Chapter 75: Unexpected Incident
"Dried salted fish? Yes, yes, yes. Give me two kilograms. This thing is hard to find." When Shen Wenyu heard that Tang Yuan had dried salted fish, he immediately expressed his need.
Second Aunt was listening nearby and also asked Tang Yuan for a pound of dried salted fish.
The price of dried salted fish is 1.3 yuan per pound, which is slightly cheaper than the price of bacon. The two of us ordered three pounds in total.
Afterwards, Tang Yuan went to see Aunt Cao again. She wanted more, a total of five kilograms.
Eight pounds of dried salted fish, priced at 10.4 yuan.
Not nearly enough.
On the tea purchasing side, the supply of tender tea has been decreasing these days, but at least 100 kilograms of tea are delivered every day. Even if the minimum delivery is only 100 kilograms, she still has to spend 20 yuan every day.
Although the salted fish business is viable and profitable, it is still far from enough to cover the expenses of purchasing tea.
Her savings for this month were barely enough, but she had also promised to go out and get information about buying old tea. Even if she calculated it at 30 yuan a day, she would still have to prepare a few hundred yuan more.
Unless there is a large order in the future, she will have to sell dried salted fish pound by pound to earn the money, and she will have to sell more than 200 pounds of dried salted fish to make this money.
That morning, apart from going to the market near her residence in Xiangjiang to sell tea, she spent the rest of the time near the machinery factory, looking for old customers who wanted to buy eggs and promoting dried salted fish.
The results were significant, but the revenue was not much.
A day passed quickly, and she put on her purse, carried a bag of tea, and got on the bus to the big market.
The road was full of worries. She could now sell at least 70 to 80 kilograms of tea leaves in the Xiangjiang market every day. In more than half a month, she had earned a full 12,000 yuan.
This amount of money is not a small amount even in Hong Kong, but what she lacked at the moment was not Hong Kong dollars, but RMB. At that time, the mainland had not yet opened up, and the Hong Kong dollars on hand could not be exchanged into RMB.
When she arrived at the market, she got off the car carrying a big bag and sold tea at the market gate as she had done in the previous few days.
Sales were a little slower today, but they were still sold out while it was still daylight.
After packing up, she walked into the market and came to Aunt Lan and Aunt Li’s stall.
"Did he give you a good price yesterday?" Aunt Lan asked.
"Yes," Tang Yuan nodded, "Ten yuan a pound, the price is quite reasonable. If it weren't here, it would be difficult for me to get such a good price."
"There have been a lot of fish in the past two years," Auntie Lan said casually, looking down at something. "Many people who have illegally crossed here from the mainland have no way to survive, so they choose to go fishing to make money. When they go out to sea, no one checks their ID, so the price of fish must have dropped."
"Smuggled in?" Tang Yuan asked subconsciously.
"Yes," Auntie Lan looked up at her, and seeing her expression, she thought she didn't understand, so she smiled and said, "A lot of people, life in the mainland is not easy now, so many people will try to sneak over. Anyway, there is only a bay between them. They don't have documents, so they can't go to busy places, so they can only hide in places far away. The sea is a good hiding place."
"So that's how it is. I didn't know that before," Tang Yuan said without changing his expression. "So where do they live?"
"Live in..." Auntie Lan mentioned a few places and warned her, "Don't go there. It's very chaotic there now. It's not safe for a girl like you to go there."
"I understand." Tang Yuan nodded.
She would not go over and get close to those people just because they were her compatriots. After all, they were "extremely poor and vicious". They had risked their lives to sneak across the border, so they must be ruthless people. If she went over and talked to them, she might be treated as a fool.
However, since some people have sneaked in, there is a high probability that they have RMB hidden on them.
After finishing today's transaction with Aunt Lan, Tang Yuan went to buy another ten kilograms of dried salted fish. Just like before, he put the dried salted fish into a bag, pretending that the bag was filled with rags, and got on the bus.
The bus arrived at its destination and she got off and was about to walk towards her residence when she suddenly remembered the Cantonese spoken with a Mandarin accent that she had heard last time when she bought old newspapers and books.
