Dragon Raja 2; Chapter 37: Reward (7)

Dragon Raja 2

“A FedEx person will come by at 7:00 PM to pick it up. Just hand it over to him,” the client replied without looking back as he walked out the door.

Tang Wei, sipping his whiskey absent-mindedly, didn’t notice that the clock on the wall seemed to be running a few minutes fast.

“Boss, got the money?” As soon as the client left, Tang Wei’s underling rushed in.

Tang Wei proudly patted the briefcase. He had already checked the cash inside, and it was real and sufficient. He hadn’t expected to get the money so easily—it was almost too smooth.

“Whoa, that was amazing, a commission from Ronald McDonald!” The underling was full of curiosity.

“You know nothing!” Tang Wei shot him a glare. “He just didn’t want to show his real face. If he came in dressed as Zorro, the security would have pinned him down on the first floor.”

Tang Wei couldn’t help but admire the client’s creativity—dressing up as Ronald McDonald, a door-to-door salesperson, got him through without a hitch. Nobody even suspected him, and one clueless office girl even asked if he was delivering food.

“So do we get a bonus this month?” The underling’s eyes lit up as he gazed at the pile of cash.

“Get lost! Don’t be so uncultured. We live this kind of life; you’ve got to stay calm!” Tang Wei shooed him out. “Tonight, get the brothers to keep a close watch! Someone’s coming to pick up the goods, so assign extra hands to every floor. Only after the goods are handed over can we properly split the money!”

On the surface, Tang Wei was running a labor export business, and he drove an imposing Cadillac Escalade. But in truth, Tang Wei considered himself a blue-collar worker. He was a hunter.

He knew there were many like him around the world, taking jobs from a website called “Hunter’s Market” for high rewards. Clients from all over the world would upload tasks, seeking capable hunters. Registered members who were confident they could complete the tasks could reply via private message, attaching their resume. This process was called “posting.” The client would then select from the responding hunters.

Tang Wei knew that many of these tasks were somewhat supernatural, and crawling in and out of ancient tombs was common. Still, if you couldn’t handle hardship, you couldn’t make money. Tang Wei had some talent and was well-suited for this line of work. His company was essentially a hunter company, and his underlings were all quite skilled. For every task completed, the profits were split 50/50 between his underlings and the company.

This job was thrilling and lucrative—the only problem was that Tang Wei never quite knew if he was in the underworld or above it. As for the “Hunter’s Market” website that brought him wealth, he didn’t have much confidence in it.

Nobody could say what kind of entity the website was—there wasn’t even a moderator, only an admin named Nido who seldom appeared. The most you’d get was a warning email from Nido if you violated the site’s rules. Tang Wei’s ID was “3rd_young_master,” Third Young Lord.

The website always had a pitch-black interface, much like the decrepit tombs that often had to be “visited” during tasks. It was as if the clients and hunters were drifting spirits trading in the middle of the night. You had no idea what might be hidden deep within those tombs, but while wandering through those forums, you’d feel like someone—or something—was watching you from the deepest recesses, following your every move. Writing just one extra word, or staying online one more minute, seemed to make whatever was in the depths learn just a little more about you.

Compared to that, a client who showed up dressed as Ronald McDonald was almost fun.

The reward for this job was the most Tang Wei had ever made, and it felt the most satisfying. Initially, Tang Wei had planned to send his underlings to forcibly grab the package, but his underlings had excitedly returned, saying, “We happened to arrive right when the earthquake struck, and the southern train station collapsed! The guy got sliced up pretty badly by the falling glass. I risked my life to grab the briefcase and ran… Thrilling as it was, the only expense was the cost of gas! Boss, you’ve got to give me a big bonus this time!”

Talk about a stroke of luck—$2.5 million just like that? It almost felt like a dream.

Tang Wei touched the stacks of bills and pulled out his phone to dial, “Hey, Dad, it’s Tang Wei. Wait for me for dinner tonight… Yeah… Did your passport application go through yet? Damn, you should call and hurry them up—the lawyer’s waiting to submit paperwork to immigration!”

He planned to run away with his father. He had applied for investment immigration to Canada. In a few months, he’d close the company; this would actually be his last commission. He was planning to settle his father in Canada, hire a few housemaids to take care of the old man, and then travel the world himself. His first stop would be Vietnam. A brother had told him that because of ongoing wars, the gender ratio in Vietnam was skewed, and there were lots of beautiful Saigon girls struggling to find husbands. They wore those high-slit Vietnamese “Ao Dai” dresses—it was a land of beautiful long legs. But thinking it over carefully, the Sino-Vietnamese war happened in 1984, and while there had been chaos and gender imbalances, by now, those girls from 1984 would have grown up to be wrinkled old women with yellow teeth…

But regardless of whether that dreamland of beautiful legs existed or not, Tang Wei was determined to delete his “Hunter’s Market” account and leave behind all those supernatural matters.

Tang Wei glanced at the clock; it was still two and a half hours until 7:30. Two and a half hours until he’d wash his hands of this business for good.

Chu Zihang stood at the foot of Runde Building, dressed in a FedEx uniform. The sun was gradually setting, and his shadow stretched long.

In his sunglasses, he saw the Escalade with 22-inch giant chrome wheels parked in front of the main entrance.

A fully-loaded BMW 320 drove by in the setting sun.

“Mingze, remember not to rush into dating after going abroad. Your parents won’t be there with you, so don’t just focus on having fun,” Auntie earnestly advised Lu Mingze in the back seat.

“Yeah, yeah, I got it. Stop nagging,” Lu Mingze replied, sending a text without even looking up.

“He’s so grown up now,” Auntie said, quite pleased.

“Can you trust him? He might just bring back a foreign girl,” Uncle was hopeful that his son would represent the country well on the romantic front.

“No foreign woman is allowed in our house! You only watch Hollywood movies and think American women are pretty, but let me tell you, their skin is rough—up close, all pores! Their golden body hair is nearly an inch long…” Auntie spoke as if she had examined a foreign girl’s thigh under a magnifying glass. “When Mingze gets his PhD from Harvard, there will be plenty of female classmates who want to be with him. He’ll definitely do better than your brother’s kid! Just look at Lu Mingfei, such a wimp, and even getting an American scholarship… Came back and didn’t even buy me any gifts…”

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