What can someone who's been to prison do?
Song Zhan says: Build subways, put up skyscrapers, and build an empire.
On his first day in prison, a prison bully broke three of his ribs. At death's door, his family's ancestral Tendon-Transformation Scripture awakened, reshaping his sinews and bones and making him immune to every poison. The price: a headache for three days and trembling hands for seven after each use.
After his release, he found his old company commander, who had a bad leg, and started out hauling bricks. He could spot errors in blueprints at a glance, set out lines with zero margin of error, and remember every piece of evidence of shoddy construction.
A site engineer asked him, “You just got out. What makes you think you can do this?”
He said, “Because I spent five years as a combat engineer. Because my dad saved twelve lives while repairing a tunnel, and never made it back out himself.”
When someone from the Provincial Construction Engineering Company offered him money, he turned it down. When Qian Youcai threatened him, he sent him straight to prison. When Liu Weiguo altered the accident report, he vowed to bring the truth from twenty years ago to light.
Workers' apartments, tunnel-boring machines, utility tunnels, a partnership with China Construction... He went from 800 yuan to 200 million in just two years.
Someone asked him: After twenty years of investigating your father's case, was it worth it?
Squatting at the construction site as he ate, he didn't even look up. “When the road is open, people can make it out. I'll walk the road my father never got to.”
