"Quiet."
That was the only word for it. Lu Wen (卢文) breathed it in as he walked along the riverbank. It was late afternoon, and the sun was hitting the water just right, turning the ripples into a million tiny, sparkling diamonds. He pushed his glasses up his nose, soaking in the view of the forest and the wide river. It felt like being held in a long, peaceful embrace.
Then he looked over his shoulder, and the feeling vanished. 'Ancient. Scary.'
Behind him sat a three-story carcass, a seven-thousand-square-meter tombstone of a building. A massive sign hung on its face, promising Eternal Luck Casino & Resort in both Chinese and English.
永运国际娱乐城 (Yǒng Yùn Guójì Yúlè Chéng)
Eternal Luck Casino & Resort
It was a lie. The place was a ghost. The neon had stayed dark for months, except for two flickering, half-dead electrical tests. Now the sign was a cracked and dirty patchwork of faded letters. The building had once been a vibrant jade green, glowing like an expensive gem under the spotlights. Now, the color was a washed-out memory. The paint was peeling off in strips like dead skin, and long, black streaks of mold and moss ran down the walls like old tears.
The decay was bad, but it wasn't the scary part. The scary part was that the place was still breathing. It had become a rat warren for a gang of Chinese scammers, fueled by 'gray' cash and built on the backs of people who had no way out. Lu Wen looked at the building and felt the weight of it in his chest. He thought about the cosmic joke his life had become—a long, downward slide into this particular hell on earth.
Lu Wen looked back at his thirty-five years, and it felt like watching a film strip that had been left in the sun too long. He was a Handan boy, from the gritty side of Hebei (河北 : Hebei). His family was lower-middle class—his old man was a high school teacher and his mother a hospital drone. They didn't have much, but they had one big dream, and that dream was him. He was the 'one hope,' but he only got the job by default. His aunt had told him the truth when he was old enough to hear it: his mother had gone through two abortions because the babies were girls. That was the One-Child Policy for you. If he'd been born a girl, he knew his fate would've been the same—a bucket of medical waste. He was the family's only chip in a high-stakes game.
His parents rode him like a rented mule about his grades. Lu Wen played along, eventually grinding through Hebei University of Technology (河北工业大学) with a degree in Computer Science. It was the golden ticket back then. Jack Ma was the new god on every screen, and startups were blooming like weeds after a summer rain. Lu Wen wanted to be the man with the plan, the guy who built an empire out of nothing but code.
He packed his bags and made a beeline for Beijing, sure he was going to set the world on fire. Instead, he got doused. He went on a dozen interviews, and every one ended with the same door-slam: 'No experience.' It was a cosmic joke, a catch-22 that made his head spin. How do you get experience when no one will let you through the door? He finally gave up, slunk away from the capital, and headed for Hangzhou (杭州). He landed a gig at a pissant startup as a back-end developer. It wasn't the empire he'd dreamed of, but it was work. And in this world, work is the only thing that keeps the dark at bay.
The company sold a glossy, ten-billion-dollar dream—a global juggernaut in the making. But for the human machinery on the floor, the reality was a dingy fuckhole of endless work and empty pockets. Eight thousand yuan a month was a joke, a pittance that barely kept the rats from the pantry and made sending a few bucks home an impossible dream. They ran him slack-lunged, day in and day out.
The 996 culture—nine to nine, six days a week—was supposed to be the standard, but for Lu Wen, it was just the appetizer. He was a slow-motion man in a high-speed world, a plodder with no creative spark and a personality as flat as a week-old pancake. His code was a mess of bugs that needed constant fixing. After seven years of that particular hell, he slunk away to the neon jungle of Shenzhen (深圳). He bounced through half a dozen offices, but he had a six-month shelf life. He was just more meat for the machine, used as cheap labor until the trial period ended and then kicked to the curb. Sometimes they even stiffed him on the final paycheck.
