Chapter Ninety-Six: Dragon Lord

“Your girlfriend?”

While touching the tiles, Chai Jin gave the little old man a curious once-over.

These two brothers were really polar opposites.

One had shut himself away in Seaport for years, stripping himself back to simplicity; though he was no ordinary man, if you saw him walking down the street, he looked no different from the old men practicing tai chi in the park.

As for the younger brother, he was already in his sixties, yet still burning with restless energy.

As Chai Jin looked on, he suddenly noticed that the antenna of the brick phone beside Master Long was gleaming with an oily sheen. The smoothness of it could not possibly have come without thousands upon thousands of careful rubs.

Still puzzled, he watched as Master Long took the phone over, shoved the antenna straight up his own nostril, and dug around.

He pulled out a huge wad of booger on the tip of it and said, “What, only you lot can have girlfriends? Can’t a little old man like me find one?”

Looking at the rounded tip of that antenna, Chai Jin suddenly understood where all that shine had come from.

One liked to use the brick phone to jab at other people’s noses.

The other liked to use the brick phone to jab at his own.

As expected, they really were brothers.

A man hanging upside down nearby seemed quite aggrieved, his mouth stubbornly set. “Master Long, you can’t do this.”

“The girls from every hair salon in this whole district have become your girlfriends. Where are we supposed to go spend money now? Xiaoli really just gave me a haircut!”

“Bullshit! A-Huang told me all about it. Said you were staring at Xiaoli’s chest!” Master Long threw a mahjong tile at him.

The man hurriedly shut up.

After nodding in a more composed manner, he fixed his eyes on Chai Jin. “I hear you made a lot of money in Seaport?”

Chai Jin smiled, his gaze flicking toward the tiles in front of Master Long.

To flatter him, he tossed out a five-dot tile. “I only made a little money under Master Zhang’s blessing in Seaport. Nothing worth mentioning.”

Master Long looked at him. “I envy you young people.”

“Ha, I’ve got it!”

All at once, Master Long brightened like a child and swept his entire row of tiles face-down.

“Damn it all, I finally won a hand.”

Chai Jin smiled. “Congratulations, Master Long. Let’s keep going.”

“Haha, of course!”

It was a game for the sake of sentiment, after all. Winning or losing money did not matter. Master Long, like Master Zhang, was not short of that kind of cash. It was only for fun.

Why had Liu Qingwen been able to get along so well with Master Zhang? Because he was excellent at reading the room, and the old man had no guard up.

The game was being played under Liu Qingwen’s watch.

Was losing several tens of thousands worth it?

Of course it was worth it.

For someone of that stature, even if you came carrying a million in cash and begged him for a favor, he might not even lift his eyelids to look at you.

But if you pleased him, then things became easy.

To put it bluntly, it was not a problem money could solve.

The two men beside him suddenly understood something. Their faces were bruised and swollen, but they looked at Chai Jin and instantly grasped what was going on.

They muttered their admiration.

So, in the games that followed, one of them was in charge of peeking at the tiles, while the other changed them under the table.

In this way, they deliberately cheated and still lost more than a hundred thousand to Master Long.

Only then did Chai Jin understand why these people had been beaten by the little old man in the first place.

They were all men under him, but their hands were not clean. They had stolen a great deal of Master Long’s money.

After being caught, they returned the money to him in double, but Master Long refused to take it.

In his words: he was a reasonable man, and he would make them lose with complete conviction.

He would win back the money he had lost through his own skill at the table.

But Master Long’s mahjong skill was truly awful beyond belief. Even when others gave him a half-hand advantage, he still lost money.

And so these men, who had failed to repay him and had in fact won money from him instead, could only bear Master Long’s wrath.

Chai Jin’s arrival was like a wake-up call.

Since Master Long played so badly, why not simply peek at his tiles? Could they really still win that way?

Such a bizarre scene, a scene where people racked their brains trying to lose money, could only happen in Master Long’s place.

Chai Jin’s composure, his measured advance and retreat, his proper respect without servility, won him great favor from Master Long.

Two hours later, Master Long finally won back the money that had been stolen from him.

He also kicked all those unlucky fools out.

The yellow-haired youth outside brought in a pot of tea.

The two of them chatted in the room. Though Master Long seemed rough and crude, and on small matters appeared to be nothing more than an unreasonable old fool, the fact that he had made it this far without falling showed that his mind was by no means as simple as it seemed.

So he could tell that Chai Jin had come with a request.

Holding his teacup, he said, “Little Chai, you’ve been in Seaport for so many days without coming to see me, and now you’ve suddenly come over without even giving a heads-up. Something must have happened.”

Chai Jin gave a wry smile and quietly took a sip of tea. “Master Long, I’d originally planned to find a suitable opportunity to pay you a proper visit.”

“But now, something really has come up.”

“We came to Seaport to make money, but our company had been open for less than half a month before someone splashed red paint all over it. That’s made things a little difficult for me.”

“People from the underworld?” Master Long asked.

“Yes. One of my men used to spend several years working in the Seaport stock market. Some trouble on this side had never been settled, and now they’ve come looking for us.”

Master Long set down his cup. “And you didn’t mention my name, Zhang Yinglong? Tell me, which bunch is it?”

Chai Jin set down his tea and explained the situation in broad strokes.

After listening, Master Long frowned deeply. “That gang from the South Vietnam Water Gang?”

“Didn’t they go legit? One and all dressed up in suits in office towers, pretending to be respectable. Why are they still running underworld tricks?”

Chai Jin smiled bitterly. “I’m not entirely sure either. You know I only just arrived in Seaport, and I’m very unfamiliar with things here.”

“This South Vietnam Water Gang has a big presence in Seaport?”

Master Long picked up his brick phone and jabbed at his nostril with the antenna before beginning to talk about the Seaport underworld of the seventies and eighties.

When the nation’s first reform-and-opening industrial zone was set up in Seaport, all sorts of speculative profiteers began flocking there.

It was an era of wild growth. There was too little experience governing a market economy, and on top of that, Seaport’s leadership at the time was still basically organized like a fishing village.

With so many outsiders suddenly arriving, there was bound to be a period of chaos.

And so, all sorts of groups sprang up on this patch of raw earth.

The South Vietnam Water Gang, the South Society, the Wudong Society, and so on.

After the city launched a sweeping crackdown, these gangs and societies began to realize how important it was to clean up their image.

So one after another, they started companies, and no one dared to be so openly blatant anymore.

After cleaning up their act, the South Vietnam Water Gang became the most high-profile of the lot, but it was also famously the worst in character.

To use Master Long’s words: those who are not of my kind must have a different heart.

Chai Jin listened quietly, not in any hurry to ask for help.

Outside, Liu Qingwen and Fang Yi had drunk so much tea that they had already run to the bathroom several times.

Bored to death, Liu Qingwen leaned over to the yellow-haired youth who was trimming his nails with a fruit knife.

With a slick grin and the full flavor of sycophancy, he said, “Where are you from, handsome? That hairstyle of yours is seriously sharp. Where’d you get it permed?”