Tòumíng arrived home as Ghost Claw pulled up to the villa's front gate. He unbuckled his seatbelt and turned to her.
"Thanks for the drive. And for... everything tonight. The party. Letting me process. All of it."
Ghost Claw nodded, her gas mask reflecting the dashboard lights. "No problemo. Get some rest. You've had a long day."
"That's an understatement."
"I know."
Tòumíng climbed out of the car, closed the door, and watched as Ghost Claw's sedan pulled away, taillights disappearing around the corner. The villa stood before him—dark, empty, silent. Měi Nán still wasn't back.
He fumbled with his keys at the front door, his alcohol-compromised coordination making the simple task frustratingly difficult. Finally, he got the door open and stepped inside.
The moment his foot crossed the threshold, exhaustion hit him like a physical force. The adrenaline from the day, the emotional trauma, the regeneration, the drinking—all of it crashed down simultaneously.
He made it approximately three steps into the foyer before his legs gave out.
Tòumíng collapsed face-first onto the marble floor and immediately passed out, his body sprawled in an undignified heap.
"WAKE UP!"
Cupid's voice cut through the unconsciousness like a foghorn.
"Wake up, you idiot! Your boyfriend is worried sick about you!"
Tòumíng's eyes snapped open, his face still pressed against the cold marble. He groaned and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees.
"Měi Nán isn't worried about me. And he's not my boyfriend."
"Oh REALLY?" Cupid's voice dripped with sarcasm. "You usually text him every five minutes like a clingy teenager. Suddenly you've forgotten to contact him for over TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. You don't think that's extremely worrying? You don't think he might be concerned that you're lying dead in a ditch somewhere?"
Tòumíng's alcohol-fogged brain slowly processed this information.
OH SHIT.
He scrambled to his feet, patting his pockets for his phone before remembering—
"My phone burned up in the explosion."
"Yes. Which means Měi Nán has been calling and texting a dead number for an entire day, getting increasingly panicked with each failed attempt to reach you."
"SHIT!"
Tòumíng ran his hands through his hair, pacing the foyer. He needed to contact Měi Nán. Needed to explain. Needed to—
Wait.
Another realization hit him.
"SHIT! I can't buy anything! My phone is gone! I need to get a new phone but I don't have—"
Then a third realization.
"DOUBLE SHIT! THE AZURITE PEBBLE!"
His hand flew to his pocket—or where his pocket would have been if he was wearing the clothes he'd had at Hǔtān's restaurant. The clothes that had burned up in the explosion. The clothes that had contained the one-and-a-half-million-yuan compressed gem.
Gone. All of it. His insurance policy, his bargaining chip, his entire financial safety net—incinerated.
"You're an IDIOT!" Cupid's voice was equal parts exasperated and sympathetic. "You brought your most valuable possession to a confrontation with a gang leader! What did you THINK was going to happen?!"
Tòumíng stopped pacing and leaned against the wall, his head spinning—partially from alcohol, partially from the cascading series of financial disasters he was mentally calculating.
No azurite. No phone. No way to contact anyone. And he still had monthly debt payments due to three loan sharks, Hǔtān was presumably out of commission, but the others would still expect their money.
He needed to be frugal. Extremely frugal. Until he could get back to the mine and find more gems, he was operating on whatever cash reserves he had left.
Tòumíng ran upstairs to his bedroom—the master suite with its absurdly large bed and floor-to-ceiling windows—and went directly to his closet.
In the back, hidden behind some clothes Měi Nán had bought him, was a shoebox containing his emergency cash reserves. Money he'd kept liquid rather than putting in a bank account, because banks asked questions about where nineteen-year-old miners got large sums of yuan.
He pulled out the shoebox and counted quickly.
Twenty thousand yuan. In various denominations. All that remained of his gem sales after expenses, after the mining auction entry fee, after living costs.
Twenty thousand yuan to cover phone replacement, food, transportation, and debt payments until the mine reopened.
"This is fine," he muttered to himself, grabbing a fanny pack from his closet—another purchase from his brief period of financial optimism. "This is totally fine. I can work with this."
He stuffed the cash into the fanny pack, strapped it around his waist under his shirt for security, and headed back downstairs.
His electric bike was still parked outside, thankfully, nobody had stolen it during his absence. He climbed on, his newly-regenerated body protesting the movement after hours of drinking and passing out on hard floors, and started pedaling.
The ride from Guanlan Lake to the poor district took an hour and thirty minutes. Tòumíng's legs burned, his head pounded with the beginning of a hangover, and the early morning sun was starting to peek over the horizon by the time he arrived.
The poor district looked exactly how he remembered, run-down buildings, trash in the streets, the smell of poverty and desperation that he'd grown up with. It felt surreal to be back here after living in a luxury villa, like visiting a past life.
He locked his bike to a street post and started walking, scanning the storefronts for what he needed.
There—a Xiaomi phone store. Not one of the flagship locations you'd find in wealthy shopping districts, but a smaller, independent retailer that sold legitimate products at slightly inflated prices because they knew their customers had limited options.
The storefront looked relatively nice, clean windows, bright signage, security cameras visible. Exactly what Tòumíng wanted. A place that looked expensive enough to have quality products but was still accessible to someone operating on a limited budget.
He pushed open the door, triggering a electronic chime.
Immediately, a man in a tuxedo, which seemed absurd for a phone store, but apparently this place was trying to project luxury—stepped in front of him.
The man looked Tòumíng up and down with barely-concealed disdain, taking in his appearance: the loose-fit skull-print t-shirt borrowed from Polo, the oversized black sweatpants, the fanny pack strapped around his waist, the general disheveled appearance of someone who'd been through hell in the past twenty-four hours.
"Sorry, sir." The word "sir" was delivered with just enough inflection to make it clear he didn't mean it respectfully. "This is a wealthy phone store. Premium products for premium customers."
He paused, his eyes lingering on Tòumíng's fanny pack and cheap clothes.
"Can you afford our items?"