Chapter 2: A First Reckoning Averts Disaster

The sea wind at Cheung Chau pier carried salt and damp, and Lin Wan did not appear at exactly twelve o'clock as A Hao had expected. Instead, she was standing two hours early in the shadows of a corner of the storage yard. Her fingertips tapped lightly against the wooden crate beside her, the rhythm steady and even, as if she were running through a silent rehearsal.

Her risk intuition surged through her mind like a tide, the timeline straightened out, and she saw clearly that A Hao was at that very moment passed out drunk in a dai pai dong on the opposite side of Cheung Chau, the alcohol numbing his judgment and slowing the speed at which he could call up his thugs. These extra ninety minutes were her only chance at survival.

Rain clouds were piling up on the horizon, black ink like an overturned inkstone, swiftly swallowing the last sliver of moonlight. Lin Wan raised her head. The rain had not yet fallen, yet the air was already thick with a stifling smell of electricity. The corner of her mouth lifted slightly, and a cold gleam flashed in her eyes, not fear, but the excitement of a hunter who has spotted a flaw in her prey.

For ordinary people, a torrential rainstorm was a disaster; but for her, this was a window in which wealth would be reshuffled. In that half-second foresight, she saw the picture of supply and demand snapping apart across Hong Kong Island's medicinal-herb market over the next three days, and a clear arbitrage path slowly took shape on the abacus under her fingertips.

A Hao never appeared, and that let Lin Wan's taut nerves relax slightly instead. She swiftly slipped away from Cheung Chau into a narrow lane in Central, her target aimed straight at that inconspicuous "Chen Ji Herb Shop" on Queen's Road Central. A wooden sign reading "Closed for rest today" hung on the shopfront, but the lights in the windows had not gone out.

Lin Wan skillfully avoided the gaze of the patrolling police, slipping soundlessly in through the gap of a jump window in the back yard. Inside the room, Uncle Zhao was sitting under the lamp wiping an old-fashioned platform scale, and when he heard the movement he did not even lift his head, a mercenary smile hanging at the corner of his mouth.

Uncle Zhao set the platform scale down at a leisurely pace: "Little Wan, in the middle of the night like this, where are you planning to run off to? If A Hao and his lot tie you up, these old bones of mine will have nothing left to count on."

Lin Wan did not turn her head. Her gaze swept over the dried tangerine peel and angelica root on the shelves, dried crisp through, and her voice was calm as ice: "Uncle Zhao, I am not leaving. A Hao's drunken poison has not worn off; he needs at least another four hours before he sobers up. And four hours is enough for me to move this batch of goods out."

Uncle Zhao finally raised his head, and a sharp gleam flashed through those murky eyes as he sized up the abacus in Lin Wan's hands, glowing faintly: "Move them out? The rain looks like it is about to come down hard. Who would take anyone's goods at a time like this? Unless you plan to dump them at a loss and let me, Zhao, pick up a bargain."

Lin Wan stopped walking. Both her hands rested lightly on either side of the abacus, her knuckles bending slightly. She did not speak; she only let the beads run under her fingers in a long stream of fine, rapid sounds, like drumbeats in the prelude to a rainstorm. The sound was not loud, yet it carried an unsettling rhythm, as if some invisible precision instrument were running at high speed.

Lin Wan's fingertips sped up, and the clatter of the colliding beads suddenly turned crisp and dense: "Uncle Zhao, I have a batch of goods, and the cost accounting runs as follows. Dried tangerine peel, purchase price twelve dollars fifty per kilogram, plus three percent warehousing loss and one point two percent transport loss, for a total cost of thirteen dollars and fourteen cents."

Uncle Zhao frowned and cut her off: "Enough, little girl, stop dragging all these numbers out for me. I do not care what your cost is. At today's market, the most I will give you is twenty percent off. Take it or leave it."

Lin Wan did not stop her hands; the beads still flew, and she spoke extremely fast, like a machine gun firing, every syllable landing precisely on Uncle Zhao's auditory nerve: "Twenty percent off, that is, nine dollars sixty. But Uncle Zhao, you have overlooked one variable.

Over the next three days, Hong Kong Island will face a torrential rainstorm unseen in a hundred years. The humidity in the medicinal-herb warehouses in the low-lying districts will saturate in an instant, and your inventory turnover rate will fall by forty percent within seventy-two hours. And this batch of mine has been specially dried, with a moisture content below eight percent. Even soaked in the rain, it will not go moldy."

Uncle Zhao's hand froze in midair, and the mercenary look in his eyes was gradually replaced by astonishment. He leaned in closer, wanting to see the readings on Lin Wan's abacus clearly, only to find those numbers leaping like ghosts, far too fast to make out. He tried to rebut her with experience, only to find that the calculations he was so proud of looked clumsy and inadequate before this complex model.

Uncle Zhao gave a dry laugh, trying to win back some ground: "Even if your goods are good, right now no one outside dares take them. Let us talk again after the rain stops. My shop cannot deliver goods in the middle of a rainstorm."

Lin Wan finally stopped her fingers, and the abacus fell into dead silence. She raised her eyes, and in her gaze there was not the slightest room for bargaining, only pure rationality and pressure.

Lin Wan pointed at the stack of cash on the table, her voice cold and clear: "An advance payment, settled at fifteen dollars per kilogram. As for the remaining balance, after the market opens tomorrow morning at nine and the price has soared, you can make it up at sixty percent of the market price. If you hesitate, I will turn around and walk out, and sell this batch of goods to William's trading house. They squeeze prices harder, true, but at least they will not leave me waiting."

