These are the true stories of how I entered the underworld at nineteen under Master Yuan Si and eventually became the man calling the shots. Some people are dead now, and some things still can’t be told in full.
I was nineteen in 1998, doing odd jobs at a freight depot behind the county bus station and earning a little over four hundred yuan a month.
Back then, I couldn’t fight and had never met anyone important. The only thing I was a little better at than others was reading people.
Some said they weren’t in a hurry, yet kept checking the clock on the wall. Others claimed they weren’t close, but instinctively gave each other the seat when they met.
That keen eye was how I met Yuan Si.
People called him Master Si.
Only later did I learn that, in his youth, he had come from the old White Fan lineage. He was among the last old-school underworld men who truly knew how to call the shots.
The first thing he taught me wasn’t how to deceive people.
It was this:
What you see may not be what you think it is.
After that, I learned there was another world hidden beneath the one we knew.
The Xiangnan school in the south, the Ma clan in the north, and Taoist sects beyond them.
There were White Fans who ran the game and head stewards who kept their word; there was the Golden Buddha, whose Iron Body training made him said to be impervious to blades and bullets; and there was the Thunder Daoist, whose Dragon-Tiger thunder breath had been honed for decades.
I followed Master Si across the country, watching schemes unfold and getting caught up in them myself. I deceived people and was deceived in turn. I took knife wounds, put my life on the line, and saw with my own eyes the legendary figures who, years later, would be reduced to nothing but a name.
Looking back after all these years, there’s really only one thing I learned in my life:
The underworld has never been about who hits hardest.
It’s about whether, once you sit down at the table, you can see what kind of people are sitting around it.
[Disclaimer: Hehe, fiction!]
