Two days after arriving in Longmen, Wu Ke met two children related to steamed buns.
One is Beatrix, the big cat girl he rescued from the kidnappers yesterday.
One was the little guy in front of him who called himself A Suo. He had a dirty and thin appearance. I didn't notice it at first, but when I looked carefully, I realized that he was a tomboy, a girl.
And the two people I met here, one was born into a wealthy family, the other was born into a poor family, one was a victim of a kidnapping case, one was a thief who stole things, one refused to eat the cold buns, and the other rolled around on the ground. Eat all the dirty buns.
Even when tearing off the dirty skin on the outside of the bun, the other party seemed cautious, as if he was afraid of tearing too much of the soft 'meat' of the bun inside.
"Real poor people should eat the dirty bun skins along with them!"
Walking beside the thief girl, Wu Ke said to A Suo who was tearing the skin off and eating the buns.
"If you are not clean, you won't get sick after eating it. That's what I thought before.
Until, one time, I ate so much in my stomach that I almost died from diarrhea.
After that, no matter how hungry I was, I would not eat dirty food.
Compared to starving to death, dying from diarrhea after eating a bad meal is worse.
Bald...Master SB, do you want a bun? "
The dirty little arms, the palms of the hands are surprisingly clean.
The thief girl held a dirty bun, reached over and asked him.
But after the bun was actually picked up by Wu Ke, her hand scratched in the air.
There was even a look of astonishment on the small gray-black face.
"You can get these buns, and part of my credit is in them. This is what I deserve."
Wu Ke threw the bun into his mouth. After chewing it and swallowing it, he commented that it didn't taste good.
"Hey, Ah Suo, if you don't steal this bun and buy it with money, how much will it cost to buy one?"
"Three coppers or two Longmen coins."
The thief girl answered his words.
"Copper?"
"This is the currency in circulation in the slums. The slums are not as glamorous as the outside world. Most people use copper instead of banknotes."
Ah Suo explained.
"Then how much can you earn in a day?"
"It depends on the situation. Generally, I rarely steal money because the risk of stealing money is very high.
If you fail to steal food, most people will only get beaten.
Well, Ma Baoqiang is a special case. He is a bad and clumsy guy.
But if you fail to steal money, you are likely to be beaten to death.
Of course, they may also be sent to the police station.
You may not know that the police station in the slums has a group of guys who can extract oil from bones.
No one living in a slum wants to be sent there. "
"I'm not asking you about the income from stealing. I'm asking you if you don't steal and work down-to-earth, how much can you earn here every day?"
The thief girl was silent for a while and replied: "In the slums, children without parents are either thieves or beggars. Those who cannot steal or beg will be eliminated.
As for making money through down-to-earth work, it is difficult. Almost no garbage dump would be willing to hire a child as a garbage sorter. This is the simplest job in the slums, but only adults are hired. "
Walking in the Longmen slum, there are muddy dirt roads under your feet and towering pigeon towers on both sides.
But the building is not gorgeous, but rather dilapidated. The poor people here are like pigeons, densely packed together.
There was a vague sour smell in the air. Some women were standing upstairs, some holding crying children.
Wu Ke even saw a smelly thing being thrown down from upstairs and falling accurately into the garbage pile below filled with stinky mosquitoes and flies.
This is a place with a very bad living environment, but according to Ah Suo, who volunteered to be his slum guide, the residents here seem to be used to this dirty and messy environment.
In this impoverished world where there is almost no hope for change, some people work hard and some are numb, but they all live in the same place.
"What about the infected people here? What's the situation like?"
Wu Ke asked without much hope. In the Ursus Empire, no matter how poor the poor were, their experiences would always be better than those of infected people under the same circumstances.
"Are you talking about stone patients, people with stone crystals appearing on their bodies?"
Wu Ke nodded.
"Those people here are living much better than the average person."
A Suo said.
"you sure?"
Wu Ke thought he heard wrongly.
"If there is any uncertainty, this is the fact. Most of the factories that come to the slums to recruit workers prefer to hire those people."
Wu Ke thought of the black-hearted factories in the northern border of Ursus that he had already banned.
He asked: "In your factory here, the wages paid to hired workers are: people with stone disease get very little, while normal people get a lot?"
"No, they're all the same."
Wu Ke didn't understand.
“It’s just that factories that like to hire stone patients often do work that can easily cause workers to suffer from stone disease.
I don’t know the specific situation, but I’ve heard people say before that if people who are not sick get stone disease in those factories, they can get a lot of work-related injury compensation. "
The situation is clear. Those factories don’t want to pay workers’ compensation that might go to normal people, so they simply hire people who are already sick.
After all, ore disease cannot be re-infected. It is actually easier for infected people to live here than normal poor people, and it is easier to find a job.
Continuing to walk in the slums, Asuo told him about various situations here. As a thief, she knew many things here, and she also understood the rules of survival in the slums.
Including but not limited to on the way, she was preparing to go on strike, looking for the streets with complicated environment, and made moves to slip away. This is a very smart little guy, if Wu Ke hadn't brought her back again.
"I promise, I just wanted to look at the wind on the corner of the street."
Ah Suo explained.
"I trust you!"
Wu Ke took her by the back collar and put her next to him.
"Okay, I admit that I want to leave, but I have told you all the information I know about the slums. I have repaid you, and you also ate a bun from me. You should let me go."
A Suo said, with a worried expression on her face. She didn't know what the other person wanted to do.
"Don't worry, I'm a good person and won't embarrass you."
"Generally, guys who say they are good people are not good people."
Ah Suo muttered.
"If you don't take my words seriously, you won't express your inner complaints. It's just because of your childhood living environment that you are instinctively wary of the strangers I just met this afternoon."
