The man was knocked right off the ox cart, his face scraping against the wooden plank at the cart's side and taking off a whole layer of skin. He scrambled to his feet, face twisted with vicious rage, just about to blow up, when Xiao Mandong's dagger pressed straight to his neck.
"If you don't want to die, you'd better behave. Even if I killed you right now, I could just say you were assaulting me and trying to rob me, and I was only defending myself by accident."
The man caught the sharp, unyielding glint in Xiao Mandong's eyes. He swallowed hard.
"Just kidding, I was just messing around..." he forced a sheepish grin, gently nudged the dagger away from Xiao Mandong's hand, climbed back onto the ox cart, and sat there as quiet as a mouse, not daring to turn his head again.
When the ox cart arrived at Red Flag Production Brigade, the winter night was dead still. Xiao Mandong pulled Bowen off the cart and headed straight for the brigade chief's house.
Shunzi opened the door, and froze the second he saw Xiao Mandong.
"Educated Youth Xiao? What are you doing back here at this hour? Who's this with you?"
"I need to talk to the brigade chief, I've got something to take care of."
The brigade chief had already stepped out wrapped in his cotton-padded jacket, looking thoroughly confused. Xiao Mandong didn't waste time on unnecessary explanations.
"Uncle Chief, this is my friend's older brother. He's a little mentally challenged. I need someone to look after him for a few days. I'll pay two yuan a day. Just make sure he's properly taken care of, don't let him leave the village, and don't let anyone take him away, not even the police—they have to notify me first."
The brigade chief was quiet for a moment, didn't pester her with questions, and nodded.
"Alright, leave him here with me. You can rest easy."
Xiao Mandong fished twenty yuan out of her pocket, plus a handful of food stamps and meat stamps. "Ten yuan for the caretaking, ten yuan for his meals. I'll come pick him up in a couple days." She also handed over the packed meals she'd bought for Bowen.
The brigade chief tried to hand back half the money. "This is more than enough, he doesn't need that much to eat."
Xiao Mandong pushed the money and stamps right into his palm.
"Uncle, just make sure you watch over him well, that's all I ask."
The brigade chief didn't argue any further. He knew Xiao Mandong was always generous, and made a mental note to make sure the young man got some nice, filling food.
Xiao Mandong knelt down to look at Bowen. "Xiaoli has some things she needs to take care of. She said you have to be good, and she'll be back really soon. If you don't behave, she won't be able to come back. Be a good boy, okay? I'm going to bring Xiaoli back to you."
Bowen nodded over and over. "Bowen good. Find sister..."
Xiao Mandong gave his hand a squeeze, asked the brigade chief for a length of wire, then turned and hurried out. She had to get back to the city as fast as she could—Xiaoli was still stuck at the police station...
The brigade chief offered to have Shunzi drive her back on the tractor, but Xiao Mandong turned him down. She walked until she found a secluded spot, pulled a bicycle out of her spatial storage, and pedaled full speed toward the city.
Far up ahead, she spotted that same ox cart wobbling slowly down the road. The driver was huddled against the cold, the ox plodding along at a snail's pace, its wheels crunching through the snow with a steady creak.
She didn't dare overtake it, so she slowed down and trailed far behind. The ox cart was moving so slow that she simply brought herself and her bicycle back into her storage space, ate a quick meal, changed into a new set of clothes, and mixed some sleeping powder into a chunk of meat. She had more than enough time, no need to rush.
When she stepped out of the space again, she headed straight for Director Peng's house. She had a strong gut feeling there was something secret going on there—why else would someone keep so many guard dogs?
It was already deep in the dead of night. She tossed pieces of the meat laced with sleeping poison one by one over the wall into Director Peng's yard.
A dozen minutes later, the sleeping powder kicked in, and all the dogs went quiet. Since there were so many of them, the only lock on the main gate was a simple wooden latch on the inside, no actual padlock.
