A single shell casing brought a four-hundred-billion-yuan business empire to its knees in court.
In 2013, in a courtroom, Liu Long, once the richest man in Bashu, listened in handcuffs as fifteen charges were read against him. The prosecutor produced the key piece of evidence: a shell casing from a 1997 shooting. But Liu Long remembered that the casing his underling had given him back then had no serial number.
Who switched the evidence? And why?
The story flashes back to 1990, outside a cinema in Mianzhu. Eighteen-year-old Liu Long clutched his last fifty cents and walked into an arcade. He fixed a broken machine and earned himself a job paying sixty yuan a month. That day, he bought three meat buns. As his younger brother Liu Hu ate, he cried, “Brother, these meat buns are so good.”
Starting with just fifty cents, the brothers spent twenty-three years building the Dragon and Tiger Empire, from monopolizing arcades to oil smuggling and stock-market racketeering. They ingratiated themselves with the powerful, made friends in the underworld, polished their image with charity, and collected honors and titles.
Until the shell casing surfaced.
Until their powerful protectors fell.
Until the brothers turned against each other.
This is an epic of an underworld kingpin spanning twenty-three years, and a bloodstained chronicle of the wild growth of private capital. As desire devours all restraint and money corrodes human nature, the only path to redemption turns out to be the fifty-cent coin from that long-ago day.
The shell casing can talk. It will tell you that every gift fate bestows comes with a price, marked in secret long beforehand.
This story unfolds amid the surging tide of reform and opening up, the golden age of capitalist excess, the sordid dealings between power and money, and the final blow of justice delivered by the law.
