I love Brother Huo

The man Huo Laosi sent to negotiate peace arrived even earlier than Duan Hang had expected.

Yang Rui, who was putting makeup on Leopard, had to stop what he was doing and come out to meet this hoodlum.

"Master Huo sent me. The boys call me Old Wolf. If you don't feel like showing me respect, Wolf Kid will do." The visitor was only about twenty, with a crew cut, green army trousers, and cloth shoes.

According to time-honored lore, the thugs who wore cloth shoes were always the best fighters. When their opponents spotted someone like that in a brawl, they would, in their terror, concentrate their attacks on him and take him out first. This also served to eliminate the knockoffs.

In other words, this Old Wolf was almost certainly a fellow with off-the-charts fighting ability.

Duan Hang twirled his handcuffs around a finger, adopting a threatening stance that said he was ready to arrest someone at any moment.

Yang Rui had no intention of pushing himself to the front. He simply stood behind his older cousin and asked expressionlessly, "Whatever you have to say, say it."

Old Wolf glanced at Duan Hang. "Master Huo said if you let Leopard go, we'll pretend today never happened. We'll keep staying out of each other's way. Otherwise... heh, heh."

"You'll have to spell it out. I don't understand 'heh, heh.'" Yang Rui looked perfectly earnest.

Had he been an ordinary student, he would naturally have had to give those words serious consideration. But he was now a third-generation official's descendant. Being frightened by a gang leader who controlled a bus station would be a terrible waste of resources.

In his memories, Xi County had once been full of underworld figures of every stripe. Further back, gangs had run rampant. But compared with the people's democratic dictatorship, all of them were nothing. There were plenty of street thugs in the eighties, but in terms of strength, never mind comparing them with the bandits from the early days after Liberation-they were far more loosely organized and weaker even than the criminal gangs of the nineties onward.

Most importantly, they had yet to find powerful protectors.

Huo Laosi knew nothing about Yang Rui's background. He had only sent Old Wolf to negotiate because Duan Hang was captain of the county criminal investigation unit. His reasoning was merely that civilians should not fight officials.

Old Wolf cared nothing about any of that. Seeing how young Yang Rui was, he immediately looked down on him and said disdainfully, "If you don't understand, just do as you're told. Let Leopard go, and we'll divide up the territory."

"How?"

"No. 1 Middle School is ours. Victory Middle School is yours. Everywhere else, we each rely on our own abilities."

"So you get to copy my test papers for nothing?"

"I don't know about 'for nothing.' Once you've sold the papers, how can you stop people copying them?"

Yang Rui laughed at that. He waved a hand. "You can go."

Discussing copyright with an opponent like this was a waste of breath.

Old Wolf snorted and looked around. "I'm taking Leopard back with me."

Yang Rui shook his head slightly.

Duan Hang rattled his handcuffs like a constable from ancient times. "If you don't leave now, you can stay and keep Leopard company."

Old Wolf lowered his head and scuffed his cloth shoe against the ground, then chuckled. "Without that uniform, I could take eight of you."

"He's trying to provoke you. Ignore him." Yang Rui stopped the angry Duan Hang.

"Master Huo isn't someone you want to mess with." Old Wolf threw back his head and laughed, then strode away singing under the "admiring" gazes of passersby.

Yang Rui watched his retreating figure as though looking at an idiot, then spoke into Duan Hang's ear. "If you're annoyed, arrest him afterward and deal with him the way I dealt with Leopard."

Duan Hang hesitated, reluctant. "Isn't that a bit cruel?"

"This is nothing. Kids in the future are the cruel ones." Yang Rui sighed and returned to the ice cream shop to continue working on Leopard.

Half an hour later, at the county town's busiest-and only-intersection, a leopard slowly rose up the flagpole on the roof of the grocery store.

He was bound with hemp rope, his whole body covered in shit-yellow dye of unknown composition, his arms spread in a crucifix pose. A line of a couplet hung from each hand: "My fists conquer Nanshan Nursing Home; my feet crush Beihai Kindergarten."

A vertical inscription hung beneath his crotch: "I love Brother Huo."

Within five minutes, the crowd of spectators had packed the intersection solid.

Entertainment was scarce these days. Gathering to watch a spectacle was even more popular than dancing, since there was no need to step onto the dance floor yourself.

Countless people pointed at the couplet and Leopard, telling those around them the stories they knew about Leopard, Brother Huo, and Nanshan Nursing Home that simply had to be told.

Cao Baoming clung to a rope and lowered himself from the grocery store's third floor to the second, where Su Yi hauled him inside. Then one cut the rope while the other used a heavy iron chain to lock the door leading to the roof.

Duan Hang was also mingling with the crowd. He sighed. "After this, it's a fight to the death."

"He's organized a criminal gang, and everyone knows he bullies other traders and monopolizes the market. Even if he survives this year, he won't get any peace." Yang Rui said things Duan Hang did not understand at all.

