Chapter 198: I’ll Give You a Chance

Chapter 198: I’ll Give You a Chance

The movement died mid-arc.

Old Dao had reacted on something like reflex: a voice behind him, and he turned to kill. He was highly professional, and extremely quick.

And then he froze.

Wu Chen had done nothing.

Nothing at all.

He only watched him.

Wu Chen was leaning against the wall, both hands in his trouser pockets, body tilted slightly back, the back of his head resting on the plaster, the brim of the cap tipped up. He stood there in a posture of complete ease, faintly smiling, his eyes calm on the man who had just erupted at him.

Old Dao’s knife arm was raised high.

And it had stopped.

There was no particular reason for it.

He had simply seen who had spoken.

Wu Chen.

Yesterday, in the elevator, in that cramped box, seven men had come at Wu Chen with blades.

And Wu Chen had turned the attack back on them. Every one of them had been cut down.

That level of combat ability could not be called merely terrifying. Old Dao had spent his life with a knife in his hand, had gone in and out of death for years, and he had never seen anyone that strong.

Obscenely strong.

Old Dao knew he could not beat Wu Chen. Never mind that he was gravely wounded — uninjured, at full strength, he still could not have beaten him.

He also knew Wu Chen had spared him deliberately.

The wound had come within a breath of his heart. A little deeper, and he would have died on the spot.

In the middle of all that, Wu Chen had still exercised that fine a degree of control, stopping a hair short of killing him. Old Dao could not begin to imagine what kind of brutal, horrifying training a man went through to be capable of that.

He had turned it over in the hospital bed. He had even mocked himself for it.

The Ding family’s intelligence on Wu Chen had to be wrong.

For him to play with knives in front of Wu Chen was showing off axe work before Lu Ban himself. Nothing but self-inflicted humiliation.

Old Dao held the raised blade where it was and stared at Wu Chen in alarm.

How was Wu Chen here?

After a pause he snapped back two steps. His wrist turned, his arm drew in, and he settled the knife into a reverse grip, taking a guarded stance. His eyes flicked sideways to the front door.

If it had been open he could have gone straight through it. Closed, it cost him a movement.

He knew perfectly well he could not get away.

He still wanted to run.

“The guns are in the case,” Wu Chen said, smiling, tipping his head toward it.

Old Dao glanced at the case on the coffee table and did not move, still coiled tight, eyes locked on Wu Chen.

The table was several steps off, and the case would have to be opened before he could get a gun out of it. And Wu Chen had arrived first. He had no idea whether the guns were loaded, or whether Wu Chen was carrying one himself.

Moving carelessly would be suicide.

“Relax. If I’d wanted you dead, you’d have died in that elevator yesterday.” Wu Chen smiled at him, and as he finished he straightened off the wall.

Old Dao immediately gave another wary step of ground.

Of course Old Dao knew Wu Chen would not kill him lightly.

But he knew something else too. If he refused to cooperate, refused to give up certain things, he would be killed in the end anyway.

And he was precisely the sort of man who would not talk.

So—

“I’ve already called an ambulance for you,” Wu Chen went on, smiling as he walked toward the sofa and the coffee table. “Those injuries won’t hold much longer. Stitched or not, the wounds weren’t sewn shut so you could throw yourself around like this.”

He spoke lightly. And crossing to the sofa, he even turned his back on Old Dao.

Old Dao did not attack.

Because what he wanted was to run, not to fight. He had seen how fast Wu Chen’s reactions were.

Wu Chen reached the sofa and turned to sit.

At the very instant he was lowering himself onto it, Old Dao broke for the door.

Wu Chen spoke in the same breath.

“Maling Shan. I hear the black tea in Pumen is excellent. Aren’t you going to invite me to try some?”

He sat down as he finished, then turned his head, smiling, toward a man whose whole body had locked rigid.

Old Dao had already spun and taken his first stride.

At the name “Maling Shan,” he stopped dead.

