Iron Fist and Loyal Heart

Chapter 13 Sorcerers

Su Xinpei sat at his workstation for the entire morning without accomplishing anything.

He wasn't being lazy. He was checking. The resident information management system was open on his computer screen. He typed in a keyword in the search bar, but only two results appeared, one of which was data from three years ago. He tried searching with different keywords, but the results were mostly about neighborhood disputes and noise complaints; none of them directly mentioned legal fees. The system's categories didn't include "folk legal education" at all. The closest categories were "illegal medical practice" and "disturbing public order," but neither covered what he was looking for.

After Beihe No. 2 Primary School was abandoned, the frequency of complaints around the school building showed a clear peak on the heat map he added last night—four complaint addresses locked down the four corners, and similar secondary complaints were found in the alleys extending outward from each corner. These complaints did not involve physical displacement or obvious threats, so they were never listed as emergencies. Su Xinpei copied the numbers, times, and addresses of these secondary complaints into a sticky notepad, and drew a set of tiny street plans in pencil next to them, marking the location and floor level of each complainant relative to the abandoned school. Then he closed the sticky notepad and went out for lunch.

After lunch, instead of returning to the subdistrict office, he rode his bicycle to the residential area on the east side of the old district. The most recent complaint came from the last alley in this area. At the end of the alley was an inconspicuous old shop with no sign. Several stacks of old plastic stools were piled up in the corridor. The door was a security iron door, half-open and the other half ajar. Su Xinpei didn't approach. He simply rang the bell on his shared bicycle, parked it outside the alley, pushed it a short distance inside, and turned into a more secluded corner. The old wall at the corner concealed his figure. He waited there for about twenty minutes and saw two people come out of that door—an old woman carrying a bag of apples and a young woman empty-handed. The two spoke a few more words in hushed tones at the alley entrance before parting ways. The old woman turned into the vegetable market, while the woman squatted at the alley entrance, lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and then got up and walked towards the tenement building.

Su Xinpei slowly pushed his cart back out, circled back to the back door of the subdistrict office, and went upstairs. He was now certain that the shop was neither an ordinary rental room nor a card room—the residents coming and going carried a certain fixed silence, a silence that only came after a clear exchange had been completed, completely different from the quietness at the end of the low-income assistance window.

The next afternoon, Aunt He received a couple at the window. The couple, both in their fifties, the man a mechanic at the locomotive depot, and the woman a temporary worker at a car wash. They brought a handwritten letter; the handwriting was messy, and there were several blurry patches from water stains on the paper. The letter said that for the past three years, they had intermittently sought talismans, water, and fortune-telling services at a certain place, paying several sums in total. The most recent demand was for an amount far exceeding what they could afford. Unable to pay, they found things in their house mysteriously shifting, and they heard footsteps walking on the roof for several nights in the middle of the night.

Su Xinpei received them. The repairman sat down, took off his work hat, and held it in his hand for a long time, his fingers still bearing traces of unwashed machine oil. The female worker clutched her phone tightly in her palm, the screen already off. They told Su Xinpei that "that person" had cured the man's long-standing migraines—after drinking talisman water for three days, the pain subsided and never returned. From then on, whenever they encountered misfortune, they would seek divination, ward off evil spirits, and drink talismans, and each time it was effective. To elaborate: they burned one talisman to avert a car accident, another to keep their son's job, and yet another to help their daughter-in-law conceive. They spent most of their earnings on talismans over the years, but didn't feel they were losing out. Until the last time, the person's "ancestor" demanded a repayment fee, which they couldn't afford. "That person" gave them a deadline, saying that if they missed it, soldiers would come to collect, and he couldn't guarantee the consequences.

Su Xinpei meticulously recorded the repairman's account in his notepad. After gathering the routine information, he turned to a new page and asked directly, "What was that person's name?"

The repairman said his surname was Kuang, and that it was a family heirloom. The shop was in an old house, with a sheet of metal covering the original signboard above the door. A female worker added that there seemed to be a line of words painted on the wall under the sheet of metal, but it had been worn down to just the frame. After listening, Su Xinpei checked the address and confirmed that it wasn't near Beihe No. 2 Primary School, but rather a low-rise house located at the border of the old district and the old agricultural machinery factory.