Uncle Zhao swallowed a mouthful of saliva. He looked into Lin Wan's eyes, eyes still as a windless pool of water, where there was no greed, only icy calculation. He knew that if he pushed the price down any further, he would only be handing this piece of fat meat to a competitor on a platter. As an old hand who had mixed in the black market for many years, he knew when to let go and when to gamble big.

He took a deep breath, drew a thick wad of banknotes from a drawer, counted out three hundred dollars, and slapped them down on the table.

Uncle Zhao gritted his teeth and said, aching at the cost: "Three hundred dollars as a deposit, call it me, Zhao, betting on you. But remember this: if the price does not rise tomorrow, you will not get a single cent of this money back."

Lin Wan put the abacus away and stacked that pile of money neatly, her movements flowing like water. She turned and walked toward the back door, her back solitary, proud, and ramrod straight, without looking back once at this temporary backer of hers. In her heart, this deal was no charity; it was the optimal solution based on probability theory. So long as the rainstorm arrived as promised, Uncle Zhao's investment would by tomorrow afternoon have turned into a huge sum he could not refuse.

The torrential rain broke out punctually at two in the morning, like the Milky Way pouring upside down, and the whole of Hong Kong Island sank in an instant into a vast expanse of water. The standing water in the streets quickly rose over people's ankles, and the warehouses in the low-lying areas were the first to take the hit, great batches of medicinal herbs soaked in the rain, their value evaporating in an instant. The district where Lin Wan was, however, stood on higher ground with a sound drainage system, and was not much affected.

She stood by a window on the second floor, watching the blurred curtain of rain outside and listening to the police sirens rising and falling in the distance, and the taut stone in her heart settled slightly. A Hao's pursuit had been cut off by the rainstorm; those thugs moved sluggishly through the mud and could not, for the time being, pose a direct threat to her.

She took out the abacus and worked through tomorrow's market direction again in her mind, the models of exchange-rate fluctuation and logistics cost unfolding once more. This time the reach of her calculation expanded from the local area to a far wider region, as if an invisible net were catching every tiny fluctuation in the data.

At six in the morning, the rain eased slightly, and sunlight spilled through the cloud layer onto the wet streets, steaming up a wave of heat. Lin Wan carried two waterproof woven bags, holding the remaining high-purity medicinal herbs, and walked quickly through the muddy lanes toward the warehouse Uncle Zhao had designated. On the way, she passed a stretch of road that was caving in, where the standing water formed a strange vortex on the surface.

Her risk intuition activated once more, and she saw that the earth beneath her feet would shift as a whole in zero point three seconds.

Lin Wan did not hesitate in the slightest. She turned her body to one side, touched the ground with the tip of her foot, and leaped lightly across that dangerous stretch, landing steadily on solid pavement. If not for this pair of "heavenly eyes," she would probably have been swept into the mud by now and lost the goods in her hands. She did not stop to rest, but pressed onward, rainwater dripping from the ends of her hair while her gaze stayed fixed ahead of her the whole time.

Auntie Su was already waiting at the back yard of the warehouse, wearing a plain gray shirt and holding a ledger, her expression warm and nervous. Seeing Lin Wan come in, she quickly took hold of Lin Wan's sleeve and led her into a secluded corner.

Auntie Su lowered her voice: "Little Wan, everyone inside has been cleared out, only I am here guarding the accounts. I checked: there has not been a single abnormal outbound record in the past month. It is clean inside."

Lin Wan nodded, took a small packet of aged Pu'er tea out of the bag, and handed it to Auntie Su: "Thank you for your trouble. Before the market opens tomorrow morning, I will deliver the last batch of goods to the place you designated. If Uncle Zhao goes back on his word, then as originally planned, contact Mr. William directly."

Auntie Su accepted the tea, a flash of gratitude in her eyes, before she recovered the particular rigor of an accountant: "Do not worry. As long as the goods are here, the price is here. However greedy Uncle Zhao may be, he will not dare make trouble in front of William's trading house."

Lin Wan smiled and let go of her hand, straightened her collar, and strode toward the front counter of the warehouse. There, Uncle Zhao stood before a pile of goods, counting them with his head covered in sweat. His expression kept changing as the numbers climbed, from contempt at the start, to doubt and alarm in the middle, to the wild joy and unease of this moment.

Uncle Zhao pointed at that pile of medicinal herbs, his voice somewhat dry: "Little Wan, this stock of yours... how is its purity so high? This batch of dried tangerine peel, if I take it to the trading house, I can sell it for at least thirty dollars a kilogram."

Lin Wan answered calmly: "Uncle Zhao, this is only the cost. The real profit lies in the information barrier you build amid the panic. Now, as agreed, make up the balance."

Uncle Zhao stared fixedly at the abacus set on the tabletop, his fingers trembling as he pulled a small booklet from his breast and rapidly calculated the price difference. When he raised his head, the mercenary look in his eyes had already been replaced by a deep greed. He realized that standing before him was not merely an orphan girl, but a monster whose calculating power surpassed the age itself.

Controlling her might be worth more than simply buying and selling goods.

Uncle Zhao swallowed a mouthful of saliva and forced out a smile with difficulty: "The balance... I will give it to you tomorrow. Today's goods, you keep them for now, call it me lending them to you."

Lin Wan did not refuse. She only gathered up the abacus lightly, her movements elegant and decisive. She walked out of the warehouse, her figure gradually vanishing into the mist after the rain. And on the top floor of a tall building far away, Chen Tai was leaning against the railing, a wine glass swirling in his hand, the liquor thick as amber.

He looked down over the city at his feet as it came back to life, and a contemptuous arc curled at the corner of his mouth, as if that little fish struggling in the muddy water could never stir up any towering waves.