Chapter 21: In Pursuit of Trifles
On the second floor, Yamazaki stood inside the room, his legs trembling.
Through the shattered glass, he had a clear view of what was happening below.
The violent gang of nearly twenty people, all tough characters who had spilled blood and even taken lives, were surprisingly so weak and vulnerable.
It's one thing to laugh it off while watching it in a movie.
If it were to happen in real life, it would make one's spine shiver.
Yes, there were indeed such terrifying swordsmen in the shogunate who had the privilege to slay commoners. However, their numbers were few and far between. With a population of over a hundred million in Yingzhou, how many such people could there be? One hundred? Two hundred? Many would go their entire lives without ever encountering such a person.
Imagine this: you're sitting in a room with dozens of people, when suddenly, someone barges in with a lead pipe. At first, you try to reassure yourself that it's nothing, but as the sound draws closer, you start to feel restless and begin to sweat. You try to calm yourself down by drinking water, but the noise keeps getting louder. Finally, when it seems like the chaos is receding, you find yourself feeling scared instead of relieved.
As the footsteps stopped outside the door and someone knocked, the sensation of fear crawled up my spine to its highest point.
His scalp was tingling.
He heard the sound of knocking and struggled to swallow his saliva.
Although the dramatic reversal from hunter to hunted was difficult to adjust to, his strong mental resilience enabled him to quickly calm down.
Tidy up his clothes and appearance.
He even voluntarily opened the door.
He thought to himself that he was different from those gangsters, his identity was clean, his hands were not stained with blood, he ran a legitimate business and everything he did was legal and compliant, once he signed the contract, it had legal effect.
He imagined maintaining a calm attitude as usual and negotiating with the other party.
There is nothing that cannot be discussed.
He thought so.
At the moment when he opened the door, at the moment when he was about to stand and speak, before he even realized it, he had already fallen to the ground.
Falling to the ground, all of his bones seemed to be disintegrating with a strange cracking sound.
Several attempts to stand up ended in failure.
He struggled to move his neck and could only lift his head to the height of the other's knee.
"I am not…" Yamazaki said with difficulty, "I am not a gangster."
"Well, I know," the other replied calmly. "You're not even as good as a gangster."
Bai Wei picked up the briefcase that the other had dropped, opened it, and grabbed a stack of contracts, which he looked at in the dim light.
He laughed and said, "So many loophole-laden contracts… designing them must be quite challenging!"
Bai Wei dragged Yamazaki to the sofa and threw him onto it, opened the nearby liquor cabinet, poured a drink and put it in front of him.
"Have a drink, it will relieve the pain."
Yamazaki didn't dare to resist; usually he abstained from drinking as much as possible, but he forced himself to finish the whole bottle of whiskey.
He drank some alcohol, and the pain subsided slightly. His courage also recovered somewhat under the influence of alcohol.
"Who…are you, exactly?"
"The person that goes with righteousness."
"Are you seeking wealth? Or revenge?" Yamazaki asked. "But no matter what you are doing, it has nothing to do with me."
"Don't be so agitated," Bai Wei raised a finger. "Actually, we met just a few days ago, but it seems like you have forgotten me."
"I…" Yamazaki still didn't recognize him. The Ming Country person who was battered and bruised a few days ago looked completely different in demeanor compared to Bai Wei at this moment.
"That's not important. Let's talk about these matters," Bai Wei threw the contract in front of him.
Yamazaki turned pale. "These contracts are all legal."
Curiously, Bai Wei asked, "How many families have been ruined and destroyed by using these standardized contracts?"
Yamazaki cursed inwardly, how could he possibly remember.
Bai Wei pulled out a very old loan contract and asked again, "Guan Tuoren, do you remember this?"
Yamazaki kept his head down and didn't answer.
Bai Wei asked again, "And Guan Ling, do you remember?"
Yamazaki couldn't help but say, "If it's money you need, I can give you a lot of money. You have such great abilities and even this land can be yours. Why do you need to say these things, you…"
Bai Wei remained silent.
