Chapter 20: Canned Food

At nine in the morning, the helicopter landed in Liu Town, a small town south of Tangshan.

The reconnaissance team Ji Cheng had sent ahead had already surveyed the area for several hundred meters around the landing site and found no one suspicious. In fact, there were hardly any people at all.

Liu Town had suffered a disaster late last year. When the seawall gave way, seawater flooded almost the entire town, killing nearly a thousand people. Rescue and relief operations continued for almost a month before gradually giving way to reconstruction. Many locals were still homeless, living in temporary prefabricated housing and relying on relief supplies from elsewhere for food and clothing.

Speaking of that disaster, we first need to explain a few of the problems facing Earth in this parallel universe.

After 2060, the four most pressing problems facing humanity were overpopulation, the energy crisis, rising sea levels, and global warming. The order runs from less to more serious, less to more urgent.

The first problem had eased after the Empire's unification war in 2000, but almost thirty years later it became acute again and returned to the agenda of Tiandu's senior leadership. After several years of study, the Empire introduced a steep “second-child tax,” which could, for the time being, be said to have brought population growth under control.

The remaining three problems can be discussed together. Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity had obtained most of its energy by “burning stuff” in vast quantities. For modern civilization, oil was blood, natural gas was oxygen, and coal was cellular tissue. These energy choices were bound to intensify the greenhouse effect, bringing global warming, which melted the polar ice, which in turn raised sea levels. Any secondary school student knew all this.

The Empire had indeed put considerable effort into transforming its energy supply, successfully developing several clean, reliable, powerful energy sources. Yet sources with all three of those inherent qualities also came with three more, imposed by people: they were expensive, their technology was secret, and the Empire held a monopoly on them.

These energy sources were not made available to the public, but reserved for the military and the Empire's senior leadership. Still, as long as someone used them, they took some of the strain off Earth's energy supply, which was a good thing overall. The energy crisis was resolved as oil prices rose.

As for global warming and rising sea levels, have you noticed that Tiandu is a floating island in the sky? From up there, the sea still has plenty of room to rise…

Of course, the imperial court couldn't actually ignore those two problems, so its solution was to raise the seawalls. After decades of construction, by 2101, virtually every populated stretch of coast in the world had a seawall standing anywhere from a few meters to dozens of meters above street level.

Liu Town's seawall had been raised five years ago. As the water level kept rising year after year, the original wall could no longer do its job, so the Dragon Commandery's senior officials allocated funds to raise it. Who would have thought it would collapse just a few short years later?

Li Wei stepped out of the helicopter, his short hair, slicked with olive oil, actually holding its shape in the fierce wind. He wore a black shirt open at the collar, sweatpants, and a pair of sneakers worth a month's salary for the helicopter pilot. Over the shirt he wore a bulletproof vest with tracking and listening devices built into it.

Almost as soon as Li Wei, Ji Cheng, and the others stepped out of the helicopter, another text from Tian Yi arrived on the phone. “Young Master Li, from now on, you're on your own. Head south. Captain Ji, please withdraw the people you've stationed nearby. You can wait here or call off the operation, but don't follow Li Wei.

“Please carry out these instructions carefully.”

Li Wei and Ji Cheng read the message together. Afterward, Li Wei asked, “What do we do?”

Ji Cheng said, “We have no choice but to do as he says.” He paused, then added, “This man doesn't like discussing the hostage. He finds our questions about her safety irritating, so he hasn't kept threatening to hurt her the way an ordinary kidnapper would. He simply added ‘Please carry out these instructions carefully’ at the end of his message. That short phrase means we must do as he says or face the consequences. There's nothing we can do… We can't risk the hostage.”

Li Wei nodded. He thought for a few seconds, then leaned close to Ji Cheng's ear. “Captain Ji, don't you think he knows too much about our situation? It's as if there's a pair of eyes watching us the whole time…” He was hinting at something.

Ji Cheng replied, his expression giving nothing away, “I know what I'm doing.” Then he deliberately raised his voice a little, as though he wanted the people around him to hear. “Don't worry. The vest is just a precaution. If this kidnapper wanted to hurt you, he could easily have put an explosive device in that coffee machine. Go ahead. We'll be listening through the tracking equipment. If anything happens, we'll be there in two minutes.”

Li Wei acknowledged him and walked south alone.

The helicopter remained on an open patch of land on the outskirts of town. The HL personnel soon brought in several surveillance vehicles, connected their portable equipment, and continued tracking Li Wei's movements.

Li Wei followed the widest road. It had clearly been repaired after the disaster, and the surface was very smooth, presumably to give large vehicles easy access for supply deliveries and reconstruction work.

Before long, more buildings appeared around him, but all had been wrecked by the flood. This had once been a residential neighborhood. Walking through it now felt like passing through the ruins of an apocalypse.

The phone rang again. Li Wei answered. “What do you want now?”

