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Cosine Mansion
墨書 Inktalez
"I can't believe I was blind enough to marry you! You worthless man, unable to earn a decent living and too cowardly to take risks—it's infuriating! What are we going to do now? If we don't gather that money soon, the two of us will be sold off! Do you even have a conscience?"
Zhang Hui's ears rang with his wife's hoarse accusations. She stood with her hands on her hips, her chest heaving violently. Her sunken cheeks, a result of prolonged anxiety, flushed with a sickly red, and her eyes were filled with despair and anger. Zhang Hui hung his head, his nails digging deep into his palms, leaving pale marks on his rough skin. It felt as though his heart was being repeatedly sliced by a dull knife, stirring waves of bitterness within him.
Indeed, he was not a good man. Three years ago, he had arrived in the city alone with only fifty yuan in his pocket, carrying a tattered sack. After enduring harsh conditions on a construction site for half a year, he was forced into unemployment after receiving just three months' wages.
At that time, clutching his meager savings, he curled up in a damp corner of the train station while calling his wife back home. His throat felt stuffed with cotton as he listened to her muffled sobs on the other end of the line, unable to utter a single comforting word. Fortunately, his wife eventually became pregnant, and through gritted teeth, he managed to find another job by leveraging connections.
He had thought that life would continue to improve from there: their child would grow up healthy, he would work diligently to earn money, and when he grew old, he would return home to farm and enjoy a peaceful retirement with his child.
However, the birth of their daughter did not bring the happiness they had hoped for; instead, it plunged their already impoverished family into an abyss. A rare disease with an unpronounceable name nearly took away most of their daughter's life. Although she was saved at a city hospital, they were left drowning in debt. To scrape together money for her treatment, he begged every relative back home for loans, humbling himself to the point of kneeling; in the end, he even sold their ancestral home. His hands trembled as he signed the demolition agreement. With no other options left, he gritted his teeth and walked into a loan shark's office in the city to borrow money at exorbitant interest rates just to cover the medical expenses.
Now that their child's medication could not be stopped, despite their family living frugally on pickled vegetables and plain porridge and wearing patched clothes, Zhang Hui often survived on just a bun for an entire day. Yet even after all this sacrifice, they could barely make the interest payments on the loan each month. Next week, those ruthless debt collectors would come again; they ominously warned that if the interest wasn't paid again, his wife and daughter would be sold off to distant places and never return.
Zhang Hui was so anxious that he couldn't sleep through the night; deep lines formed on his forehead and half of his hair turned gray. Countless nights were spent lying awake in darkness listening to his wife's suppressed sobs and their daughter's faint coughs from the next room. One night, unable to bear it any longer, he quietly put on his worn-out coat and slipped out into the streets aimlessly—after all, it didn’t cost anything. Before he knew it, he found himself back at the construction site where he had worked before.
This was where he had spent half a year sweating for his first job. Now the building was nearly completed but had been halted due to lack of funds. The exposed concrete walls looked like pale faces reflecting cold light under the moonlight—ominous and eerie. The ground was littered with debris: wooden planks, newspapers, ropes… Anything valuable had long been sold by fellow workers who were owed months of wages by the developer Yu Group and the contractor; everyone’s resentment had nowhere to go. Zhang Hui squatted down and absentmindedly rubbed the rough ground with his fingers while murmuring softly to himself: "If only I could get back those few months' wages; at least we could last a little longer."
It seemed that in order to raise money quickly, he would have to resort to illegal activities. Selling organs? He had thought about that many times; countless nights spent lying in bed feeling around his waist made him wish he could trade one kidney for lifesaving money. But as a mere laborer in this vast city without connections or support, he had no chance of meeting anyone involved in organ trafficking. Robbery? Just recently there had been a major robbery in town that remained unsolved; meanwhile banks heightened their security measures significantly—armed guards at every entrance made it impossible to attempt anything there. Pickpocketing? That skill wasn’t something just anyone could master; "quick, precise, ruthless"—he needed a mentor for at least six months of practice before daring to hit the streets. Extortion? With his honest and introverted personality making him blush even when speaking to strangers, how could he scare or deceive anyone? Burglary? Breaking into someone else's home sounded like an appealing idea but filled him with dread—how dangerous could that be?
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