Yamazaki continued, "I can stop and completely separate from the Sanada Group! You can take and burn all these contracts. My relationship with Sanada Ryoichi is simply a mutually beneficial one, I'm not even a gangster."
Bai Wei smiled.
He coughed, pretending to be serious, but soon couldn't help but laugh again.
"Uh, do you know?"
"You saying this is nothing new, I've heard it countless times while being a part-time interrogator. It's always the same old story."
"The more you are certain that I came for my own gain, the further you are from the correct answer… Congratulations, you have missed the last opportunity for defense."
"Although your appearance of trying hard to persuade looks awkward, you have persisted in the basic values of a villain, which is quite cool."
Yamazaki's face was full of astonishment. He wondered what he had said wrong.
"Do you not understand?"
Bai Wei picked up the lighter from the desk, lit the flame, and burned the contract, with the dirty signature and red fingerprints burning in the flames. "You didn't even remember the signature on the contract… In your eyes, are those people as worthless as cattle? You're beyond redemption."
What is he saying?
…signature on the contract?
…those pigs?
Yamazaki's mind went blank, then he found the situation absurd, even feeling angry and irrational.
Isn't the existence of this group of people just to be exploited for profit, all for the sake of a lowly group of civilians?
Since ancient times, it has always been this way: whether it is by gangs, by shoguns, by court nobles…that group of people is like weeds, no matter how much you try to eradicate them, they continue to multiply! Who cares if more people die, they don't even care about the life and death of another commoner. Even among commoners, they compete with each other to form classes, and engage in cycle after cycle of exploitation. He is just one of them, so what is there to be blamed or hated for?
Yamazaki's shirt was soaked with cold sweat, "Are you going to kill me?"
He shouted absurdly, "Just for a few names you don't even know, you want to kill me?"
"Not exactly. At least one of the names here is one I recognize, and… " Bai Wei threw the papers into the trash bin and watched them burn. "A few days ago, you forced me to sign in this warehouse too."
Hearing this sentence, Yamazaki's ears buzzed, and he finally remembered who the young man in front of him was.
"It's…you, you are that person from the Ming Country…"
His face turned pale, and his lips trembled.
"I, I can swear that I won't bother you again. Let me go back, and I promise the Sanada Group won't interfere in the acquisition business anymore!"
"I will return to my hometown later and will no longer do evil things. I can become a monk! I will eat vegetarian and recite Buddhist scriptures!"
"All my savings can be given to you, I promise, promise…"
Bai Wei still said nothing, only quietly looked at him.
"How could you kill me!"
"I'm a citizen! I still have the legal person license issued by the shogunate! Do you know how much business is under me? This is just one of the companies I deal with!"
"The Sanada Group is a violent gang. If you kill me, will they let you go? Even if you are not afraid of the Sanada Group, there is still the Kanto Federation behind it!"
"The Sanada Group is just a second-rate group under the Kanto Federation! It is not the real main faction! I am an adopted son of the Yamazaki family, but my real surname is Fujiwara!"
"How serious do you think the consequences will be if you kill me?"
"You are not afraid of death, you are not afraid of implicating everyone else!"
Trembling with fear, he hoarsely yelled, "How could you kill me!"
Bai Wei just gazed at him quietly.
He had seen such people before, and had encountered many of them. In the aristocracy of the old imperial era, there were far too many people who were more disgusting and ruthless than him.
Those people never believed they were guilty, even to their deaths. They firmly believed they could ascend to heaven and enter paradise…
When they died, they were still unclear about what they had done wrong, and they truly couldn't comprehend a logic.
Why would someone come to take one's life for pulling a few extra blades of grass or accidentally stepping on a few more ants?
Is it worth it?
History, past, present and even future, there are countless people like these insignificant blades of grass. You should stand with us, do you really need to care about them?
Same questions were answered by Bai Wei tirelessly.
"Why?"
"Because…"
"Go to hell, who's on the same side as you?"