Tian Yi said, “The piece at the bottom left of the phone is a built-in Bluetooth headset. Snap it off and put it on.”

Li Wei held the phone up in front of him, detached a component the size of a building block from its bottom left corner, and fitted it over his ear. Then he slipped the phone into his shirt pocket beneath the bulletproof vest.

“Done.”

Tian Yi said, “Does this place remind you of anything?”

Li Wei glanced around. “I've never been here.”

“I know. But everyone who lives here knows you.”

“Hmph… Plenty of people in the Dragon Commandery know me. I just don't know them.”

“Ah… You seem to have a very short memory. Do you really need me to jog it for you?”

Tian Yi's words left Li Wei baffled. He replied, “I don't know what game you're playing. What exactly are you after? Where's Jiang Yun?”

“Six years ago, you, Young Master Li, the brilliant young entrepreneur, received funding for a construction project from the Dragon Commandery's senior officials.” Tian Yi ignored his questions and launched into his own account. “In theory, the money was to be disbursed in five installments. But the governor of Tangshan handling the matter at the time wanted to curry favor with you, the young scion of a powerful noble family. To demonstrate his complete ‘trust’ and ‘support,’ he gave you the entire sum upfront.

“You spent a month doing absolutely nothing on the project, without laying a single brick or tile. First, you laundered 30% of the money and used it to finance a newly established shell company in your name.

“Then you dumped everything that remained on a contracting firm you'd been doing business with for years and washed your hands of the whole thing. Once the firm landed the job, it followed the usual practice and paid you a hefty kickback.

“A little over a year later, the project was completed. You declined the governor's invitation to cut the ribbon, claiming you were unwell. In fact, you were simply fooling around with some actress in a luxury villa in Guangzhou that day.”

The more Li Wei heard, the more alarmed he became. His expression changed abruptly. “How could you possibly…” He simply couldn't imagine how Tian Yi knew all this. Apart from Li Wei himself, there wasn't another person in the world who knew that he'd tampered with the funds, what his dealings with the contractor had been, what he'd said to the governor, and where he'd been at that exact moment.

“Hahahaha…” Tian Yi laughed like a madman on the other end of the line. “You're still worrying about your privacy? You should be worrying about your personal safety.”

Li Wei suddenly realized something. In that instant, even his neck went rigid.

Tian Yi continued, “It seems you've worked it out. That's right. The project was raising the seawall here.” His tone was light. “Obviously, all the cost cutting left it shoddily built. But since you, Young Master Li, had handled the project, the governor here had the good sense to help cover it up. His thinking was that even if the wall collapsed a decade or two down the line, he might well have left office by then. How could anyone hold him responsible?

“Unfortunately… the wall collapsed after five years. Of course, our governor didn't suffer any particularly severe punishment. He was merely transferred to a poorer, more remote region to serve as deputy governor.

“The Empire wanted to hush the whole thing up. The gist of it was… if the wall collapsed, blame the waves for being too rough. Just a natural disaster. Tough luck, everyone.”

“Haha…” At this point, Tian Yi couldn't help laughing again. “But… back then, to get into your good graces, the governor made very good use of the local media to publicize the completed project. If you'd come to cut the ribbon, you'd have seen it. Huge slogans, enormous photographs, in the papers, on roadside walls, even on billboards. They were everywhere. You were the great benefactor of the people of Liu Town.”

Li Wei's face darkened. Now he understood why “everyone who lives here knows you.” Instinct told him he had to leave. It wasn't safe here.

He turned around, only to find the road behind him packed with people for several dozen meters.

The crowd consisted mostly of the elderly, the frail, women, and children. Most of the young, able-bodied adults had already left. Yet the looks in the eyes of these old people, children, and middle-aged women made Li Wei's legs tremble uncontrollably.

Tian Yi's voice came through the headset again. “Lastly, we come to the funniest part. After that shell company in your name helped you pocket a fortune, it still had some assets left. You casually folded them into your own food business chain, and the company went on to develop and produce canned food.

“The canned food tasted so awful that people online rated it the worst-tasting garbage in the entire Dragon Commandery. In fact, its reputation got so bad that even I couldn't resist buying a can out of curiosity. I wanted to see just how terrible it was…

“Anyway, things took a turn and came full circle. Late last year, your group's headquarters declared that company a money-losing cancer. Layoffs and dissolution followed. But its factory warehouse still held one last batch of cans, almost past their expiration date. Then your think tank had a flash of inspiration. To make the company look good and improve its corporate image, they donated every last one of those godawful, unsalable cans to a badly hit area that had just suffered a disaster. And they made quite a publicity splash over it.

“That disaster area was Liu Town.”

With a clang, something struck Li Wei in the forehead.

Some brat in the crowd had thrown a can and hit Li Wei squarely in the head.

Li Wei grimaced in pain, blood running down his forehead, but he was already practically stupefied. He simply crouched down in a daze and picked up the can. There on the label, in appallingly bad taste, was a photograph of the boss. Himself…