He didn't say much to the couple. He simply helped them photocopy the handwritten letter, smoothing out the curled corners of the paper while copying, and wrote "Resident's request for help has been accepted" in the remarks column. Then, under the old clock next to the photocopier, he quietly said, "You'll stay at the accommodation that Aunt He arranged last time tonight." Aunt He happened to be passing by the photocopier, and without asking why, she simply wrote the vacant room number of the accommodation on a note, and when she handed it to the couple, she also placed a slightly used disposable lighter next to the plastic bag containing their letter.

That evening, Su Xinpei spread out all his materials in his apartment. He reorganized all the sketches of the alleyway structure around the shop from his notepad into a neat topographical map, marking the locations of the three entrances and exits, as well as the approximate distances between the neighbors and the areas that might be disturbed by the noise. Then he started on a new page and began writing his intelligence report.

He didn't use the term "legal religion," nor did he mention "soldiers," or name anyone. He described an address where an individual was suspected of using superstitious methods to extort large sums of money from residents; this person had been repeatedly inducing multiple victims to make purchases over three years, with the most recent extortion directly impacting the normal lives of the victims' families; and there were unidentified clues in the vicinity of this address that were highly correlated with the unusual increase in complaints in the area over the past two weeks. He used the phrase "highly correlated," without explaining how the two were related—he needed to maintain a firewall between professional judgment and supernatural topics. The Special Affairs Bureau didn't need to be told how the connection was made; they would determine it themselves.

He wrote two reports. One was a summary of testimony, including the repairman couple's account and file numbers from two similar complaints from last year. The other was an environmental observation, including a simplified diagram of the cracks in the bungalow area, a floor plan of the abandoned Beihe No. 2 Primary School, and the distribution of surrounding complaint hotspots. He didn't include all the information from his visits over the past few days; he only extracted independently verifiable objective information—time, location, a complete account from one household, and an observable anomaly in a wall—removing all his bold speculations. This was to ensure the other party had enough information to make a judgment, but not to attribute it back to a grassroots social worker who had never seen cracks, never measured temperature differences, and never personally witnessed the dark green fluorescent light of the talisman.

After finishing the report, he checked it twice. The first time, he verified it against the procedures for handling official documents at the street office—whether the facts were verifiable, whether the descriptions were neutral, and whether they contained any inferences or emotional language. The second time, he examined it from the perspective of someone who had been anonymously reported: if he were an investigator from the Special Affairs Bureau, could he reconstruct the reporter's daily routine or travel routes from this report? He was certain that he had replaced two pieces of information that could reveal his identity with wildcards: one related to bicycle parking routes, and the other buried in a redundant description in the environmental observations.

He put the materials into an envelope. The envelope was addressed to the Tieji Branch of the Special Elephant Bureau, and the sender had provided the post office's postal code. The signature section read "Beihe Subdistrict Office." When sealing the envelope, he carefully pressed his finger along the adhesive strip, making it perfectly flat without a single wrinkle. Then he placed the envelope on the corner of the table, under his notepad.

After finishing all this, he went to the kitchen and got a glass of water. The water was a little cold, and it chilled his stomach as well. He stood by the sink and looked down to see a grayish-black scratch on the edge of the basin, a mark from when he moved the files last time.

The next morning at six o'clock, before dawn, Su Xinpei dropped the letter into the mailbox at the entrance of the Beihe Post Office. The letter arrived at the branch office's mailroom at noon that day, and in the afternoon, the mail clerk dispatched it directly to the Action Section via the "Street Office Documents" channel. Before leaving get off work, Ye Xinghe received a printed summary of the on-site investigation attached to the letter, and at the end of the text was a temporary allocation table of vacant houses in the old district provided by Aunt He. He folded the table and tucked it into his inner jacket pocket. That evening, he led a plainclothes team and knocked on the slightly ajar iron gate of the bungalow area.

When the sorcerer, surnamed Kuang, was taken away, he was cutting talisman paper. Seven or eight sheets of uncut yellow paper were spread out on his worktable, next to a faded teacup and a roll of dark red thread. Ye Xinghe found a small, sealed plastic bag containing medicinal powder near the foot of the table; traces of a compound remained on the bag, later identified as containing hallucinogenic components. Several handwritten debt lists were also found at the scene, ranging from several hundred to tens of thousands of yuan, each marked with a date for "fulfilling a vow" or "warding off evil," including the names of the repairman couple.

