Chapter 279: Brother, You Know Me?

Chapter 279: Brother, You Know Me?

As Wu Chen walked toward the alley mouth, He Ming, the white-haired young man kneeling at the wall, and the punk-haired young man kneeling beside him both took out their phones.

Wu Chen had told them to make calls. Naturally they could not dial fast enough.

He Ming was calling his boss, Yu Hailiang.

The punk-haired young man was calling his father.

This would reach Crooked Zhao almost at once. And then Li Ruotai would know. For something this serious, Crooked Zhao would not dare hide it. He would be desperate to call Li Ruotai first and explain before Wu Chen spoke to him.

Confessing fault of his own accord was far better than waiting for Li Ruotai to come looking for him.

Wu Chen walked back more than ten meters.

He was not leaving. Had this concerned only himself, he would simply have walked away and left the rest to unfold without him. By tomorrow people would be at his door apologizing. Some might even be dealt with quietly, to calm Mr. Wu’s anger.

In fact Wu Chen was not angry at all.

He had already crippled a group of them, breaking arms and legs. He had come looking for this incident on purpose. And at the end of the chain, all these men could be counted as Li Ruotai’s.

Li Ruotai listened to Wu Chen very closely now, had even come to fear him a little. One word from Wu Chen and Li Ruotai could put the underworld to work at once.

So—from Wu Chen’s own point of view, these men were, in a sense, his own people.

You could call it the flood washing into the Dragon King’s own temple.

And every step of it Wu Chen had known, or rather predicted, in advance. He had known how events would unfold, and they had unfolded exactly as he foresaw.

So inside, naturally—

he felt nothing at all.

Strictly speaking, Wu Chen was not in the habit of meddling in other people’s affairs.

During the thousand-year loop there had been a time when he loved doing exactly that. Then he thought it through.

There was no need.

In any densely populated major city in the world, too many things happened every day involving death, crime, or ruinous loss for ordinary people.

Far too many.

Was he supposed to handle all of it?

Wu Chen thought not. He could not, and he could never keep up.

He had no wish to be a city hero. He considered himself an ordinary, worldly man. As far as he was concerned, while a person was alive it was better to make life a little easier on yourself. A little happier.

Don’t get hung up on every little thing. Don’t make life more exhausting than it has to be.

And so, although Wu Chen had reset July 20, and although the evening news alone could tell him where a car crash had happened that day and where an industrial accident had killed someone, he had not gone to intervene.

He had no impulse to.

He had intervened only in what was happening in this alley.

Entirely because he knew the short-haired young man and the girl in the black dress.

He had predicted what would happen if he did nothing. And he had predicted how much benefit intervening would bring him.

Wu Chen reached the short-haired young man and the girl in the black dress.

The young man was still sitting against the wall, the girl beside him. His face was still dazed, and he stared blankly as Wu Chen came up, unable to surface.

What stunned him was not only how unbelievably well Wu Chen could fight. It was the wild turn the whole thing had taken.

In the middle of the fight the other side seemed to recognize Wu Chen. They called him Mr. Wu. Then they knelt. Then they begged.

Even the rich kids who had called these men in, the ones who had been so arrogant in the bar, were kneeling at the wall now.

The short-haired young man understood. This man in the suit, who looked about his own age, was not merely a peerless master.

He was also a major figure in Donghai.

“Can you stand?” Wu Chen asked, looking at him with his habitual smile.

The short-haired young man stared up at him blankly. It took him a moment to react. Then he moved all at once, planting a hand against the wall behind him and trying to rise.

The girl in the black dress took his other arm to pull him up.

Wu Chen put out a hand.

The short-haired young man took the hand he had been bracing against the wall and reached for it.

Wu Chen pulled.

He stood. He had rested a while now, and though his whole body hurt and his face was bruised and swollen, he could just about hold his feet.

