As the boy left the general store, he was still thinking about what Tang De had said: a soft tongue could break hard bones, and a wise mind was better than any divine weapon. At any rate, Tang De's words had given the miserable green youth a little inexplicable comfort. His dejected mood had improved somewhat.
As Zhang Tie passed the flea market, the coalstone streetlamps along the road began lighting up one by one. Black Flame City's lamplighters rode around in four-wheeled carts, ringing their bells. They stopped at each lamp, climbed the pole, took off the shade, refilled the streetlight with fuel, lit it, and climbed back down. After the lamplighters left, women began appearing in the shadows beside the row of coalstone lamps near the train station. Each one was heavily made up and dressed provocatively, her ample bosom half exposed as she cast flirtatious glances at passersby. The women stood together in twos and threes, occasionally saying a few words to their companions before someone burst into an uninhibited, wanton laugh.
As Zhang Tie walked, he kept glancing at the women standing beneath the lamps. They left him feeling flustered, yet stirred a longing he couldn't quite put into words.
"Sweetheart, come here to auntie. I'll let you taste what it's like to be a man..." The woman speaking stood at the mouth of an alley beside a lamp. She had curly red hair and a voluptuous, alluring figure, and looked to be in her forties. Her features were a little blurry, but when she saw Zhang Tie's eyes flick toward her, she leaned down slightly, letting the streetlamp illuminate her magnificent, fair breasts. Then she pressed both hands against the two exposed half-globes above the neckline of her dress and let out a faint moan. "Ah..." She opened her mouth, licked one of her fingers, and slowly slipped it between her lips. At that single gesture, the muscles in Zhang Tie's throat began twitching like a plucked rubber band. He was burning up, and the tent in his trousers sprang up high. Then, amid the woman's uninhibited laughter, Zhang Tie fled in disarray.
The flea market beside the train station only truly came alive at night. All sorts of people from every walk of life seemed to spring out one by one as darkness fell. Zhang Tie had gone nearly a hundred meters from that terrifying yet alluring woman before his pounding heart began to settle. One disobedient fellow was still standing stiffly at attention, and to avoid embarrassment, Zhang Tie had to pretend to put both hands in his pockets and press the rascal firmly down through the fabric with his right hand.
Just as Zhang Tie was about to leave the flea market, a voice coming from a roadside stall made him slow his steps.
"Boss, did you get all these things from ruins dating back to before the Great Cataclysm?"
"Of course. Look at this book. The writing on it looks like Hua Script, and the Andaman City-State Alliance doesn't publish anything like this. And look at the cover—this looks like an abacus used by the Hua Clan, a calculating tool with a long history that goes back thousands of years before the Great Cataclysm. And look at the print quality on this cover. If it hadn't come from the ruins, how could it have been preserved so well?"
"Do you take us for idiots? I know it's Hua Script, but nobody can read it. You can say whatever you like; what good is it? And what the hell is an abacus? Does anyone still use something that old-fashioned...?"
"I'm a man of my word..."
The words Hua Script made Zhang Tie stop in his tracks. He walked over and crouched beside the two people in front of the stall, casually picking through the wares. The stall was tiny, barely two square meters at most. A jumble of odds and ends lay on a piece of waterproof canvas. The only things worth a second look were several daggers and copper bracers weighing down its four corners. At the flea market, every seller claimed that any strange item they came across had come from the ruins and was a treasure from before the Great Cataclysm. But even a fool wouldn't believe that...
After crouching by the stall for a while, one of the two men chose a decent dagger with a sheath for eight silver coins and sixty copper coins, then left. Zhang Tie was the only one left in front of the stall.
The stall owner was a seedy old man in his sixties with a bright red, drinker's nose. As soon as you got close, you could smell the cheap liquor on him. Just looking at him made you think of an animal: a rat.
After casually looking over the stall for a while, Zhang Tie finally picked up the book with an abacus printed on its cover and flipped through it. "How much for this?"
