Chapter 29: Mo Cong

Mo Cong used An Jie’s foreign SIM card to call Mo Yu and Mo Jin, vaguely explaining that he had been taken on an out-of-country internship for the holidays, and he wouldn’t be able to come back anytime soon.

An Jie listened to him with an odd smile.

As Mo Cong nursed his wounds, he finally realized that even after being neighbors for over half a year, he had been completely blind to who it was he had been living beside: this obedient-looking youth, keen with dark humor… or rather, this obedient-looking man.

Maybe because he had been tired from his travels, but Mo Cong realized that An Jie was very much a shut-in, his daily route constrained almost entirely to the study and the living room alone. Ever since Mo Cong began to be able to somewhat move out of the bed by himself, An Jie had even stopped going into his own bedroom, aside from when he had to change Mo Cong’s bandages.

This man was terribly taciturn… or rather, Mo Cong alone had been given the privilege of seeing his taciturnity. Because sometimes, Mo Cong could hear through the closed door of the bedroom the sound of Xiao Yu coming over to borrow a book or ask a question, or Xiao Jin’s boredom-fuelled disruptions. To them, An Jie would answer patiently like a good older brother, sometimes even going on a small lecture alongside his snide remarks.

This knowledge made Mo Cong’s living environment even more dull.

Finally, after a week, as An Jie came in to change his bandages, Mo Cong decided to practice his Chinese and start a conversation. He cleared his throat, thought for a long time, before awkwardly raising a topic with intentional nonchalance. “There’s a lot of maps in your house, of all editions.”

“Mhm, quite a lot,” An Jie responded coolly. He didn’t say anything else.

Mo Cong looked up in exasperation – he had observed this man in secret when he was bored and discovered that he seemed to be adamant about something. Apart from when he was doing homework, flipping through textbooks and test papers, he spent almost all his time pouring over those maps; sometimes he could sit there and stare meaningfully at a single one for almost two hours.

Even though Mo Cong couldn’t understand such a strange hobby, he still expected An Jie to talk a bit more about his favored area like a normal person. Unfortunately, the results weren’t as expected.

Stopped dead in his first attempt to strike a conversation, Mo Cong decided he wouldn’t give up just like that and started a new topic. “Did you buy so many maps for traveling? I see you’ve circled parts of them, are those the places you’ve gone to, or the ones you want to go to?”

“Oh, both.” An Jie quickly helped him bandage up his wounds, packed up the things, and left. “Alright, go rest.”

Mo Cong almost choked on his own spit. Attempt one: a complete failure.

He was starting to suspect that An Jie was under orders when he saved him, and he tried to sort through the causes and effects of his stabbing while observing him carefully. But even when even the reason Si-ge had betrayed him became clear as day, this young man’s intentions only became more and more confusing.

If this were a wuxia novel, then Mo Cong would be willing to believe that An Jie was a sage in hiding. His own attitude towards this mysterious man went from being highly vigilant, to bewilderment and confusion… to an almost dangerous heavy interest.

So the next day as An Jie redid his bandages and applied medicine, Mo Cong continued his plan to lead An Jie into a friendly conversation.

“Are you planning on living in Beijing for long?”

“…No.”

“Oh.” Mo Cong sighed with some inexplicable regret. “You don’t look like you’ve been trained in medicine but you’re good with a knife, like someone who’s lived life on the edge. If you were to stay in Beijing, Old Gun Zhai would be the first to befriend you.”

An Jie didn’t say anything. He truly wasn’t bothered to deal with this morally grey brat who saw a thief as his own father.

Mo Cong paused, saw that he stopped talking again, and felt a little defeated. After some silence, he started again, “I only recently noticed, but my girls have been causing you quite the trouble.”

“No worries.” An Jie watched as he struggled to build a conversation and laughed silently as he answered perfunctorily.

…He passed him off in another one or two words. Mo Cong gritted his teeth and decided to try yet again. “The girl who came a few days ago to borrow a book from you, the one looting through rubbish the other day, was that your girlfriend?” Fuck… he wanted to slap himself the moment those words left his mouth. It turned out being ignored for a long time really was harmful to one’s intelligence – what was that, how did it matter if she was his girlfriend?

But An Jie’s reaction was very calm, a grand total of three words. “Oh, she’s not.”

Mo Cong thought with a bitter face that ever since this person had said ‘your father gave you this life’, he had treated him like empty space. Actually, empty space wasn’t an apt description; he had been perfectly polite and not mistreated him in the slightest, he had been treating his wounds this entire time with at least passable albeit not professional skill. He actually owed him a favor, but… for some reason, it was uncomfortable no matter how he stayed there.

