Chapter 1: An Orphan Awakens

A damp, musty smell drilled into her nostrils, and Lin Wan snapped her eyes open, her gaze focusing on the worn old abacus in her hands. Its wooden beads were cold, yet her fingertips burned hot, the lingering warmth left where the memories of a past life collided with the despair of this one. This was Hong Kong Island in 1970, and dim yellow streetlight leaked through the cracks in the tiles of a slum hovel. The hunger churning in her stomach was held down by a strange, steady calm.

The Divine Abacus Mind-Flow quietly activated, and in her field of vision the world broke apart into countless flowing grids of numbers. She closed her eyes, and in an instant her mind built an arbitrage model for black-market secondhand goods: from the waste cardboard yard in the west district to the warehouses in the east, the cost of pulp per pound, the fluctuations in transport fuel, and even the hidden tax rate of the protection money collected by the gangs were all run to their optimal solution in a single moment.

Its precision surpassed the clumsiest mechanical computers of the age, and its error was zero. This was no fantasy; it was an instinct carved into her soul. Lin Wan slowly flicked the abacus beads, and the crisp sound echoed through the cramped little room, the sound of reason crushing fear underfoot. She was no longer an orphan girl tossed about by fate, but a player who held the variables in her own hands.

The moment she stepped out of the hovel, Lin Wan ran straight into a wall of men. Several skin-and-bones thugs blocked the mouth of the alley, and their leader, A Hao, had a sinister look in his eyes and an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. He stepped forward, spittle flying: "Lin Wan, that rotten little debt your Uncle Zhao owes gets settled today. Either you hand over the money, or you hand over yourself."

Lin Wan did not retreat. Her gaze swept over the clubs at their waists, and in her mind she silently calculated their reaction times and the probability threshold at which the violence would erupt. She lowered her voice, her tone icy and cruel: "In the structure of Uncle Zhao's debt, forty percent is fake loan-shark interest. Under the Money Lenders Ordinance newly issued by the Hong Kong government, that portion is not only void, it also amounts to fraud.

If I go to the police now, the lot of you will go inside for a few years, and by the time you come out, this debt will have been written down to zero."

The alley fell silent at once. The corner of A Hao's eye twitched; plainly he had never expected this skinny girl to understand the law, let alone calculation. He leaned in viciously, jabbing a finger toward Lin Wan's chest: "Who are you trying to scare? I eat black, you run and tattle, and tonight you will not walk out of this street."

Lin Wan looked straight into his pupils, which were full of the arrogance that comes from ignorance. She lifted her chin slightly, and a trace of mockery pulled at the corner of her mouth: "I do not need to walk out of this street. I need you to shut your mouths.

Uncle Zhao is right behind you. If you dare lay a finger on him, I will mail the detailed black accounts of the protection money you collect, together with the smuggling taxes your boss owes the trading house, straight to the ICAC. Do you believe me or not?"

The moment her words fell, hurried footsteps sounded from the end of the alley. Uncle Zhao came rushing over, wiping his sweat, his face wreathed in smiles as he planted himself in front of Lin Wan and apologized to A Hao: "Brother Hao, a misunderstanding, all a misunderstanding. Wan is young, she does not know any better. Come on, let us sit down and talk. I have a little cash here, let me put it against the debt first."

Lin Wan watched Uncle Zhao coldly, and in her mind she had already worked out his intention: to use her, a tool whose value was about to be squeezed dry, to calm the gang's anger and preserve his own position as a middleman. It was a classic strategy of transferring risk onto the weaker party.

Uncle Zhao shifted sideways to shield Lin Wan and tried to pull her away, but Lin Wan broke free of his grip. She turned to A Hao, her voice not loud yet every word crisp and clear: "A Hao, your debt ratio has already passed the critical point. If you make a move now, the probability of police intervention is sixty percent.

But if you let us pass now, Uncle Zhao will give you a sum of hush money, and at the same time I will sort out a resale channel for a batch of your unsold dead stock, with a net profit of at least two thousand dollars. The choice is yours."

A Hao narrowed his eyes, weighing the value in her words. He felt some wariness toward Lin Wan's abacus, but far more than that, contempt. He savagely stubbed out the cigarette and threw it down at Lin Wan's feet: "You are ruthless, I will give you that. Uncle Zhao, settle the account before tonight, or I will smash the lamps on this street for you one by one."

