In Northeast China in 1995, the wind cut to the bone and the underworld ran rampant.
Sixteen-year-old Song Yuanqing was the most insignificant young hoodlum in Tiexi District, Shenyang. His father never cared for him, his mother never raised him, and with just eighty-seven yuan in his pocket, he still strutted through the streets like he owned them. He thought he was tough enough, wild enough, and carefree enough, until that night: drunk and muddled, he slept with a woman he never should have touched.
Her name was Su Wanqing, and her husband was Zhao Jinlong, the biggest construction contractor in Shenyang’s northern suburbs. Everyone called him “Dragon Lord,” and he had dozens of vicious men at his beck and call, each one capable of killing.
Song Yuanqing had brought trouble upon himself that no one in their right mind would invite. His first flight for his life had begun.
From Shenyang to Tieling, from Tieling to Kaiyuan, from Kaiyuan to Changtu: he fled north, like a stray dog with its back broken, running for his life in winds that plunged to thirty degrees below zero. He had no money in his pockets, blisters had worn his feet raw, and Zhao Jinlong’s inescapable net was closing in behind him.
But on the run, fate gave him its finest gift: he met two people.
Pei Dazhuang was a veteran, with a heart harder than steel beneath his honest exterior. After throwing a platoon leader who bullied new recruits out of a second-floor window, he was discharged from the army and began wandering the underworld. Fang Jianhong was an old hand from Daowai District, Harbin. He had slept with a boss’s younger sister, had a twenty-thousand-yuan bounty on his head, spent a year in prison, and held the key to a smuggled antiques warehouse left behind by Qiao Ba. He summed up the rules of life on the run in three words: read people, keep moving, wait.
Three men, one life. From a shabby inn in Shuangliao to the depths of the Inner Mongolian grasslands