"This is a treasure brought back from the ruins. At least twenty silver coins..." the old man said craftily.
"What's the book about?"
"Uh, I think it's a manual explaining how to use this calculating tool called an abacus!" The old man wasn't sure. He had looked through the book, but couldn't understand a single word of the Hua Script. He'd even found some half-baked fellow who knew a little Hua Script to take a look, but that man could only make out a few simple numbers in it—things like three-three, two-two, five-five, six-six. What nonsense...
"What use is that? Is it supposed to help me count sheep to sleep?"
"Well, all right. If you want it, I can make it cheaper. Sixteen silver coins. Not a copper less!" The old man put on a pained expression.
"Do you take me for an idiot? This book isn't even sixteen pages long. There's so little paper, it wouldn't be enough to wipe my ass once. And you want sixteen silver coins? I only asked because the book looked a little strange." Zhang Tie angrily tossed the book down. He might never have eaten pork, but he'd seen pigs run. At this market, if you didn't haggle rudely, people would take you for a fat sheep and fleece you without mercy.
"Then name your price."
"Eighty copper coins!"
"Eighty copper coins?" The old man leaped up like a rat whose tail had been stepped on. "Boy, this came from the ruins! No, at least ten silver coins!"
"What ruins? Who are you trying to fool, a child? There aren't any ruins within a thousand miles of Black Flame City. Even if there were, people would've stripped them bare long ago. Why would you get there first? Eighty copper coins!"
"Nine silver coins. Not a copper less!"
"Fine. Since you're so old, I'll show respect for my elders. I'll add another ten copper coins: ninety copper coins!"
"Ninety copper coins?" The old man howled like a slaughtered pig. "That's not even enough to cover what I paid for it!"
"Then one silver coin!"
"Seven!" the old man gritted out...
After two minutes of dry-mouthed haggling, Zhang Tie simply stood up and walked away without a backward glance. Five steps later, the old man's furious voice came from behind him. "Don't go! Fine, we'll do it your way. Four silver coins, and it's yours!"
A faint smile appeared at the corner of Zhang Tie's mouth. Those people who didn't know Hua Script obviously couldn't read the title on the book. But the moment Zhang Tie had seen it, he'd frozen: "Abacus Mental Calculation." It had a very impressive name. He'd just flipped through it and discovered that it described a mental arithmetic method related to the abacus, something rather unusual. So he'd bought the book...
On the way home, Zhang Tie's stomach was already growling, but with the book in his pocket, he felt satisfied. In this era, knowledge was more expensive than many people could imagine. Any skill or knowledge that wasn't common fare taught at school had its own unique value and preciousness. Zhang Tie remembered that when he'd first started as an apprentice at the general store, Tang De had spent more than three months testing him before finally bringing out that strange thing called an abacus and teaching him how to use it. The old fellow had even acted as if the boy had struck gold. And from what Zhang Tie had seen in Black Flame City, not many people knew how to use an abacus. At least, he'd never seen anyone else use one. Ordinary calculations could be done on paper, while for more advanced ones, he'd heard that the exchanges and trading houses used mechanical hand-cranked calculators. So the abacus skill was a bit of a white elephant. But even an unneeded skill wasn't something just anyone could learn. Zhang Tie had only casually flipped through Abacus Mental Calculation, but the moment he saw the abacus diagram and mnemonic verse on the front endpaper, he'd recognized its value. All in all, the book might not be particularly precious, but four silver coins for a skill like this was worth it, even if he couldn't put it to use just yet. Besides, those four silver coins hadn't been his to begin with.
"One more skill never hurts." That was something his father often said.
When he was little, his parents had beaten his palms with bamboo slats to force him to learn Hua Script. It had taken ten years of hard work to learn every character in a Hua Script dictionary that would give anyone a headache. That had been the darkest experience of Zhang Tie's childhood. Now, more than ten years later, he'd finally put what he'd learned to practical use for once and picked up a bargain. He was a little pleased with himself.