Wu Ke's judgment was very accurate. There were a bunch of such people in the northern border of Ursus. This thief girl was like a stray wild cat, even though she had a pair of rabbit ears on her head.
When the thief girl was silent, Wu Ke asked her again: "Do you want to get a job?"
"What?"
Ah Suo pricked up his ears and looked at Wu Ke.
"A job that makes money."
"Is it stealing?"
she asked.
"no."
Wu Ke denied it.
"Then what to do? I can only steal things. Besides, I'm good at throwing ropes."
"It's not something too difficult, but it's not something that can be discussed in public."
Wu Ke's simple and unpretentious dress is more conspicuous in the slums. After all, there are no patches on the clothes and they are very clean.
"Don't you have a home here? Let me go to your home first, and then I will explain the work content to you in detail."
Ah Suo thought of something, his face changed, and he stuttered a little: "I am very small, very thin, and my dry appearance is not good-looking, and I smell terrible."
"I'm not going to eat you, what are you worried about?"
Wu Ke looked at the dirty girl and wondered where the girl had the courage to bite his hand after being caught.
Seeing that he could not refuse the bald man, Asuo turned his eyes to some people wandering around and whispered.
"Before this, I think you should leave the slums as soon as possible. The sun is going down, but the slums at night are more dangerous than the slums during the day."
She reminded: "You have been targeted by people. Those people are from the Rat King Club. They have knives and even guns. They are completely different dangerous guys from the bag sellers who were scared away by you."
"Thanks for the heads up, but I don't think they're a problem."
Wu Ke stepped forward and negotiated directly with the young leader who had a tattoo on his arm and was obviously surrounded by people faintly surrounding him.
The young man was stunned for a moment, but he didn't expect that the other party would find him and the others and still not leave. Instead, he came over to talk to him. After he came to his senses, he put forward the condition that this guy hand over all his belongings and kindly expressed his willingness to leave them for him. Bottoms out of here.
Obviously, Wu Ke would not agree to this strange request, and his negotiations failed.
Just before a sneer appeared on the tattooed young man's face and he said some harsh words, he slapped him.
As expected, amidst a burst of banging sounds, a group of young people who looked like they had bad guys written all over their faces all fainted gorgeously.
"What have you done?"
A Suo was shocked.
"As you can see, I knocked out everyone who was trying to rob me."
"But they are all members of the Rat King Society?"
"What's that? It sounds like a gangster."
"That's a gang. It's the biggest gang in the slums here."
"Oh hoo, I won the prize."
"We have to leave quickly. If people from the Rat King Society find out what's going on here, we will be in trouble."
After Ah Suo confirmed that the person on the ground was just knocked unconscious, he breathed a sigh of relief.
As long as there's no bloodshed, it's not a big problem.
Then, she turned back and saw the bald man who had knocked these people unconscious was untying their belts.
"No, what are you doing?"
"Of course I tied up these people and brought them back to your home."
Wu Ke used his trousers belt to wrap a loop around the person's body, and easily carried the fainted person in his hand, just like packing fainted barbecued pork.
. . . .
The world is crazy. Ah Suo knew this when his mother deliberately made herself sick with stone disease in order to support the family after her father died, and then went into a factory to die of exhaustion.
"I am a good person. I see the terrible situation here and I want to help you, but my power alone is limited, so I need to find some evil-minded people and borrow some aid funds from them."
"But aren't you just robbing..."
Before Ah Suo finished speaking, he was interrupted by Wu Ke.
"How can it be called robbery when a messenger of justice robs the rich and gives to the poor?"
"I'm doing good things for bad people!"
The bald man said righteously.
"But what good will this do to you?"
Ah Suo was puzzled.
“Bring beauty to the world and bring smiles to the world.
This is what I think I should do in this world.
That's the benefit. "
"It means that there is no real benefit to you here, and you don't want to replace the Rat King Society and become the new slum gang boss, but you just want to use their money to give money to the poor here?"
Suo summed up what he meant.
"You can say that."
Wu Ke nodded.
"It's just that in actual operation, it may not be so simple and crude."
"There must be something wrong with your brain. There must be shit in it, or something I don't know about."
"Anyway, you tied up people from the Rat King Society here just for this. I don't want to say anything, and I don't have the ability to oppose you, but please give me a way out, okay?"
Ah Suo said that he was just an ordinary thief, and he did not want to be killed by a guy who suddenly rushed out on the street one day, or was pulled out of bed at night, and then his body was exposed in the slums the next day. In the ditch.
"Hoho, I knew that in such a poor place, there must be a so-called dark side, but don't worry, I am a real professional with rich experience in fighting evil and gangsters.
I have dealt with evil forces in many cities, and in every place I clean up, the living standards of the people there will be improved, and this place will be no exception. "
Wu Ke is very confident.
"If you want to change your living environment, you must not let this opportunity pass by. I will hire you to be my facilitator.
All you need to do is provide me with some information. It can be seen that you are not ignorant of the dark side of the slums. "
Ah Suo's face became a little stiff.
"Did you know something?"
"What exactly do you mean?"
"I deliberately brought you there so that you would be targeted by the Rat King Society..."
"I thought you were giving me a surprise!"
"I don't mean to harm you. The people in the Rat King Society are more gentle. They steal wealth without killing people. I..."
"I can understand your desire to get rid of me and make some small moves to do so, but whether your ass will get spanked depends on your choice. Will you cooperate with me?"
Wu Ke raised his palm as big as a cattail leaf fan and said to A Suo with a gentle smile.
Ah Suo felt a deep malice, and she seemed to have no right to choose.
In a dilapidated bungalow, the dusk light casts extremely long shadows on the ground on several rat king gangsters hanging from the beams.
In the gap between the shadows, A Suo told the bald man opposite him about the dark forces in the slums that he knew about.
