The turn of the millennium, Sansha City.
Orphan Pan Haoran walks out of prison. He served five years for someone else's crime, in exchange for his younger brother finishing college and his younger sister becoming a doctor. He didn't feel he'd lost out.
The former butcher is now known as "Fatty." He has two brothers he'd trust with his life: Gou Xun handles the brains, and Ji Feng handles the knives. He wants to go straight, but every plot of land in Sansha City bears the same rule: people at the bottom have no right to choose.
It takes Fatty twenty years to go from his first cut at the market to building Sansha City's biggest criminal empire. He thinks he's playing a game, moving from pawn to player.
But he doesn't know that Zhang Yi, the young police officer he once helped, has spent those same twenty years waiting for the day to close the net.
When his younger brother falls to his death, his sister leaves for a foreign country, the woman he loves dies in his arms, and everything he built comes crashing down, Fatty finally realizes that nobody ever wins this game.
In 2022, Pan Haoran walks out of prison. At the end of the new road to the pier, the paulownia trees are in full bloom.
Zhang Yi stands beneath one, beside two young people. Doudou wears work clothes and is half a head taller than Zhang Yi. His lips are pressed together, just like his father when he was young. Gao Yan's son holds a folder containing the pier's operating reports from all these years.
Pan Haoran looks at them but doesn't go over. He simply nods.
Zhang Yi leans against the trunk, his hair completely white, holding Old Huang's charred matchstick. He watches the scene from afar but doesn't approach.
There's no escape from the game at the bottom. The next generation has its own path.