It was already evening when the news arrived. Su Xinpei was organizing materials for the next day's meeting at the street office when he heard people at the next workstation whispering, "The Special Bureau took away a superstitious person from the old district." He paused, his hand holding the stapler, then continued staplering the stack of materials in front of him, pressing the staple all the way in with a very slight click.

After get off work, he didn't go directly to Ironbone Hall, but instead took a detour past the bungalow. The door of the low house was sealed—not with police tape, but with the standard silver seal of the Special Elephant Bureau, bearing the symbol of a one-eyed man with closed eyes and a tiny number. Beside the door, under a broken, makeshift wooden shelf, lay a small bag of unpeeled raw peanuts, shells scattered on the threshold. He stood there for a moment, then turned and walked towards Ironbone Hall.

That evening, one of the lights in Tiegutang was out, leaving only the light outside the storeroom. Wu Xiong was repairing old sandbags in the corner, the evening news was playing on the radio, and Old Tie Tou was leaning back in his rattan chair with an enamel mug on his lap. He nodded when he saw Su Xinpei come in.

Su Xinpei didn't immediately begin his stance training as usual. He took out an enamel mug from his backpack, poured himself a cup of cold tea from the corner, and drank it. Only then did he begin his preparations for the stance training: rolling up his trouser legs, tying on the sandbags—the movements were exactly the same as every night. Old Tie Tou remained silent until his second punch during the boxing stance was several times heavier than usual—it was powerful, not fast, but with immense force, like a deflated spring suddenly springing back to its full strength. After finishing the boxing stance, Su Xinpei stood by the bench for a moment to conclude his practice.

Old Tie Tou suddenly asked, "Was it you who delivered the letter from that bungalow?"

Su Xinpei paused for a moment before answering, "Yes."

Old Tietou picked up his enamel mug, took a sip, and put the mug back on his lap. "That sorcerer, Kuang, has been operating in the Beihe District for at least six or seven years. Does he have a patriarch? Yes. Does he have an army? Yes. But he won't tell a word of that to those he deceives. Those talismans have a talisman head and a talisman core, but the most crucial stroke—the price mark—is covered by another sheet of paper. Those who pay can't see it. Kuang himself knows that the price has been passed on to those who come to have the talismans signed, but how can an illiterate laborer know that what he wrote isn't 'blessing for peace' but 'compensation for misfortune'?"

Su Xinpei didn't say anything, but simply wiped off a patch of dust from the enamel mug on the bench.

"Last year at the Beihe Agricultural Machinery Factory, you used the same method as this time—you didn't show yourself, but sent the intelligence to a department capable of intervening, letting them handle the situation on-site. That's correct. But you need to understand one thing." Old Tie Tou stood up, placed the water bottle on the bench, walked to the door of the storeroom, took out the sandbags from the toolbox, and placed them at Su Xinpei's feet. "Your Special Elephant Bureau's contact method only works when the opponent is still within the framework of the rule of law. If the situation you face in the future is outside anyone's jurisdiction, you must go out yourself. The sandbags are for training your legs. You use your legs to run through the alleys where you deliver messages, but one day you will have to use your legs to step on your own judgment, not on paper."

Su Xinpei reached out and lifted the sandbag. The canvas had been replaced, and new lead strips had been added to the inside, making it considerably heavier than before. He placed the sandbag beside the bench, not immediately tying it on. Old Tietou sat back down in his rattan chair, placed his enamel mug on his lap, and added one last sentence: "You know where that energy in your boxing stance tonight came from."

Su Xinpei knew. The raw peanuts left at the door when the sorcerer left with his men, and the oil stains on the repairman and his wife's pockets when they left the neighborhood office, were the same image in his mind. He punched them so hard because these things shared the same underlying theme—the poor in the darkness of the lower city having what little they had repeatedly taken away in ways they didn't understand, until someone was willing to stand up and say a word.

The next morning, Su Xinpei saw Aunt He answering a call from the repairman's wife at the street office window. The voice on the other end was unclear, but Aunt He held the receiver and answered softly, her right hand slowly scribbling a few words on the phone log. After hanging up, she looked up at Su Xinpei standing by the printer and simply said, "The child slept very soundly last night."

Su Xinpei responded, took out the low-income assistance application form from the printer, stamped it, and put it into the output tray.

The progress bar for tendon training on the panel silently increased by over a hundred points. He glanced at it and confirmed it hadn't been recorded in the training log. This wasn't training.