I Collect Scrap Abroad and Solve Crimes Along the Way. What's So Strange About That?

Synopsis:

Chen Yao is an overseas special agent with the Ministry of State Security. To the outside world, he is the owner of Fumanduo Recycling Depot in Montreal’s Chinatown, where his daily work involves weighing scrap and wrangling with the neighbors over every last penny.

But beneath the calm surface, undercurrents are stirring. Wang’s Roast Meat Shop has installed a top-of-the-line security door that cost a fortune; stray cats have developed a peculiar interest in the fire hydrants; and the voltage fluctuations in the early hours are so precisely timed they seem clockwork. To Chen Yao, these trivial details are all pieces of a puzzle.

When the high-tech spy organization Quantum Phantom launches its Chaos Pendulum plan to disrupt global energy supplies, its members never dream that its greatest obstacle will be not some super-spy in the style of James Bond, but a young man squatting among piles of old refrigerators and using scrap-dealer logic to work backward toward the truth.

And so, an unconventional shadow war quietly begins:

He uses salted fish to disrupt sophisticated eavesdropping devices, sends intelligence through the rhythm of a coffee grinder, and encrypts communications amid the clamor of haggling.

Chen Yao is convinced that the best undercover agent is one who lives like a truly useless salted fish. But when the enemy’s global schemes keep collapsing under the fish’s utterly bizarre way of thinking, they begin to seriously question their lives: What kind of monster did we lose to?