“Brother, th-thank you. Really, thank you. If it weren’t for you I would’ve… Brother, I’ll repay you, I mean it. Thank you.”

He grew more emotional the longer he spoke.

It had truly felt like his life was on the line. At least, that was how dangerous he believed it had been.

In fact, Wu Chen knew that even without him no one would have died. The short-haired young man would have been beaten badly and sent to the hospital. He would have survived.

“Brother, thank you,” the girl in the black dress said as well, still holding her boyfriend up.

Both were extremely polite. Both were still shaken.

That was how one treated the man who had saved your life.

“How did you get tangled up with them?” Wu Chen asked, tipping his head toward the others.

“It… it was back at the bar…”

The short-haired young man began to explain. There was nothing to hide from the man who had saved him. He even had a faint urge to have Wu Chen judge who had been in the right, because he knew now that Wu Chen was a major figure in Donghai, a man who could keep these people in hand.

The matter was not complicated.

And Wu Chen was asking a question whose answer he already had. He had learned what caused this on the previous “July 20.”

The couple had driven to Donghai for fun. More precisely, the short-haired young man was obsessed with cars. He had heard lately that Donghai’s street-racing crowd was formidable, so he had driven his modified GTR over to meet them and test himself.

The two had only arrived in Donghai that day. Before they could even work their connections to arrange a race, they went to a bar that evening to sample Donghai’s nightlife.

That was where they ran into the punk-haired young man’s group. Their booths stood side by side.

While chatting with his girlfriend, the short-haired young man had talked about how powerful his modified car was, and passed along some of what he had heard about Donghai’s street-racing crowd.

The punk-haired young man happened to be one of that crowd’s core members.

He overheard, joined the conversation of his own accord, and then the two of them began arguing over modifications and who was better, neither willing to give an inch. The punk-haired young man finally threw down a challenge—come outside right now and see whose car was faster. Whoever backed out was a dog.

The short-haired young man said he had been drinking. Tomorrow.

The punk-haired young man mocked him.

After that both sides started cursing, slapping the table, standing up to shout at each other.

The short-haired young man was not intimidated by their numbers. He had trained, and he was not afraid of a fight.

But the two groups never came to blows in the bar. Others stopped them.

The girl in the black dress talked her boyfriend down.

On the other side the punk-haired young man’s friends pulled at him and warned him quietly. It was Crooked Zhao’s establishment. He did not dare start a fight inside and hurt the bar’s business and reputation.

So there was only shouting in the bar. No one threw a punch.

Later, when the short-haired young man and the girl in the black dress had finished drinking and walked out, the punk-haired young man called people to block them.

That was all of it.

A perfectly ordinary verbal quarrel that had ended in violence.

And as Wu Chen saw it, the punk-haired young man’s side was plainly in the wrong. If the argument was over who was better, race and find out.

Calling in a gang of thugs to block a man, smashing his car and beating him—there was no other name for that but using local power to bully an outsider.

Wu Chen had his own judgment. He did not voice it.

The short-haired young man’s account was very detailed, because he believed he was in the right. That GTR, modified at a cost of several million yuan, was the apple of his eye.

And they had smashed it.

The more he talked the more worked up he became. Between the talking and the gesturing it took him eight or nine minutes.

Wu Chen heard him out and offered no opinion. He only said, “I’ll handle it.”

“Brother, I really do have to thank you. I mean it. If it weren’t for you, who knows what would’ve happened to me and Qiqi tonight…”

He thanked him again, still emotional.

Wu Chen smiled. He turned and looked back down the alley—some kneeling, some lying on the ground, some cradling broken arms and not daring to make a sound. Then he looked at the short-haired young man again and smiled.

“Aren’t you going to call your second uncle?”

“Ah, right, I should—”

The reminder had him reaching for his phone, and only then did he find the screen already shattered.

He was turning to ask his girlfriend for hers when he stopped short. His head came up sharply toward Wu Chen.

“Brother, you… know me?”