Net Closing

Outside the No. 3 Mining District of the city.

The blizzard had barely stopped, and the counter-gale whipped across people's faces with a stinging pain.

It was already broad daylight; under normal circumstances, the overseer's water-soaked leather whip should have long since lashed down onto the miners' backs.

Yet today, no whistle blew, and no one came to hand out the wooden tokens for going down the shaft.

The surroundings were quiet enough to make one's hair stand on end.

Hundreds of miners, their teeth chattering from the cold, stood blankly in a circle around the ore sand mountain that towered higher than a rooftop, staring at one another.

Zhou Fu, an old miner, wrapped his coarse cloth jacket tighter—its gray cotton stuffing leaking out—his eyes never leaving the mouth of the mine shaft.

The hoist rope swayed in the wind, and the winch was actually unlocked.

He clutched a pickaxe in his hand.

Yesterday's blood scab had frozen onto the wooden handle, and with the slightest shift, the split in his palm tore open, the seeping blood gluing to the wood splinters with a piercing pain.

Zhou Fu's heart beat wildly.

If they didn't go down the mine today, who would he collect double wages from?

The half-bag of sand-mixed broken rice at home had bottomed out last night, and his old wife on her sickbed was still waiting for medicine money to keep her alive.

There were charitable people distributing porridge south of the city, but the mining district was forty miles from town, and he couldn't even manage to take time off to line up.

A few days ago, in order to seize this top-grade mineral vein, his distant nephew's windpipe had been pierced straight through by a kunai, and the corpse was still buried in a