Madman!

Chapter 8: Stealing Heaven's Opportunity

"Hey kid, who are you looking for?"

It was afternoon, and Chen Wujun had just stepped into yet another gambling den. A young man standing at the entrance with his arms crossed gave him a sidelong glance.

"Hey brother, is Degenerate Hong around?" Chen Wujun fished out a cigarette and smoothly offered one over.

"Slick kid, aren't you!" The young man cracked a smile and accepted it, then waved vaguely toward the interior. "Degenerate Fai, Degenerate Wah, Degenerate Keung... There's a whole bunch of 'em. No idea which one you mean."

"Find him yourself."

Chen Wujun spent twenty minutes inside before emerging.

This was already the sixteenth place, and he still hadn't spotted any of those loan sharks.

But Chen Wujun kept his composure. Not a shred of impatience stirred in his mind.

Three days. Thirty joints. If he didn't find them, he'd go through them all again.

He was walking toward the next spot on his mental list, mulling things over, when someone approached from the opposite direction. The moment Chen Wujun laid eyes on him, his gaze narrowed.What a coincidence.

It was one of the four men from last time—one of the ones in the floral shirts. Chen Wujun remembered him clearly.

Chen Wujun stepped aside, waited for the man to pass, then quietly fell in behind him.

The man didn't head for any gambling den. Instead, he left the Walled City entirely, making his way to Carpenter Road before ducking into a hotpot restaurant.

Chen Wujun crouched in the mouth of an alley across from the restaurant, waiting for his target to come out.

He waited for two full hours.

'He's in there stuffing his face and living it up, while I'm out here breathing cold air.' Chen Wujun mocked himself silently, then ran through his earlier tailing in his mind, checking for any mistakes he might have made.

If the roles were reversed, how would he go about avoiding a tail—or at the very least, spotting someone following him?

Self-reflection, three times a day.

After another twenty-odd minutes, the man finally stumbled out of the hotpot restaurant, half his body draped over a woman, swaying with every step.

He even turned around at the door to wave goodbye to his friends.

Chen Wujun took note of the dining companions—none of them were the crew who'd come to collect the debt that day, so he dismissed them.

He waited until the man had swayed a good distance away, then crossed the road and followed.

He tailed him all the way back into the Walled City, finally tracking him to an alley beside a gambling den. Spotting several people inside, Chen Wujun decided not to follow any further.

Instead, he took a few careful looks at both the gambling den and the alley, then turned back the way he'd come.

Chen Wujun figured the loan shark normally operated out of that alley beside the den, with one man stationed inside the gambling hall itself. Whenever someone needed a loan, they could deliver the cash instantly—or bring the borrower around back to sign the papers.

Whether that was actually the case, a visit tomorrow or the day after would confirm it.

Chen Wujun didn't take Lung Tsun Road home. Instead, after walking only a short distance, he ducked into an alley—he wanted to familiarize himself with the surrounding area.

After weaving through narrow passages for about fifteen minutes, his foot suddenly struck something soft. He stumbled, nearly pitching forward onto his face.

Chen Wujun barely swallowed a curse, bracing one hand against the wall to steady himself. He turned to see what had tripped him.

Only then did he notice a person in dark trousers and a T-shirt, slumped against the wall. A stack of wooden crates beside the figure blocked most of the body from view—only the legs stuck out.

He hadn't seen them at all.

And even after being kicked, the person hadn't stirred in the slightest.

A suspicion flickered through Chen Wujun's mind. He pulled out a lighter and flicked it to life. The small flame revealed a man with blackened eye sockets and a face the color of pale wax, so emaciated he was little more than skin stretched over bone. His eyes were shut tight, his body half-collapsed into the corner where the wall met the crates.

The posture looked unnatural.

Chen Wujun reached down and checked for breath at the nostrils.

'Gone cold.'

Chen Wujun's face twisted with irritation as he muttered, "Damn. What rotten luck. Ground's freezing cold—of course you'd go cold lying there."

He stood up, turned, and walked away without looking back.

In the Walled City, people dying in alleys like this was a regular occurrence. Several bodies were carried out every day.

Chen Wujun had seen it countless times growing up. It didn't surprise him anymore.

Come morning, someone from the Welfare Association would haul the body to the collection point beside the public toilets outside the Walled City. The Municipal Services Department workers would take it from there.

As Chen Wujun walked home, he spoke to himself in his mind: 'I will never end up like that—dying in silence in some forgotten corner where nobody even notices. I'm going to make something of myself!'

'I'm going to buy a mansion, drive luxury cars, and marry a movie star!'

Then, as if venting everything inside him, he let out a roar that echoed through the alley.

"AHHH—!"

"Who's that lunatic out there?! Howling like a ghost in the middle of the night—you trying to scare people to death?!" Voices from several nearby apartments immediately cursed at him through their windows.

...

"Why are you so late again? Where have you been all afternoon?" Back home, both his parents were waiting for him to eat.

"Went to see Lin Zetao. He's at the same martial arts school, just started a few days before me," Chen Wujun lied casually.

At the dinner table, Chen Wujun observed carefully.

His mother, Huang Meizhen, looked a bit better today. Her movements had returned to normal too, which eased some of the worry in his heart.

After dinner, Chen Wujun headed out to the rooftop again.