Xiao Mandong pulled out the length of wire from her storage, slipped it through the crack in the gate, and pried the latch open. Inside the yard lay three big, plump dogs, all fast asleep.
She pushed the front door open gently. The main room inside was spacious, but the furniture was plain and sparse—there was barely anything worth taking.
"Please... no, don't... please don't..."
As she got to the bedroom door, a woman's sobbing, begging voice drifted out from inside, followed by a loud, sharp crack—the clear sound of a slap across a face.
"You cheap whore, shut up," a man snarled, and then came the obscene, unmistakable sounds of assault, followed by the man's ragged, heavy panting...
She froze in her tracks. Peering through the crack in the door, she saw a young woman tied to the bed. She was wearing nothing but a thin undershirt, shaking so hard it was impossible to tell if it was from cold or terror, a rag stuffed in her mouth, her eyes red and puffy from crying.
"Peng Chao, can you keep it down? If the neighbors hear you, we're going to be in huge trouble, don't you get that?" Director Peng's voice called out from the next room.
"Just leave him alone. He's thirty-something, his leg is messed up, he needs to let off some steam," a woman's voice replied, thick with resentment.
Tang Guanshan jolted upright on the kang bed.
"You keep coddling him, do you have any idea that woman is a walking disaster? I told you I'd find him a proper wife soon, but you wouldn't listen. You just had to go and buy this one. We need to get rid of her tomorrow. I saw Tang Guanshan's niece today, she's pretty, and she has a mentally challenged older brother—she'd be easy to control. We should marry her to him properly, get a baby on her as soon as possible."
"I coddle him? Peng Jianfeng, how dare you? If you hadn't gone and offended those people, our son wouldn't have gotten his leg broken! If his leg was still fine, that bitch never would have divorced him."
Xiao Mandong pressed herself to the wall and listened for a while, and she had the whole picture now. The woman tied up in the bedroom had been trafficked and bought.
She could report the corruption to the Revolutionary Committee, and the human trafficking case would be a perfect chance for Director Lin to get a big merit.
She didn't rush to act. She waited in her spatial storage for almost an hour, until all the noise died down and loud snores drifted out from the rooms. Then she slipped quietly out again.
She lit a sleeping incense stick and set it outside Director Peng's bedroom door. Ten minutes later, she stepped inside. She rummaged through the wardrobe and found over three hundred yuan and a handful of food stamps.
She got down on her knees to check the floor, found a loose tile, lifted it up, and uncovered two bankbooks with a total of seven thousand yuan in savings, plus several pieces of gold and silver jewelry. Xiao Mandong put all of it straight into her spatial storage.
She walked around the yard and didn't find anything else, until she reached the dog kennel. She felt around the top of the kennel, and sure enough, that sly old fox had hidden a pile of gold bars up there. She moved the kennel aside, and under it was a buried jar full of silver Yuan Datou coins, with a ledger sitting on the very top. When she flipped it open, she found Huang Yuanqing's name written right inside.
Xiao Mandong put all the items into her storage, put the kennel and everything else back exactly the way she found it, then left the Peng family's house and headed back to the family residential compound. She unlocked her front door, and immediately sensed something was wrong.
Since she was single and lived on the first floor, she always tucked a small piece of paper in the crack of the door every time she left. Now that paper was lying on the floor. She looked closer and spotted faint, half-erased footprints on the ground. Someone had been inside her house. Xiao Mandong stepped back instinctively, pulled a kitchen knife out of her spatial storage, and only then crept slowly further into the house.
There was no one inside. Diandian, the little dog that lived in the yard, was curled up asleep in its kennel, which meant no strangers were still hanging around outside.
The first person she thought of was Tang Guanshan.
Right then, Tang Guanshan was running around like a headless chicken, sweating through his clothes, searching every hostel in town one by one—he'd broken into Xiao Mandong's house earlier and couldn't find Shi Bowen anywhere, and he was panicking so bad he was about to lose his mind.