As if granted a great pardon, Uncle Zhao dragged Lin Wan away at a quick pace, and as he left he turned his head and glared at her, his eyes full of venom. Lin Wan stood where she was until his back vanished around the corner, and only then slowly let out a breath of stale air. Hunger made her fingertips tremble faintly. She gripped the abacus tightly, and the wooden beads knocked together with a fine, faint rustling sound.

Uncle Zhao's mercenary nature and his sense of loyalty existed side by side: he wanted to use her, yet he feared being dragged down himself. That contradiction showed her the possibility of cooperation, and it also planted the seed of betrayal.

Night fell, and the back alley behind the department store was relatively safe. Auntie Su stood beside a pile of cardboard boxes and said in a low voice: "Wan, those men just now were terrifying. That performance of yours really made me look at you with new eyes. I have worked as an accountant for ten years, and I have never seen anyone work out the black market's accounts more thoroughly than head office itself."

Auntie Su's gaze was warm and attentive, and she passed over a cup of hot tea. In the curling steam, Lin Wan saw the respect in this ally's eyes. Auntie Su sighed softly: "I saw your inventory accounting sheet at the company. That turnover-rate optimization plan of yours, even the manager could not find a single fault in it. Wan, you are no ordinary orphan girl. You are a genius."

Lin Wan held the teacup, feeling the warmth against her fingertips. She knew that Auntie Su's value lay in inside information. The department store's inventory backlog, the hidden channels for currency exchange, and even the time windows for tax inspections were all keys she could use to break open this game.

Auntie Su lowered her voice and pointed toward the lit trading-house building in the distance: "Manager William has been auditing accounts lately, and he has found traces of you 'divine calculators.' He is a shrewd man, pragmatic, but greedy for credit too. If you want to live well, hiding alone is useless; you have to enter the game. But right now he only wants to treat you as a handy calculating tool, not as a partner."

Lin Wan nodded, rapidly building a model in her mind: Auntie Su would provide the intelligence, she would provide the plans, William would provide the funds and protection, and Uncle Zhao would provide the black-market channels. It was a perfect closed loop, so long as every single step was precise and without error.

And yet Chen Tai's shadow had already quietly closed over them. In the distance a black sedan rolled slowly past, and the light inside the car swept across Lin Wan's figure through a gap in the curtains. Chen Tai was talking with his driver, and his voice drifted over faintly: "That abacus girl, I have had her checked out clearly. No father, no mother, no one to rely on, just some nobody from the wild roads. Hmph. A character like that, crushing her to death would be as easy as turning over my palm.

Have someone watch her. Do not let her get anywhere near the trading house's core exchange-rate data." Chen Tai's arrogance was not groundless: the consortium behind him commanded resources that could crush everything, and in his eyes Lin Wan was only a pawn on the board that could be discarded at any time. That contempt was both her crisis and the starting point of her counterattack.

Lin Wan raised her head, her gaze piercing through the dim street and stabbing straight at that sedan. The risk intuition in her heart leaped violently: she foresaw that within the next half hour, Chen Tai's men would try to cut off her contact with Uncle Zhao in order to isolate her. Within that half hour, she had to complete the first closed-loop test of a secondhand-goods arbitrage.

She turned to look at Auntie Su, her gaze resolute: "Auntie Su, lend me half an hour. I am going to take that batch of unsold old newspapers in the west district and, through your channels, turn them into printing raw material for the east district. Every loss, tax, and logistics cost in between, I have already calculated clearly. Thirty percent of the profit is yours. This is your token."

Auntie Su looked at the abacus Lin Wan held out to her, a flash of resolve in her eyes, and nodded in silence.

Half an hour later, Lin Wan stood at the edge of the black market, facing the porters Uncle Zhao had sent. She flicked the abacus beads rapidly and read out a string of figures accurate down to the cent, specifying the best loading sequence and route and avoiding three known high-risk checkpoints. The porters listened in stunned amazement; they had never seen scheduling this efficient.

