Chapter 10: Ting-Ao Town

Leaving Yuanguang Temple, Shuisheng declined the kind offer from team leader Yan Ning to drive him back to Wang'ao Village.

Upon arriving in Ting'ao Town, he decided that, besides meeting the young lady, he needed to replace his phone and visit the Ting'ao Bookstore. His phone had gone into the sea with the fishing boat that morning; he had managed to retrieve the SIM card, but the device itself remained on the ocean floor. That old, dilapidated phone was essentially scrap once it hit the water, and he had been meaning to replace it for a long time anyway.

Walking down the road, he felt a wave of emptiness as he touched the two items in his pocket.

How laughable, truly laughable. Only moments ago, he had briefly fantasized about being a descendant of the Yan family, imagining that he had finally found a sense of belonging. How ridiculous. For the first time in his life, he felt a profound sense of not knowing where he belonged.

The blare of a car horn startled him out of his thoughts.

"Hey kid, watch where you're walking!" the driver of a small truck called out from the window.

Shuisheng offered a sheepish smile and stepped back onto the sidewalk. He found a small second-hand phone shop, spent 200 Donghua coins on an old, worn-out button phone, and inserted his original card. He powered it on, and everything worked fine. The shop owner told him that, despite its age, the performance was excellent—it had all the basic functions and was quite durable. Shuisheng had been fooled by the same pitch last time, but he accepted it readily; after all, the main thing was that it was cheap.

After turning the phone on, there were no missed calls or unread messages, even after half a day. He felt like a person forgotten by the world.

Lost in thought, he walked instinctively until he looked up and found himself at the Ting'ao Bookstore.

Ting'ao Town was a fishing town that had developed from an old harbor. It was small, with a permanent population of no more than thirty or forty thousand. The town had two main streets: one horizontal and one vertical. The vertical street ran along the coast and served as the main area for the fish market. The horizontal street intersected it at a right angle, lined with shops covering various industries other than fishing.

Yuanguang Temple stood at the end of the horizontal street, a place of faith for the townspeople.

The Ting'ao Bookstore sat right next to the temple. In stark contrast to the bustling, glamorous temple, the bookstore was dilapidated, dimly lit, and desolate.

Shuisheng stepped inside and nodded to the owner, who was curled up napping at the entrance, not caring whether the man saw him or responded. The shop had two shelves, ninety percent of which were covered in dusty, old books. Compared to his last visit, there were only a dozen or so new titles. Even so, the young man browsed through them as if he had discovered a treasure.

Yan Ning, the gentle-looking young man in a tailored suit, stopped in his tracks when he followed Shuisheng to the bookstore and saw the scene inside. He walked back a few paces and made a call.

"Young Lady, he has entered a small, run-down bookstore in town," he reported.

"Go in and keep an eye on him. Don't let him out of your sight," a cold voice came from the receiver.

"Young Lady, I can't go in. Besides the owner, he’s the only one inside," Yan Ning replied with a grimace. "He’s seen me before; he’ll be on guard if he knows I’m following him." He muttered to himself, "This kid, what century is he living in, still going to bookstores... and he's just a fisherman. If he wants to read something, isn't it all on the computer? Oh, right, he doesn't have a computer at home."

"I don't care what method you use, I want to know everything about him! Who he sees every day and what he does!" With that, the young lady hung up.

Yan Ning thought for a moment and decided to wait outside. He couldn't bring himself to go in and pretend to browse; it was a habit from before the college entrance exams—looking at paper books gave him a headache, and that had been the case for years. He found a small supermarket, sat under a patio umbrella, and began watching the bookstore entrance while sipping a drink.

He expected the kid to come out quickly, but after three drinks and half a pack of cigarettes, the boy still hadn't emerged.

"Shuisheng, is that stranger outside—the one who looks like a dancer—a friend of yours?" the shop owner, wearing thick reading glasses, suddenly asked the teenager as he focused on his book.

Sitting at the entrance, the owner had a different perspective than Shuisheng and had long noticed Yan Ning’s strange behavior.

