[Republic of China transmigration] [Bionic robot] [Gang rivalries] [Love and hatred in a chaotic era]
"Pick one. You or him?"
Just after transmigrating to old Shanghai, Jiang Huaisheng was tied up at the docks, with a hemp rope behind him attached to a stone meant to drag him into the river.
The thugs forced him to confess, then pulled an employee ID card out of a corpse's pocket. It was the very card they had just taken from him.
These people had never intended to let him live.
But they didn't know that the "dead woman" in the sack beside them was Zhiwei, a bionic robot who had transmigrated with him.
The moment the gun was lowered toward him, her fingers moved.
She seized the gun and saved him. Jiang Huaisheng clawed back his life from the mud and saw the rules of this city clearly: without a place of your own, if you survive tonight, there's always tomorrow night.
He repaired machines to earn his first sum of money, led the porters to reclaim their stolen wages, and gradually took the crumbling Yiping Wharf Gang into his own hands.
Some people waited for him to pay their wages so they could support their families. Some stood between him and the guns. And one woman, who complained that he was a bother, left him a bowl of hot food every night.
But just as business was taking off, the Green Gang moved to cut off his supply routes. The Kuomintang secret agents wanted his boat, and Japanese intelligence had their eyes on Zhiwei.
Hand over one person, and the docks would be safe.
Jiang Huaisheng pushed the terms sheet back.
"The man who once told me to pick someone to sink in the river is already dead."
