Book 1: Chapter 33: Liu Sang the Psychopath

Book 1: Chapter 33: Liu Sang the Psychopath

Fatty kept it very brief, but my hair was standing on end by the time he was done. I had heard many strange ghost stories in recent years that left me unfazed, but the more I listened to people's stories, the more horrifying they became. The things people could do in this world were really scary, especially in my line of work.

Even though what happened to Liu Sang was still quite strange, Fatty thought that the story was truer than all the other rumors out there.

Liu Sang wasnt an orphan. Although people said he was a street caller, he still had parents. Liu Sang's dad fought in the counterattack against Vietnam. The Sino-Vietnamese conflict lasted all the way up until 1989 and he was in one of the last squads sent out. When he arrived at the front line and saw the machine guns, he realized that he was really going to fight. He cried all night before going to the battlefield. At that time, his father's squad leader was very proud and mobilized them at dawn, saying that he would definitely take them home.

The squad leader was shot in the head less than ten minutes after going up the hill to the battlefield. The first battle took less than five minutes. The whole platoon lost half its people and he was wounded by falling artillery shells. When he saw the squad leader again, his brain matter was already flowing out of the bullet wound. A person could live for ten minutes even if he was shot in the head. He saw that the squad leader had been crying before death and the tears were still flowing after he had died.

After that, the two remaining squads merged and went to the jungle in Mengdong, where they were considered veterans even though they had only fought once. This time, they managed to fight for sixty hours and the whole mountain was blown bare. At that time, the Chinese were already very good at fighting and the Vietnamese veterans quickly learned the saying bloody mound (1).

During the fighting, his father saw a hole in the mountain get blown up and bluestone went flying in the air. After more than ten hours of continuous bombing, a giant hole was blown through the bluestone. But the mountain turned out to be hollow.

When his fathers squad charged for the last time, the Vietnamese retreated into the empty hole. They went in after them and found that there was an ancient tomb with jadeite, golden Buddhas, and Sri Lankan rubies lining both sides of the tomb passage. The tomb belonged to a South Vietnamese prime minister.

The Vietnamese inside put up a fierce resistance. The Chinese fought more than a dozen times and sacrificed several people, but they couldn't get in. When his fathers squad pulled out, they called for a tank to blow the hole and bury all the Vietnamese inside.

In less than thirty minutes, the Vietnamese reinforcements drove them down the mountain again. At this time, the battle on the Eastern Front was over, so Hill 334 had the full support of all the surrounding artillery. They bombarded the nearby mountains to such an extent that the whole landscape had changed and his father couldnt even find the original mountain.

After he recovered, he told several comrades-in-arms about it, one of whom was Pan Zi. At that time, Pan Zi didn't know Uncle Three. He knew it was easy to get into this business and difficult to get out of it, so he didnt say anything in the end.

Liu Sang was born after his father came back. When Liu Sang was a teenager, his father divorced his first wife and brought another woman home to marry. Liu Sang began to rebel and ran away from home twice. He ran away the second time because of what transpired after his father was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. He had been living alone with his stepmother, and she had splashed boiling water on him. As he walked to the city hospital to find his father, he begged for food on the streets. But by the time he arrived at the hospital, his father had already died. He never went home after that.

Poker-Face looked at him and then pulled the probe out. No fire or gas came out, which meant that the inside wasnt sealed. We used our phone lights to look at it and saw that the end of the probe had pulled something out of the gap.

It was hair covered in mud.

Fatty looked at me, but I shook my head. I wasn't going to open the gate. Fatty sniffed the probe and suddenly said, "Do you remember the legend of the Mute Emperor?"

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TN Notes:

(1) Im sure you all know, but the Vietnamese were all about guerilla tactics and using tunnels in the mountains and stuff so the Chinese would blow the tunnels up, hence bloody mounds (at least, thats how I took it). General info on the war here.

(2) Yin in this context means the negative principle of Yin and Yang. Yin energy is passive/restive and could probably be associated with death since Yang energy is all about life and vitality and stuff.

(3) This is a Chinese idiom that comes from a fable (think along the lines of Aesops Fables). The idiom suspect people of stealing an axe is used to describe those who, ignoring facts, rely on subjective assumptions to make suspicious judgments of people or situations. The story is here.

(4) Mawangdui in Changsha, Hunan, is a recent (~1970s) Han dynasty archaeological site. The tomb belonged to a 2nd-century B.C. noblewoman known today as "Lady Dai," wife of Li Cang, the marquis of Dai. The background of how the fire started is here (basically some workers digging a bomb shelter stumbled across the tomb, took a break to light up, and BOOM lol)

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At this point, I'm just over here like "Drama, what drama?" Liu Sang's background is SO DIFFERENT.