Night in the Yangcheng suburbs was a tapestry woven from the sodium-orange glow of distant streetlamps, the ceaseless, insectoid drone of traffic on the ring road, and the profound, waiting silence of half-finished construction sites. At the heart of one such site, a kingdom of naked concrete and steel skeletons, Wang Jianshe paced. The gravel crunched under his expensive, inappropriate leather loafers. His gaze, sharp with a familiar, gut-twisting anxiety, remained fixed on the construction gate, a yawning mouth of chain-link and corrugated tin. The look in his eyes held a desperate, almost romantic longing—a feeling he hadn't experienced since nervously awaiting a girl from the neighboring classroom over two decades ago. Now, the object of his desire was not a person, but a solution. Any solution.
Wang Jianshe was a contractor. A successful one, by the gritty, pragmatic standards of Yangcheng's second-tier construction world. He lacked the guanxifor the glittering municipal projects, the soaring bridges and glass towers. His domain was the flesh and bones of the city: apartment blocks, shopping plazas, the unglamorous but profitable shells of everyday life. This project, a twelve-story residential complex, was his current crown jewel. Its successful, timely completion meant a payday that would silence his creditors, placate his wife, and fund a few more months of attention from the young woman whose affection was measured in designer handbags.
But time, that most merciless of foremen, was squeezing him. Delayed permits had stolen months. To meet the brutal deadline, his crew worked in brutal shifts, day and night. The skilled laborers—the masons, the steel-benders, the electricians—he could manage, cajole, or replace. It was the simple, brutal physics of the job that was killing him: the moving of matter. Bricks. Cement bags. Rebar. The unskilled, backbreaking labor that young men in China now fled to easier factory jobs or delivery gigs. The rural strongbacks went to Shenzhen, to Guangzhou, where the pay was higher and the work marginally less medieval.
Six trucks sat in his yard now, hulking shadows under the temporary halogen lights that turned night into a stark, buzzing daytime. Each was piled with twelve thousand red clay bricks. Five more waited with thirty-ton loads of cement. Seventy-two thousand bricks. One hundred and fifty tons of powder that would become stone. All needed to be offloaded, stacked, and distributed before the day crew arrived at dawn. His phone, warm and accusing in his hand, had buzzed ten times today with calls from the primary contractor. The threats were always the same: liquidated damages, blacklisting, ruin.
He'd made calls. His brother-in-law, a man of many vague promises, had sworn to find bodies. None had appeared. His other, thinner hope was the young man from last night. 'Niu.' The one with the cheap steel and the shifty eyes. A ton of sub-grade rebar would save him a thousand yuan, a pittance, but it was the principle. A man built his fortune brick by brick, yuan by saved yuan. And the boy had asked about work. Work?Wang had thought with a silent, derisive snort. You? One scrawny kid against a mountain of brick?
As the clock slid past 7:30 PM, the silence from the gate grew taunting. The promised steel hadn't come. The promised laborers hadn't come. Wang Jianshe felt the cold weight of failure settling in his stomach. He didn't even have the boy's number. Another dead end.
Then, a sound. Not the roar of a labor gang's truck, but the asthmatic wheeze of a dying engine. His own battered Isuzu flatbed, a relic he kept for hauling waste, nosed through the gate like a sick animal seeking shelter. It was coated in a thick, fresh plaster of mud, the license plate a meaningless brown smudge. Behind the wheel, peering through a windshield smeared by an ineffective wiper, was the boy. 'Niu.'
Wang's heart, a cynical organ, gave a tentative thump of hope. He strode forward, his contractor's eye automatically assessing. The truck's suspension was flattened, the tires bulging. It was heavily laden. Five tons, maybe more.
"Boss Wang! Your site is a proper maze!" the boy called out, clambering down with an easy grin that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Took me two bloody laps to find it!"
Wang grunted, dismissing the excuse. His attention was already on the cargo. He walked to the back of the truck, the harsh halogens revealing a tangled nest of rust-brown steel rods. Number three rebar, twisted and scarred from some past catastrophe, but thick and true. He hefted one end. Good weight. Better quality than the usual scrap-market dreck. The boy had come through on one promise, at least.
Then the boy asked the question, wiping his hands on his filthy jeans. "Boss Wang… you still need hands tonight? For the moving? I may not look like much, but I've got strength to spare."
Wang looked at him, then at the six Everest-sized piles of brick waiting in the trucks. A single, skinny kid. The thought was laughable. But desperation was a curious negotiator. "Can you unload a truck?" he asked, his voice flat.
"I can unload allof them," the boy said, and there was a strange, new certainty in his voice that hadn't been there before.
What Wang Jianshe witnessed over the next hour defied all his years of site experience. The boy, 'Niu', went to the site toilet—a reeking plastic cubicle—and emerged a minute later. Nothing seemed different. He was still slight, his frame swimming in a cheap, stained hoodie.
Then he started to work.
It began normally. He hefted a stack of bricks. Then another, laid crosswise. Then another. The stack grew in his arms, a rising wall of fired clay that soon eclipsed his head, weighing, by Wang's practiced estimate, over four hundred jin. A back-breaking, staggering load for two men. The boy lifted it, not with a straining heave, but with a smooth, unsettling power that seemed to flow from the ground up. He didn't walk. He jogged. A steady, ground-eating trot from truck to stacking area, his arms locked, the mountain of bricks impossibly stable. He deposited them with a soft, precise crash, turned on his heel, and jogged back for more.
He didn't sweat. He didn't grunt. He didn't pause. He was a machine. A piston of terrifying, silent efficiency. The other night workers—a few electricians running conduit, a watchman—stopped to stare. The slap-slap-slapof brick on brick became a rapid, metronomic beat. One truck was cleared, then half of another. The boy moved with a preternatural awareness, never fumbling, never misstepping on the littered ground.
Wang Jianshe's initial derision melted into astonishment, then into something like superstitious awe. This wasn't a worker; this was a phenomenon. A force of nature in a grubby hoodie. His phone rang—the primary contractor again. For the first time that day, Wang answered with a thread of genuine confidence in his voice. "It's handled. The yard will be clear by morning."
He hung up and watched the boy, a speculative gleam entering his eyes. This was no ordinary migrant laborer. This was… an asset. A secret weapon. In a fit of unprecedented generosity, born of sheer, relieved gratitude, he pulled out his phone and called the auntie who ran the site canteen night shift.
"Saozi," he barked, his voice uncharacteristically warm. "Cook more noodles. A lot more. There's a lad here, a temporary hand, working like a demon. Don't be stingy with the pork. Use the good leg meat in the freezer. All of it. This one… this one has earned it." He looked at the slight figure effortlessly conquering the mountain of brick, a machine of perfect, silent labor, and allowed himself a small, triumphant smile. The night, suddenly, was full of possibility.