The latter shook his head. "Where did you learn this sort of... bizarre trick...?"

"From secondary school students."

"Secondary school students?"

"Yes. Secondary school students are the nastiest people in the world. Look at the United States and Japan... well, you'll know if you watch movies. Bullying and things like that are absolutely tactics that make people want to kill themselves. Of course, our Chinese students aren't bad either. Before long, they'll learn all of it too." Yang Rui was thinking of the students from his old tutoring classes. However innocent a child looked, the tricks they used when bullying others could leave adults dumbfounded. Drinking toilet water, being locked in changing rooms, and the like were only beginner techniques. Their methods evolved even faster than successive generations of students.

Compared with a beating, bullying clearly left deeper psychological scars.

Huo Laosi and his ilk might regard a body covered in wounds as a man's badge of honor, but it was hard to say what sort of badge being covered in shit was.

Even more puzzled, Duan Hang asked, "There really are movies like that?"

"On videotape." That was the only explanation Yang Rui could give.

Duan Hang gave a knowing smile.

Before long, a large crowd charged up the grocery store stairs like lunatics. Then some raced downstairs, found axes and pliers, and raced back up.

Next came the sounds of pounding on the rooftop door and shouted curses, prompting all sorts of speculation among the spectators.

The operation to rescue Leopard went on for a long time. Cao Baoming had barricaded the rooftop door with heavy objects, so even after cutting the chain, they could not break it open. In the end, Huo Laosi could only send people climbing up the outside wall to clear the objects behind the door and open it. Not only was the process embarrassing, it kept the crowd's excitement at its peak for ages.

In the end, Huo Laosi and the others could only vent their frustration by roaring.

Cloth-shoed Old Wolf looked at Leopard, who was sobbing too hard to speak, with lingering fear. If anything had gone wrong earlier and he had been made to stay, he would never have been able to show his face again.

Huo Laosi sent people to take Leopard back, then mobilized everyone he had, putting the word out on the streets and searching frantically for Yang Rui.

Little did he know that Yang Rui had mounted his bicycle and headed back to Xizhaizi Township before Leopard had even reached the ground.

He did not go home. Instead, he went to the office, sat down in front of the desk, and explained everything that had happened.

Even the exceedingly composed Yang Laodie was stunned by the fifty-yuan daily profit and the "I love Huo Laosi" couplet.

After a long while, Secretary Yang finally found an opening. "You really didn't take a single cent of the money from the test papers?"

"Not a single cent. The principal can vouch for me." Hearing his father's question, Yang Rui inwardly praised his own foresight. When the local business environment was unclear, this was the strategy that put him in an unbeatable position.

"How is the money allocated?"

"Some goes to the school, some to students in financial difficulty, and some covers costs."

"How are the students who do the mimeographing paid?"

"By the hour, a little less than temporary workers at a printing factory. But they work fewer hours, and they also receive the benefits generated by the final profits. The jobs rotate."

Secretary Yang asked several more questions and received satisfactory answers to them all. Only then did he give Yang Rui a long look, call the school to question Zhao Dannian personally, and begin to think.

As a former commune secretary and a good Party member who firmly believed in socialism, Yang Laodie clearly found Yang Rui's approach very much to his liking.

Working together, running a collective enterprise, and sharing the profits-Xizhaizi Township's earliest commune factories had operated on these very principles.

Although the commune factories had ultimately failed, Yang Feng still held a deep fondness for those principles.

Seeing Yang Rui use this approach to run the test-paper printing operation gave Secretary Yang the pleasure of having a son follow in his father's footsteps.

"Go call Xiao Jiao in, and wait outside for a while." Yang Laodie's expression did not change in the slightest as he picked up the telephone again.

Yang Rui went out as instructed, called to his father's secretary outside, and sat down to drink tea.

Two cups of tea later, a young man in a military uniform without shoulder insignia came up to Yang Rui, stood at attention, and saluted. "Wei Lin of the Militia Company reporting to you!"

"The Militia Company?" Yang Rui stood up.

"Secretary Yang ordered the entire Xizhaizi Township Militia Company to assemble and protect Xibao Middle School's collective property. I'm the commander, Wei Lin, at your disposal." Wei Lin stood ramrod straight, every inch a soldier.

Yang Rui stared. As someone from the twenty-first century, he had long since forgotten that militia organizations even existed.

Looking at Wei Lin's serious expression, Yang Rui asked quietly, "How many men are in your militia company? What equipment do you have?"

Wei Lin answered loudly, "The Xizhaizi Township Militia Company has a total of 158 men, with two 12.7-millimeter antiaircraft machine guns, four Type 53 Light Machine Guns, eighteen Type 63 Automatic Rifles, twelve Type 53 Carbines, three Type 54 Pistols..."