As for the old man's claim that the book had come from the ruins, Zhang Tie wouldn't have believed it if he'd been beaten to death. Anything from the ruins was at least a thousand years old, and the book didn't look a thousand years old at all. Yet the faint, nearly blurred words beneath the abacus illustration on the page still puzzled him: "Recommended Extracurricular Reading for Elementary School Students." He was already about to enter society, yet he couldn't get his hands on this kind of knowledge. What kind of elementary school student had it so good? They even had extracurricular reading materials. Damn, comparing yourself to others could drive you mad!
He'd inexplicably taken a beating, spent the money he'd scavenged to buy a book, joined the Airplane Brotherhood, and made a complete fool of himself in front of Teacher Daina...
As he walked home, Zhang Tie tallied up what he'd spent and gained that day. Even he couldn't tell whether he'd come out ahead or lost out...
Zhang Tie's home was in the working-class district in the north of Black Flame City. If the Upper East District was the rich folk's back garden, then the northern district was a haven for all the law-abiding workers and ordinary townsfolk of Black Flame City. Compared with the Upper East District, the northern district's streets weren't pretty, but they were fairly clean, and public safety was decent. Rows of plane trees along either side of the street lent the place a warm, down-to-earth feeling. Decades of hard work by his parents had earned them only a small, two-story wooden house with a footprint of less than a hundred square meters and a backyard, on a neighborhood street. They'd turned the ground floor into a storefront selling fermented rice drink. His father worked at a factory, while his mother ran the little shop. Business was neither hot nor cold, mostly supported by the neighbors and residents nearby, and the profit was meager—just enough to help with household expenses.
By the time Zhang Tie got home, it was nearly nine at night. His parents weren't there; they'd probably gone to church again. The fermented rice drink shop was closed too. The food his family had left was still being kept warm in a pot of water. Dinner wasn't lavish: a pot of mixed-vegetable soup, a bowl of pork with beans, and a large mound of white rice made up the whole meal. A few broad-bean-sized chunks of meat floated in the pork and beans. Zhang Tie knew his parents had left them for him. In truth, they always went without, saying they didn't like meat and leaving it all for him. As he ate the modest dinner, his nose inexplicably stung. He swore to himself that once he earned money, he'd make sure his father and mother could eat their fill of meat and fish every day.
After hurriedly finishing dinner and cleaning up the kitchen, Zhang Tie dragged his tired body upstairs. The door to his older brother's room on the second floor was shut, but from inside came rhythmic thumping, along with unmistakably stifled panting. This wasn't the first time. Zhang Tie knew what was happening in there. After lightening his steps, he walked a little farther down the hallway. Near the end, he found the cord on the wall and gave it a gentle tug. A wooden panel in the ceiling at the end of the hall slid open. On its other side was a staircase leading straight up to the small attic.
The staircase probably hadn't been oiled in several days, because it made a loud creaking noise as it came down. When it unfolded, the thumping in his brother's room stopped for a few seconds. Then, before Zhang Tie had even climbed up, the noise started again, even more vigorously.
Zhang Tie climbed the stairs and, once he reached the attic, pulled them back up. The ceiling panel slid into place. This small attic with its triangular roof was Zhang Tie's little nest.
The house wasn't very big to begin with, and the rice wine shop took up the ground floor, leaving even less room for people to live in. Zhang Tie had no choice but to sleep in the attic. Nearly half of the already cramped space was partitioned off with sheet metal and wooden boards to store household odds and ends. His little nest could barely fit a bed, a desk, and a small wardrobe. There was only enough room between the pieces of furniture for two people to pass one another without squeezing. The furniture was old but not quite worn out. Much of the paint had faded beyond recognition or was beginning to peel. The family had scrounged all of it secondhand for Zhang Tie, and the lot hadn't even cost two silver coins...
A room less than eight square meters in size, a few old secondhand pieces of furniture—that was everything the fifteen-year-old, green-as-grass youth Zhang Tie had in this world...