Era | Realistic | Ensemble cast | Not wish fulfillment
Spring 2001. Jiang Min has just gotten out of jail.
No money, no job, just a few poor buddies he'd known since childhood.
He scrapes together 50,000 yuan, gets himself a truck, and starts delivering beer to restaurants and shops near West Town.
But what really changes everything is a debt of just a few thousand yuan.
The restaurant owner who owes him money brings in some thugs to back him up. A debt collection turns into a fight, and the fight turns into a grudge.
Jiang Min finally realizes how hard it is to live a quiet, decent life like an ordinary man.
This little mess pulls him right back into the underworld.
It draws in West Town, Taitung, and the South District, along with the liquor trade, nightclubs, sand quarries, construction, real estate, freight, and more shady businesses.
Names he once only heard from other people, Nie Lei, Gaga, Old Qiao... eventually start turning up at Jiang Min's drinking tables, in his business dealings, and in his feuds.
Years later, when the special task force looks back at the gang, it's already hard to say exactly when things started spiraling out of control.
Maybe it began with that bad debt nobody thought twice about.
That year, Jiang Min was 25.
He had no idea that he and the people around him would run roughshod over Island City for twenty years.