He was down and out, a loser in a city of winners, and too ashamed to tell his parents the truth. And they were getting old, their health starting to fail like a battery that won't hold a charge. It was a weight in his chest he couldn't put down. Then he saw the golden ticket: a programming gig in Malaysia. Thirty thousand yuan a month. The conditions looked fine, better than fine. Lu Wen's heart swelled with a hope he hadn't felt in years. He talked to the recruiter and it sounded like a breeze—easy work, good pay. The only catch was the distance, being a stranger in a strange land, only seeing home once in a long while. But he didn't care. It was a way out, and he grabbed it with both hands.
Lu Wen swallowed the hook, line, and sinker. Part of it was the weight of his parents' expectations—the constant, silent demand for money to keep the home fires burning. The rest was just a lack of nerve. He felt like a spent shell in the mainland IT world, a slow-motion man in a high-speed race where the new graduates were getting faster and hungrier every year. He knew he was naive, a soft-headed introvert who didn't say much, but he had discipline. He could wrangle Python and JavaScript well enough. The dream was simple: stack up some cash, get some seasoning, and head home to open a little shop. Take care of the old folks. Start a family.
But that was the dream—the kind that turns into a nightmare when you realize you've been played.
When he set out, he didn't end up in Malaysia. He landed at the jagged edge of the Thai-Cambodian border. They shipped him to Thma Da, a new-age hellhole for global scammers. But Lu Wen was a lousy criminal. He couldn't code the fake trading apps or the crypto-scams they wanted—the ones that look real enough to bleed a sucker dry. So they tuned up on him. They beat him, demoted him, and sold him from one gang to the next like a piece of used machinery. Now he's at the Yong Yun Casino—the 'Green Building'—a bottom-feeder camp on the banks of the Meteuk River. Some 'gray' Chinese money had tried to build a gambling empire here in the middle of nowhere, but the big dogs started biting each other and the project rotted where it stood. Now it's just a ghost of a building in a jungle that doesn't care if you live or die.
Lu Wen arrived at the 'Eternal Luck' looking like a battered carcass, and the beatings only got worse from there. They demoted him from programmer to a phone-jockey, a job that sat in his gut like spoiled meat. He couldn't lie to the marks well enough to hit his numbers, so they tuned up on him until he was nearly scheduled for a trip to the organ-harvester's table. He only caught a break when a teammate dropped dead from the grind—one man's funeral became Lu Wen's lucky ticket. The tech was ancient, stone-age code he could actually wrangle. Once he proved he had value, they gave him a little slack, a chance to breathe the river air away from the stink of the building. In this hellhole, he was one of the lucky ones.
From the outside, the Yong Yun International Entertainment Center was a tombstone, but inside, thirty-odd souls were caught in the gears. The first floor was a fortress, held by four guards with modern war-gear on twenty-four-hour rotations. The second floor was the call-center fuckhole, fifteen liars and three watchers. Lu Wen worked the third-floor server room with five other grunts. But the basement—the old VIP suites—that was the real slaughterhouse. Eight people were caged down there in the dark. For them, it was just a countdown to a ransom call, a life of slavery on a stinking fishing boat, or a final meeting with the black-market butchers looking for fresh parts.
The outfit was raking in seven to ten million yuan a month, but it wasn't enough for the big boss. Lu Wen had heard the local lead, 'Big Brother' Zhang Wei (张伟 : Zhang Wěi), refer to the man as Big Boss Deng (鄧)—or sometimes "Bao Zheng Deng."
Today, Lu Wen walked the riverbank with a freedom that felt almost sinful. The guards weren't bird-dogging him like they used to. Maybe it was because he'd been part of the machinery for six months now, or maybe it was because the guards themselves were starting to fray at the edges.
For days, a nasty kind of gossip had been making the rounds, the kind that sits in your gut like spoiled meat. They said that in the dead of night, you could hear a baby wailing on the river-side of the casino. There wasn't a baby for miles, nothing but the deep, uncaring forest and the stink of the building. So where was that sound coming from? It was a mystery that was turning into a haunting. The story passed from one man to the next like a virus, and now the guards—those hard-eyed bastards who'd beat you half to death without missing a heartbeat—wouldn't go near that side of the place. Not even in the broad daylight, unless they absolutely had to. They were scared of what might be looking back.