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Cosine Mansion
墨書 Inktalez
"I can’t believe I was blind enough to marry you! You useless man, you can’t even make a decent living, and you have no guts to take risks. It’s infuriating! What are we going to do now? If we don’t gather that money soon, the two of us will be sold off! Do you even have a conscience?"
Zhang Hui could hear his wife's hoarse accusations ringing in his ears. She stood there with her hands on her hips, her chest heaving violently. Her cheeks, hollow from long-term anxiety, flushed with a sickly red, and her eyes were filled with despair and anger. Zhang Hui lowered his head, his nails digging deep into his palms, leaving pale marks on his rough skin. It felt as if a dull knife was repeatedly cutting into his heart, bringing waves of bitterness.
Yes, he was not a good man. Three years ago, he had come to the city alone with only fifty yuan in his pocket, carrying a worn-out sack. After enduring the harsh sun and wind on the construction site for half a year, he was forced out of work after receiving just three months' pay.
At that time, clutching his meager savings, he curled up in a damp corner of the train station while calling his wife back home. His throat felt like it was stuffed with cotton as he listened to her muffled sobs on the other end, unable to utter a single word of comfort. Fortunately, his wife had finally become pregnant, and through gritted teeth, he managed to find another job.
He thought life would continue to improve from there: the child would be born healthy, he would work hard to earn money, and when he grew old, he would return home to farm and enjoy a peaceful life with his child.
However, the birth of their daughter did not bring happiness but instead pushed their impoverished family into an abyss. A rare disease with an unpronounceable name nearly took away most of their daughter's life. Although they managed to save her at a city hospital, they were left drowning in debt. To gather money for medical expenses, he begged every relative back home for loans—pleading and even kneeling; in the end, he sold their ancestral home. His hands trembled as he signed the demolition agreement. With no other options left, he reluctantly walked into a loan company in the city and borrowed high-interest loans that haunted him with nightmares every night just to cover the medical bills.
Now that their child's medication could not be stopped, even though they lived frugally—eating pickled vegetables with plain rice and wearing patched clothes—Zhang Hui often survived on just a bun for an entire day. Yet every month, they couldn’t even pay off the interest on the loans. Next week, those ruthless debt collectors would come again; they ominously warned that if the interest wasn’t paid again, his wife and daughter would be sold off to distant places and never return.
Zhang Hui was so anxious that he couldn’t sleep at night; deep wrinkles formed on his forehead while half of his hair turned white. Countless nights were spent lying awake in darkness listening to his wife’s suppressed sobs and their daughter’s faint coughs from the next room. One night, unable to bear it any longer, he quietly put on his worn-out coat and slipped out of the house, wandering aimlessly on the streets—after all, it didn’t cost anything. Before he knew it, he found himself back at the construction site where he had once worked.
This was where he had spent half a year sweating for his first job. Now the building was nearly completed but had been halted due to lack of funds. The exposed concrete walls looked like pale faces under the moonlight—chillingly eerie. The ground was littered with debris: wooden planks, newspapers, ropes… Anything valuable had already been sold by fellow workers for food since the developer Yu Group and the contractor owed them months of wages; everyone was filled with resentment with no outlet for it. Zhang Hui squatted down and absentmindedly rubbed the rough ground with his fingers while murmuring softly to himself: "If only I could get back those months' wages; at least we could last a little longer."
It seemed that in order to raise money quickly, he would have to resort to illegal means. Selling organs? He had thought about this many times; countless nights spent lying in bed feeling around his waist made him wish he could trade one kidney for lifesaving money. But as a mere laborer in this vast city without any connections or support, he had no chance of meeting anyone involved in organ trafficking. Robbery? Just recently there had been a major robbery in town that remained unsolved; security at banks had tightened significantly with armed guards at entrances making it impossible to attempt anything there. Pickpocketing? That skill wasn’t something just anyone could master; "fast, accurate, ruthless"—he couldn’t dare hit the streets without training under a mentor for at least half a year. Extortion? With his honest and introverted personality making him blush even when talking to strangers, how could he scare or deceive anyone? Theft? Sneaking into someone else's home sounded like a decent idea but filled him with dread about how dangerous it could be.
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