Something clicked and he suddenly asked tentatively, “You… Did you know my father?”

An Jie’s hands paused and he looked up at this young man. After a while, he answered vaguely, “You could say that.”

Mo Cong only had a suspicion and didn’t expect him to actually answer. He himself was dumbfounded for a moment, but in that short time, An Jie had already packed up and left, cutting short this not-so-pleasant topic.

Attempt two: utter defeat once again.

“I followed him for three years, I understand Si-ge; there’s no way he would have sold me out without a reason, there would be no benefit for him.” This was the topic of the third day of conversation-hunting, but An Jie’s response seemed to be even flatter.

“But who could threaten him into it? I thought Chen Fugui would cover him, I didn’t expect… In the end, I underestimated that old gun Zhai.”

An Jie didn’t say a word, his eyes half-lidded, letting Mo Cong say what Mo Cong wanted.

Mo Cong laughed bitterly. “Chen Fugui could’ve sold Cao Bing to Si-ge before, and judging by where I am now, could easily sell us off to the old gun Zhai too… and to think I thought I could have controlled him.”

An Jie let Mo Cong’s words pass through his head for once and sighed secretly. This brat’s response time really was quick; he was both sharp and keen. If he was to be compared to An Jie himself in his youth, it was possible that not only would he not be found lacking, but he would even end up slightly ahead.

Whether or not it was because he had initially been expecting special treatment from this person, but Mo Cong had become much more used to An Jie’s present lackluster attitude. Today, he turned back to give him an eye, and suddenly asked a rather explosive question. “Was the person who shot Cao Bing that day you?”

An Jie stared at him for a moment, then responded for once. “What?”

Mo Cong saw he had a reaction and puffed up, saying with a hint of delight, “That day you took down Cao Bing, you said something to the Stick to make him misunderstand… to put the blame on Si-ge?”

An Jie finished changing his bandages, but hadn’t gone to leave yet. He put his equipment to one side and asked, “Why would it be me?”

“I thought it was Zhai Haidong to start with, but then I noticed something I didn’t pay attention to the first time.” Mo Cong shifted his posture to something more comfortable and said slowly, “That rat died.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“The rat was Old Gun Zhai’s, that I had guessed. It was so chaotic then and he had been tied up, so his death would have been nothing remarkable…” Mo Cong said, considering each word carefully, “but that rat is rather sly, he’s not called a rat for nothing. I remembered where it was he had been shot—”

An Jie suddenly cracked a smile. Mo Cong’s self-confidence went up and he continued, “It was the only place in that room that could have been called a blind spot. The moment the rat saw how the situation was going down and that no-one was looking at him, he shimmied his way over there. So… who killed the rat?”

He paused, two bright eyes watching An Jie.

“He couldn’t have been shot by his own men?” At this point, An Jie had stopped denying it and he asked Mo Cong with a grin. He sighed inwardly. The smarts in the old professor had probably all gone into his research; if he was half as street-smart as his son… he wouldn’t have died in the desert.

“Impossible.” Mo Cong didn’t even consider it. “Zhai Haidong is someone capable of great things, he knows when to be cruel and when to be kind. I could believe it if it was some nobody, but that kind of person would never be able to succeed. Someone with the status of Old Gun Zhai would never silence his own people out in the open.”

An Jie was stunned and breathed out after a long time. “Yes… Zhai Haidong is someone who can succeed, I keep forgetting that…”

For a moment, Mo Cong suddenly felt that the man in front of him should be the sort of person with his face tanned from age, faint wrinkles around the corners of his eyes, filled with the vicissitudes and leanness of his father’s generation. The strong contrast between the temperament he felt and the image his vision perceived made him stare at An Jie in a trance.

But in just the blink of an eye, An Jie’s expression suddenly turned stern. “And what about you? Do you also want to succeed like Zhai Haidong?”

“Me?”

“Do you know why Zhai Haidong sent people to kill you?”

Mo Cong frowned. “I know how much I’m worth; if he really wanted to kill me, I would have stopped breathing a long time ago.”

Good. Not arrogant nor impatient, his mind clear afterwards. But for some reason, An Jie wasn’t happy. He would rather this brat be an idiot for his entire life like his dead father, to be a… proper man.

Mo Cong continued, “He’s only giving me a warning… Plus, I guess the old gun thinks that he has uses for me, so he’s using this method to take me over, or… train me?”

He was too smart… An Jie took back his smile and sighed to himself. He was unbelievably smart, and yet hindered by his own intelligence.

An Jie suddenly lost interest in maintaining the conversation and said, “I have something to do. Finish this yourself.”

And stopped paying attention to him at all.