Shuisheng froze. He walked to the door and carefully peered outside. Through the small gap, he saw the young assistant team leader in the blue suit, hands in his pockets, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, pacing back and forth in a state of agitation.

He quickly pulled his head back. "I don't know him."

"That man is a bit odd," the owner muttered. "We rarely see people dressed so fancy on our street."

"Uncle Yong, let me check out." Shuisheng placed the two books he had chosen and the money on the counter.

"Regardless of who he is, it's better to be cautious," Uncle Yong said while counting out the change. "Use the back door to leave so he doesn't see you. I hope he's not a human trafficker. I hear they love targeting kids like you—no parents around, and no one would care if you were sold off for labor somewhere."

Hearing the words "no parents around" made Shuisheng’s mood sink.

Hadn't Yan Ning returned to the Yan family with the young lady? Why was he still hovering around, and why did it look like he was tailing him? Were they unwilling to let those two items go so easily? Or did they have other motives? Did they know the three people who had tried to harm him? Or the person behind them?

Clutching his books, he slipped out the back door. After navigating a narrow alley, he reached the Ting'ao Town fishing pier. Looking over, he saw his best friend and childhood companion, "Little Fatty" Zhou Yudong, helping his father sell fish.

It was Thursday, and school was in session. After finishing primary school with the help of the village chief and the villagers, Shuisheng had stopped his formal education to make a living by fishing. For his reality, survival was more important than anything else.

Although Zhou Yudong was in junior high at Ting'ao Middle School, he didn't like studying; he preferred business and always dreamed of getting rich through the fishing trade. He often slipped out of school to hang around the pier's fish market with his father. His father turned a blind eye to this, believing that spending so much time and money on school wasn't worth it—even college graduates didn't make as much as he did as a fisherman. If it weren't for the sake of appearances before relatives and friends, he wouldn't even have bothered to pay for Yudong's middle school.

"Yudong," Shuisheng called out as he walked over.

"Brother Shuisheng, why are you here?" Zhou Yudong asked, surprised and delighted. "Weren't you taken to the Yan family in the city?"

"You heard about that?"

"The whole village is talking about it. I heard the Yan family is one of the top families in Fuling City! Are... are you going to work for them?"

"Don't talk nonsense. They just had some things they wanted to ask me," Shuisheng said, keeping the truth to himself. "Even though your Brother Shuisheng didn't finish school, I am still an avid reader with a wealth of knowledge."

"Pfft," Zhou Yudong said enviously. "I heard the Yan family is incredibly rich. If only we could be that wealthy in our lifetime... or no, even getting the same treatment as the workers in their family business would be satisfying. I heard even the lowest-level workers at the Yan family make 140,000 to 150,000 Donghua coins a year!"

"My dad and I sell fish at the pier every day, just scraping by with pocket change. When will we ever have a breakthrough?"

Shuisheng felt the same.

"Brother Shuisheng, I've had an idea for a long time. When our village's fishermen come to town to sell fish, it's always a rush job—they sell and leave, and the prices are low. But the quality of the catch from our Wang'ao Village waters is really good and popular. The selling price doesn't do justice to our fish." Yudong continued, "We're always in a hurry to sell, and every family competes by lowering prices, so the buyers hold all the power. Business can't be done this way. No wonder everyone stays so poor."

"We've been doing it this way for thousands of years," Shuisheng noted.

"That's why it can't continue," Yudong insisted. "My idea is to open a fish shop in town. All the fish from the village would be sold to this shop, which would eliminate the competitive price-cutting. Then, we clean and sell them uniformly, which would raise our catch prices to a normal level or even higher. Everyone makes more money. Plus, everyone can settle up after weighing and leave, saving a lot of time. With that saved time, they could catch even more fish."

"Higher prices and saved time—that's a project with a lot of potential."

"Yudong, that's a great idea," Shuisheng said, looking at him with newfound respect. "The project would need everyone's approval. But that shouldn't be a problem; who would turn down more money? It's just that the project would need a large amount of startup capital—licenses, rent, operating costs, taxes, and cash flow to buy the fish..."

"Exactly. It's just the money. If we had the money, everything else wouldn't be a problem..."