhelmingly strong, effectively unbeatable.

That was the psychology of an extremely confident man after a defeat. If even I couldn’t beat him, who could?

And Wu Chen had not beaten Old Dao alone. He had beaten all seven of them, Old Dao included, coming at him together.

Wu Chen wanted Old Dao to work it out for himself.

By handing over the gun, he would push the man’s estimate of his abilities higher still, without Old Dao ever noticing it happen.

At the same time, Wu Chen was clearing away the discomfort in him.

The discomfort of having his family used as a lever.

Intelligence extracted under threat might still be true.

But loyalty extracted under threat is never real loyalty.

Wu Chen could perfectly well have carried on the conversation without playing this hand. He would not skip it. By his original plan, Old Dao would eventually become his man — and if it happened under duress, his loyalty would always be a question mark. He would believe he worked for Wu Chen only to keep his family safe, because he had been forced.

And if that were so, then once he had investigated enough, he would move against Wu Chen sooner or later.

He would bite the hand that fed him.

That could not be allowed.

So Wu Chen gave him this chance. Wu Chen was not threatening him with his family. If Old Dao thought otherwise, he could pick up the gun. If he did not pick it up, that was his own choice.

And that choice would work deeply on him.

Old Dao was the first man Wu Chen had met in the real world who would not talk no matter what was done to him.

Enormous combat ability, an extraordinarily tangled life. His personal competence on a job was exceptional, and when a job went wrong his mouth shut tighter still.

He never sold out his boss.

And he truly did not fear death. There was almost nothing he would not do.

Old Dao’s reputation along the Yun Province border had been built up piece by piece. There was nothing exaggerated about it.

Had he not run into Wu Chen, this trip to Donghai would never have gone off the rails.

Now Wu Chen was determined to recruit him. To make Old Dao one of his own.

“What do you want to know?” Old Dao asked. He was still watching the gun, still weighing it — or rather, looking for his opening. “If it’s about the Ding family, then I’m sorry. I won’t tell you. Li Ruotai raised it. I didn’t tell him, and I won’t tell you.”

“I don’t need you to tell me any of that. I already know.” Wu Chen gave him a slight smile.

“You know?” Old Dao said.

“I do. Very clearly.” Wu Chen kept smiling at him. “For instance, you were the one who arranged Wang Ruida’s killing. On Ding Ruilong’s word.”

Wang Ruida’s death was another piece of lethal dirt on Ding Ruilong.

Nobody had ever imagined that Ding Ruilong had arranged it. In the whole stretch of time before Wang Ruida died, the two of them had not merely avoided conflict — they had never so much as met. There had been no clash of business between them either.

At Wu Chen’s words, Old Dao’s pupils shrank.

In all the world, only three people should have known who stood behind Wang Ruida’s death. Ding Ruilong himself. Old Dao. And the boss of the Golden Flower Group.

Ding Ruilong had not even routed it through Jiang Chuan. He had called Old Dao directly.

“That reminds me.” Wu Chen went on without waiting for a reply, still smiling. “I took photographs in the elevator after we’d finished. I sent them to Jiang Chuan and told him to pass them to Ding Ruilong. So by now Ding Ruilong most likely believes you’re all dead. Golden Flower, over the border, may believe you’re dead too.”

Something extremely subtle moved across Old Dao’s face.

If everyone believed him dead, he had another chance to fake his death and vanish.

The thought lasted an instant before he let it go. He had sunk too deep. The dark had swallowed him whole. Two roads were left to him: die, or keep at this until he died. There was no third.

“There’s one more thing.” Wu Chen smiled at him, and there was something subtle in that smile as well. “I also know Ding Ruilong killed Ang Tun.”

Old Dao’s face changed violently.

This was the second piece of dirt Old Dao could be used to establish against Ding Ruilong.

In fact Old Dao had no idea who had killed Ang Tun. He had no evidence pointing to anyone at all.

But that was the strange thing about it. As long as Old Dao believed Wu Chen, and then repeated it to another person, Old Dao could become a witness that Ding Ruilong had killed Ang Tun.

Old Dao stared at him, eyes wide, unable to believe it was true. He had spent a long time investigating Ang Tun’s death back then and had never turned up a single thread. How could it have been Ding Ruilong?

He did not believe it. And he could not make it make sense.

As he worked at it, the muscles of his face twitched.

“I know you probably—” Wu Chen began.

Then—

Old Dao’s hand shot out and snatched the pistol off the coffee table.

In that instant the muzzle was on Wu Chen.