Underworld Youth: The Dragon and Tiger Return to the Mountain

Crime + delinquents + urban setting + multiple heroines + gangs + bloody battles

Jiang He's three years of middle school were a long ordeal of relentless bullying. In the corridor, someone would deliberately knock him down, scattering his books across the floor, while the school bully stood on his homework and sneered. The bathroom stall became his refuge. The door rattled under pounding kicks as insults like “wimp” and “loser” slipped through the cracks, leaving him gasping for breath.

His lunch was always stolen. Sometimes he found a dead rat in his desk, and he had to hide the bruises on his arms beneath long sleeves. He learned to keep his head down perfectly, and whenever someone came near, he instinctively hunched his shoulders and swallowed his sobs. When his parents asked, he only said, “I fell.”

When the sun warmed the playground, he always hid in the shadows at the back of the classroom, like a stone no one cared about. But no one knew that the resentment in his downcast eyes was slowly hardening into something fierce, like roots buried beneath frozen earth, quietly twisting and spreading where no one could see.