His father, Chen Hanliang, turned to his mother. "You don't need to go selling blood. This family doesn't need your pocket change. How much can you even get for selling blood? I'm planning to put this apartment up as collateral for a loan. A few months of tightening our belts and we'll have it paid off. As long as that good-for-nothing doesn't cause more trouble!"

"That won't work—the interest on loans is way too high! And what about Wujun's martial arts school?"

"Besides, Auntie Liu says my blood runs hot, so letting some out is actually healthier for me." Huang Meizhen had a gentle nature, and her voice was always soft and even.

Most of the buildings in the Walled City were unauthorized constructions. While they could be traded internally using Street Papers, no bank on the outside would recognize them.

That meant the only option was to sign Street Papers with gangs like Hetu—at a monthly interest rate of ten percent. Utterly impossible to pay back.

"I'm not borrowing from any gang. I've got a way—three percent monthly at most. Half a year and we'll be back on our feet!" Chen Hanliang clenched his jaw.

What else could they do if they didn't borrow?

"As for Wujun's school, I'll talk to him in a few days. He can wait six months." Chen Hanliang had another plan in mind too—putting Chen Wujun to work. Inside the Walled City, that meant about fifteen hundred a month.

With the whole family pulling together, they could pay off most of the debt in half a year.

Then the boy could go back to martial arts.

"Wujun's always been sensible. He'll understand."

In truth, both Chen Hanliang and Huang Meizhen harbored deeper fears—what if their eldest went gambling again, racked up more loan shark debt...

Neither dared to dwell on it. The thought barely surfaced before they snuffed it out.

...

At that moment, Chen Wujun stood on the rooftop, gazing at the glittering high-rises in the distance. After a pause, he nimbly climbed onto the parapet wall.

The instant he straightened up, a gust of wind swept across him, making his body sway ever so slightly. His heart immediately began hammering.

Beads of sweat formed on his forehead.

His toes curled desperately, gripping the surface beneath him. He spread both arms wide for balance.

Before coming up, he'd thought there was nothing frightening about this parapet. As long as he refused to give in to fear, standing up here would be no different from standing on flat ground.

But the moment he was actually up there, his body tensed involuntarily, beyond his control.

Soon, Chen Wujun expelled every stray thought from his mind. In his world, only two things existed: the abyss before him and the narrow wall beneath his feet. Nothing else.

Every one of his senses sharpened to a razor's edge.

On a distant rooftop, a short-haired woman in a T-shirt and shorts sat perched on the edge of a parapet. She turned her head with some surprise, looking in Chen Wujun's direction.

In the darkness, her eyes gleamed with unnerving brightness.

Chen Wujun couldn't see her, but everything he was doing was perfectly clear to her eyes.

"Charge Stance... From a martial arts school? Where did the little runt learn Stealing Heaven's Opportunity? Or did he come up with it on his own?" The woman watched Chen Wujun, her initial surprise shifting into keen interest.

Stealing Heaven's Opportunity—also known as Grasping Skill—meant placing yourself constantly on the razor's edge between life and death, summoning every ounce of focus, tightening every fiber of mind and will.

Each session was equivalent to undergoing a metamorphosis between life and death. Martial progress came at breathtaking speed.

"If he doesn't fall to his death, he'll make one hell of a prospect." The woman watched with growing amusement for a while.

After all, it wasn't every day you saw someone this young with the guts to practice stance training this way. It was downright rare.

Audacious to the point of madness, really.

And most people who used Stealing Heaven's Opportunity to train worked their way up gradually. Who in their right mind started by standing on a rooftop?

With her trained eye, she could tell at a glance that Chen Wujun's body showed no signs of long-term martial training. He'd clearly only just begun.

A moment later, footsteps sounded behind her.

"Shark Jiu, in such fine spirits tonight? Coming all the way up here to enjoy the view?"

"Everything down below reeks. It's more comfortable up here. What do you need?"

"Prince Kai got drunk and started trashing the place!" the person behind her reported.

"Does he know whose place that is?" Shark Jiu turned her head.

"He knows it's my place and still has the nerve to cause trouble? Breaking his leg last time didn't teach him anything?" Shark Jiu's lips peeled back, baring a row of white teeth. Her eyes turned lethally dangerous.

Every tooth in her mouth was sharp and pointed—like a shark's.

Combined with that look in her eyes, her otherwise rather pretty face was transformed into something cruel and savage.

Shark Jiu strode toward the rooftop stairwell, her subordinate hurrying to keep pace behind her.

"I want to see who gave him the guts this time."

"If he can't give me a damn good explanation, I'm breaking his middle leg today. Let him use his fingers the next time he wants a woman."

...

Ten minutes after Shark Jiu departed, Chen Wujun finally climbed down from the parapet.

A trace of elation colored his face. He glanced in a certain direction.

He'd sensed it—someone over there had been watching him just now.

If he hadn't been doing stance training on the building's edge, with every nerve firing and every sense pulled taut, he never would have noticed.

But when he looked now, there was nothing but pitch darkness.

He couldn't see a thing.

'Probably just my imagination.'

Chen Wujun quickly pushed the thought aside and leaned against the parapet to rest, his face alight with satisfaction.

Twenty minutes straight this time. The progress was nothing short of extraordinary.

Standing for twenty minutes on the edge of a forty-meter-high building—where a single fall meant being smashed to pieces—drained more stamina and mental energy than two hours of stance work on flat ground.

'Once I can hold it for thirty minutes, I can try the Golden Rooster Stance.'