Late autumn had arrived, and mist began to rise at night.
At Fish Market Entrance, beneath the gate plaque, the boy was still hanging there.
Kill one to frighten a hundred, cowing the hearts of all.
"Damn it, what rotten luck. Why do those guys get to go drink with Eighth Master while we have to stand guard over this brat and drink the northwest wind?"
"Who told you not to be willing to pay your respects to Eighth Master? Naturally, this kind of bitter, exhausting work falls to poor devils like us."
"Damn those stinking fishermen. Squeeze them dry and they still barely have a few coins. I even got up at the crack of dawn today and searched Old Chu Tou's boat. Good fellow, nothing but useless junk. I finally found two or three strings of coins, and Eighth Master took all of them. I did not get a single copper."
"You should count yourself lucky. Good thing this kid only found an ordinary fist manual. If he had really found some divine art manual and mastered it, we would all be dead, just like that Old Xu Tou three years ago. Good fellow, you have no idea how ruthless he was. Golden Carp Gang's Third Miss..."
At a small table nearby, two Silver Fork Gang members were grumbling.
Every gang and sect had long since developed a complete process for such matters.
First came surveillance. They watched for abnormal signs in people's behavior. If someone suddenly became rich for no reason, or did something out of the ordinary—if fishermen stopped fishing properly, farmers stopped farming properly, and instead secretly practiced fists and martial arts—then there was certainly a problem.
Then came reporting. A gang's manpower and resources were limited, and they naturally could not watch everyone at