The blood-red halogen beams painted the falling snow the color of fresh arterial blood.
The screaming roar of the forty-ton diesel engine shook the frozen concrete beneath Grandma Chen’s snow boots. The meteoric-iron ramming spikes were twelve feet away, pointed straight at the eighty-year-old woman’s chest.
In that tiny fraction of a second, Qin Haoran did not think about the eighty-point rule.
He did not think about the black Benevolence terminal sitting on the kitchen sink. He did not think about the ninety percent discount on Rank 4 healing pills. He did not think about returning to Jiangnan to boast in front of his wealthy cousins.
He did not care if anyone had a phone camera. He did not care if anyone was watching.
For seventy grueling shifts, he had lived with the constant ache of dirty dishwater under his fingernails. He had scrubbed five hundred greasy bowls a night until his palms peeled like raw onions. He had slept in a cold attic next to sacks of red beans, shivering under a thin quilt while the north wind rattled the roof tiles.
In the beginning, he had hated every single second of it. He had cursed Lin Mo in his dreams every single night. He had counted the hours until his seventy shifts of punishment were over.
