Volume One, Chapter Seventeen: The Past

In the dimly lit office in the North, the Crow sat and outlined the approximate schedule of the Flying Squirrel’s movements to the other three members of their group: the Water Snake, who handled intelligence gathering; the Bear, responsible for logistics and backup; and the Magpie, the only woman in the group, who managed paperwork and departmental coordination.

The Crow instructed that until the Flying Squirrel completed his mission and returned to Cloud Court, the four of them must remain on standby in their respective offices for 72 hours, ready to cooperate at a moment’s notice.

The three nodded in silent understanding, said nothing, and left one by one. In truth, they all knew the timeframe for the mission was extremely tight, and with such distances and poor communication, the Flying Squirrel would have prepared thoroughly and likely wouldn’t need their cooperation.

They were all professionals, each with their own strengths, different ways of thinking, and highly adaptive working styles, but overall, this was no impossible task—unless, of course, there was a traitor among these comrades who had long fought side by side.

At that moment, the Crow finally exhaled. The hardest part, after all, had been figuring out how to slip into the city unnoticed—and the Flying Squirrel had succeeded in that. But the mention of paramilitary checkpoints suggested that Rock-Glutinous had already received some intelligence. Where had the leak come from, and how much had been exposed?

The next crucial step was dealing with Rock-Glutinous’s many subordinates on his own turf—how to set a deadly trap and then escape unscathed. This was not something that could be planned in advance.

The Crow thought, if the Lone Wolf were here, this mission would undoubtedly be his, for Lone Wolf was in charge of operations, and in terms of physical ability and combat, he was the best among them.

The Flying Squirrel’s role was intelligence analysis.

The intelligence analyst, Flying Squirrel, lived up to his code name: his face gaunt, limbs as long and slender as a monkey’s, seeming as though a single gust of wind could blow him away.

His main job was to organize, verify, filter, and categorize all collected information and, within a very short time, make judgments about the likely direction of people and events. The job was simply described as “analyze information, share results, propose solutions, and execute together.”

This required not only formidable logical analysis but also the bold use of intuition.

In other words, both emotional and intellectual intelligence needed to be high.

None of the others understood why the Flying Squirrel had volunteered for this, the task he was least skilled at and that was most dangerous.

It was certainly not, as he claimed, because he wanted to retire early.

The problem was, the Lone Wolf was dead.

Rock-Glutinous had killed the Lone Wolf.

Every night at ten, Rock-Glutinous would go upstairs to his daughter’s bedroom. If she wasn’t home, he had to know in advance.

Even when Jade Wen’er stayed home, she never liked to join the extravagant, dazzling parties in the hall. In front of his daughter, Rock-Glutinous always played the gentle, loving father, his face creased in a kindly, doting smile.

At just forty-five, Rock-Glutinous already felt old—especially when he looked at his daughter, once swaddled in his arms, now grown into a graceful young woman. The ruthless air of his youth vanished in an instant.

He knew he was not as tough inside as others thought.

He was determined his children would never live by crime as he had, which was why he planned to switch to legitimate business as soon as possible. He foresaw that his attempt to wash his hands clean would meet fierce opposition from all sides, and to achieve this, he’d have to endure one last, most violent storm of bloodshed in his life.

His late wife had died suddenly from hemorrhage while giving birth to Jade Wen’er. At that time, in the Wild City, there was only one clinic that could be called a hospital—a town health center, where the mediocre doctors had been barefoot doctors during the Cultural Revolution. The crude, filthy surgery rooms whispered of death.

Strangely enough, at sixteen, Rock-Glutinous became a practicing dentist at that very health center.

His father, Wu Su, could pull teeth. For villagers, toothache wasn’t a real illness; it was simply a sign from one of the many “tooth spirits” in their mouths.

Only when the pain became unbearable would they admit that a particular tooth spirit no longer wanted to stay and, clutching their swollen faces, seek out the town’s only dentist, Rock-Glutinous.

The dentist’s job was simply to find the troublemaking spirit (and not make a mistake), clamp it precisely with forceps, and yank it out with explosive strength.

But Rock-Glutinous didn’t see patients at the health center. His “clinic” was set up right in the open-air market: a long bench with a battered door for a tabletop—this was his operating table.

On the door lay dozens of freshly extracted, decaying teeth of various shapes, alongside his mismatched forceps and tweezers.

In the center of the operating table, a pile of rotten teeth formed a ring around a full set of upper and lower dentures—plastic, of course—salvaged by his father Wu Su from the big hospital in Cloud Court.

This denture model, bristling with teeth, stood as a proud testament to Dr. Rock-Glutinous’s authority and expertise throughout the town.

In the morning, as the market rang with the cries of chickens, ducks, and geese—and the desperate squeals of pigs meeting their end—Dr. Rock-Glutinous would stroll in wearing his only yellowed lab coat.

Even on the busiest market days, no one dared take an inch of the doctor’s space; after all, who hadn’t suffered a toothache?

When there were no patients, the young Dr. Rock-Glutinous would stand and read that day’s newspaper, going through every word from start to finish. Though his family had no television, each Sunday he would carefully read the following week’s TV listings. Just seeing the program and film titles filled his mind with wild imaginings.

When a patient shuffled over, he’d set the paper aside, seat them on the only bench, and search that gaping, malodorous mouth for the unruly tooth spirit.

One day, rummaging in one of his father’s rusty tins, he found a ten-centimeter-long red book—“Selected Works of the Great Man, Volume One.” He slipped the palm-sized book into his pocket and spent a month reading it, especially taken with “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society.”

He grew ever more engrossed, eventually taking notes. Sitting in the only battered bamboo chair at home, with the breeze slipping through the cracks in the bamboo walls and the flickering bulb casting his hunched reading form in shadow, he let his thoughts soar. If he’d been born in that era, he would have followed the Great Man without hesitation—not for glory, but to escape his own wretched, humble class.

Back then, honest and studious Rock-Glutinous could never have imagined what he would become. In his dreams of the future, he would attend trade school and study dentistry.

But everything changed because of his mother’s illness. The meager savings he and his father Wu Su had scraped together were not enough to pay the health center’s bills.

Each day, he’d steal two vials of painkilling morphine from the hospital—one for his mother, one to sell to those in need.

More and more people needed it, until finally, he’d funneled all the hospital’s morphine out. Eventually, the whole countryside knew. Even the old hospital director found out.

The director told him, this was not the life he should lead. Across the border lay the Golden Triangle, where the goods were purer and fetched a better price.