When Wu Chen said “Pumen,” the cold went through him from scalp to heel.

Old Dao turned slowly back, eyes wide, staring at Wu Chen. The whites went bloodshot almost at once. It was a look brimming with murder. His hand clenched on the knife until the knuckles blanched.

“How do you know?” His voice came out hard and cold.

“Don’t you want to talk to me?” Wu Chen smiled and lifted an eyebrow, indicating the armchair to one side with his eyes. “Sit.”

Old Dao stared at him, silent, thinking.

Several seconds later he crossed to the coffee table and sat in the armchair.

His eyes never left Wu Chen. The knife never left his hand.

In that room, in front of Wu Chen, the only thing that gave him even a trace of security was the knife in his fist.

Even if that security was self-deception, and worth nothing at all.

“How do you know?” Old Dao asked again, staring. His face, bloodless from the wound, showed nothing whatsoever.

Two words — “Maling Shan” and “Pumen” — had kept him in the room. Wu Chen needed no force. Old Dao had no choice but to stay and talk.

Because what Wu Chen had said was a secret no one knew.

The legal name on Old Dao’s ID card was Liu Yundao, and the age on it was forty.

Both the name and the age were false.

Old Dao’s first name had been Maling Shan.

At sixteen he changed it to Ma Shan.

At twenty-one, Ma Shan disappeared, and was later confirmed dead in a traffic accident. A body had been thrown down a hillside, and by the time it was found it was too far decomposed for anything but the clothing to identify it.

Technology was limited then. DNA testing was not yet in general use, and absent some specific need, there was no reason to run it.

So the body was never confirmed by DNA.

Ma Shan had not died. He had committed a crime and fled, and had acquired a false identity under the name Chen Zhuangmin.

Chen Zhuangmin knocked around the Yun Province border region for a few years, then crossed into Myanmar. After years of blood and slaughter he joined the Golden Flower Group and rose to become one of its core men. When he formally returned to China, he changed identities again, taking over the papers of a man who had just died.

Liu Minfeng.

At thirty-three, Liu Minfeng became another “former name,” and the name on his ID was officially changed to Liu Yundao.

Maling Shan was Old Dao’s first name.

Liu Yundao was his fifth.

Of everyone who knew Old Dao now, the most anyone knew was the last three.

Even the Golden Flower Group, before he joined them, had known him only as Chen Zhuangmin.

Nobody knew who he actually was.

In the eyes of the law, Maling Shan had been dead for years. His household registration had long since been canceled.

This was Old Dao’s greatest secret.

And the secret touched on something far larger than himself.

His family.

He was a tea farmer’s son. His real age was only forty-one. Both his parents were still living, and so were both of his elder sisters.

His sisters had married long ago and raised children of their own. All of them, his parents included, lived ordinary lives in that place famous for its black tea.

Pumen.

For a man like Old Dao — vicious, feared, weighed down with more enemies than he could count — having someone find his family was the thing he dreaded most in the world.

“Twenty years, and you’ve never dared contact home once. I hear your mother still visits your grave every year.” As Wu Chen spoke, he opened the case on the coffee table and lifted out one of the pistols.

Old Dao held the knife in one hand. The other braced on the arm of the chair, ready to spring at any instant — to dodge, or to throw himself at Wu Chen.

“For what it’s worth, I think you were right,” Wu Chen said.

With the pistol in hand he ejected the magazine and looked at it.

There were rounds in it.

He was showing Old Dao.

He seated the magazine again, racked the slide, and chambered a round.

“Protecting your family from harm is something every man should do.”

Smack.

Wu Chen set the pistol down hard on the coffee table and slid it toward Old Dao. The force was exact: the gun came to rest right at the table’s edge, within easy reach of his hand.

Old Dao’s pupils contracted.

Wu Chen had given him the gun.

“I’ll give you a chance,” Wu Chen said, smiling, at his ease.