The goods left the warehouse smoothly, and while Lin Wan was waiting for the receiver, she keenly sensed something wrong at the street corner. Three men in black were approaching fast, their positions forming an aggressive triangle. These were the probers Chen Tai had sent, meant to catch the flaws in the pattern of her movements.

Lin Wan did not panic. She stood in place, both hands hovering above the abacus, utterly still. The men in black closed in around her, and their leader, a lean, hard middle-aged man with a vicious look in his eyes, said: "Miss Lin, Master Chen would like you to go and see him. Your abacus work is splendid, but this is not a place where you can run wild."

Lin Wan did not answer. Her fingers trembled lightly, and the abacus beads gave a faint "pa" sound. In the silence the sound was exceptionally clear, like a countdown. Using her risk intuition, she foresaw the trajectories of their moves: the two men on the left would lunge at her flanks at the same time, and the one man on the right would try to snatch the abacus.

She shifted lightly sideways, evading the first grab from the left, and at the same time pressed the abacus against the right-hand man's wrist, borrowing his force to twist, and swept the dagger out of his hand and down to the ground.

The men in black froze, staring in disbelief at this seemingly frail girl. Lin Wan said coldly: "My time costs too much for me to play at life-and-death games with you. If Chen Tai knows goods when he sees them, he should understand that my value lies in calculation, not in fighting.

Take this sentence back to him: if you come again, I will calculate the exact time each one of you enters the police station, and I will have Manager William provide in court a chain of physical evidence that works against them."

The men in black went white in the face, turned, and withdrew. Lin Wan stood in place, a cold smile curling at the corner of her mouth. This silent deterrence set the tone of her survival: intellect as her blade, calculation as her armor.

Uncle Zhao had witnessed the whole thing from a distance, and his face had gone ashen. He had originally meant to swallow Lin Wan's abacus amid the chaos, but he had never expected that her wings had already grown this strong. He muttered to himself: "This little girl really is a monster. If this goes on, I am afraid she will turn around and eat me alive."

But Lin Wan had already turned and walked away, her steps steady and firm. She knew that tonight's "settling accounts" crisis was only the beginning. The real storm was rolling in with the gaze from inside that black sedan.

At the mouth of the alley, A Hao's figure appeared once more, this time with ten men behind him. He blocked Lin Wan's path, and in his eyes there was no longer wariness, only pure murderous intent and greed. He stared into Lin Wan's eyes, eyes that saw through everything, and murmured: "There is something wrong with your eyes. They are like a ghost's."

Lin Wan stopped. She did not run, and she did not cry for help. She simply stood there quietly, her fingers tapping lightly on the abacus in a slow, heavy rhythm, like a heartbeat. A Hao pressed closer, his hand reaching toward her neck, but it stopped in the instant before it touched her collar.

Lin Wan did not open her eyes, and her voice carried clearly into his ears: "A Hao, that thirty thousand dollars you just lost at the gambling table, were you planning to pawn this abacus of mine against it? If so, congratulations, you cannot win. Because in my model, your bankruptcy point falls exactly three hours from now. If you make a move now, you will not even have the chance to pay off your debts."

A Hao's hand froze in midair, and cold sweat soaked his back in an instant. He had never faced an opponent this calm and this terrifying. He slowly drew his hand back, the corner of his mouth twitching, and squeezed one sentence out through his teeth: "Tonight at twelve o'clock, Cheung Chau pier. Bring your abacus and come to 'settle accounts.' Otherwise, I will make you disappear from this island."

Lin Wan still did not open her eyes. The abacus beads came to rest, and deathly silence surrounded them. She could feel the ninety percent malice in A Hao's words, and she could also feel the steady rhythm of her own heartbeat. She slowly opened her eyes, her gaze clear and cold as ice, sweeping over the thugs behind A Hao who were poised and ready to strike.

Her risk intuition activated once more, the timeline straightening in her mind. She saw the layout of the pier at twelve o'clock, she saw the empty window when the sound of police sirens would leave at ten forty-five, and she saw the mad measures A Hao would inevitably take once his funding chain snapped. Everything was within her grasp. She put the abacus away, turned, and walked into the depths of the darkness, her back solitary, proud, and ramrod straight.

The twelve o'clock showdown had only just begun.