The man last time... Tang Yuan carefully recalled the man's appearance, but he didn't remember it clearly. But since the man dared to do the scrap business, he should have something to rely on, or he must have some skills.
Most of the people who had sneaked in were gathered together, so she didn't dare to go through. If she let them through, maybe there would be no problem.
As she thought about it, she looked up at the sky. At this moment, the days in the entire northern hemisphere were getting longer and longer. The sky that usually got dark was still bright, and it was not yet the chaotic night.
After confirming this, Tang Yuan turned around and headed towards the scrap yard. If he could meet the man from last time, maybe they could have a conversation and see if the other person was willing to make the trip.
I just don't know where that person is now.
Tang Yuan walked into the alley, and looked carefully every time she turned a corner to make sure there was no one there before moving forward. Who would have thought that she would walk around for more than 20 minutes without meeting anyone.
As the sky gradually darkened, she frowned, confirmed the direction, and went back in the direction she had walked when she bought the scraps. After walking for another five minutes, she suddenly heard a crash coming from the front.
The noise was so loud that she subconsciously hid in a corner.
Just as I was about to leave, I heard a sound.
"So it's a woman. She's trying to steal our business, huh? She doesn't take us brothers seriously!"
"Women are more interesting."
Tang Yuan stopped in his tracks as he was about to leave, carefully moved to the corner, and leaned over the corner to look in the direction of the fight.
In a dim alley not far away, four men were standing around a person, two of them were holding knives, and the person in the middle was surrounded. His hair was cut very short and his face was smeared with black. At first glance, he looked like a man.
But she was injured at this moment, and her clothes were torn, revealing the clothes underneath. Everyone could be sure that she was not a man but a woman.
Tang Yuan moved his neck to avoid the back of one of the thugs' head, and finally saw the complete appearance of the man being besieged. The memory in his mind gradually became clear.
Isn't this the person who spoke Cantonese with a Mandarin accent that she met last time?
She clenched her bag tightly.
The besieged man suddenly launched an attack. He kicked at one of the men who did not have a knife, grabbed his hand and pulled it hard, causing him to howl.
During this process, another knife slashed at her, leaving another long wound on her arm.
Tang Yuan saw it clearly. If the man had not dodged the knife quickly, he would have been killed.
For the first time, she faced the lawlessness of some people in Hong Kong at that time.
"What does it matter if you are strong? You will still be chopped by the knife? Do you really think you know martial arts?" The thug who chopped the woman said with a smile, "I advise you to be obedient and stop struggling now. You still have a life. If you don't behave, I don't know where the next knife will hit you."
"Bah, you want to keep your life and become a prostitute? Unless I die, I will never surrender!" The woman avoided carefully, and because of the wounds on her body, she subconsciously covered the wounds. The sweat on her head showed that she was in severe pain at this moment.
"What's wrong with that? You can still have a good life if you take that road, but you want to steal our business here. I think you want to die!"
"Come on! Let's see who dies first!" The woman blinked, sweat dripping from her eyes, and blood seeped out from the gaps between her fingers that were covering the wound.
"Then go to hell!"
The knife slashed at the woman.
"Bang--"
The bullet hit the man holding the knife in the back.
The woman was the first to react. She reached out to snatch the knife from the man who was shot, and stabbed the other man with the knife with her backhand. After pulling it out, she stabbed the man who was shot with the knife again.
After that there were no weapons and no injured people.
In the end, it was the person whose hand was dislocated by her.
Then she looked up at Tang Yuan at the entrance of the alley, her face covered in blood. "Go!"
Tang Yuan looked at what happened in front of him in a very short time, immediately put away the gun in his hand, turned around and ran out of the alley, back to the bustling neighborhood, suppressed the fear and tension in his heart, and slowly returned to his residence step by step.
When she arrived at the game space, she immediately threw the gun aside.
She used this gun for self-defense. She had learned how to shoot from Sun Dong before. She thought she had always been careful and cautious and there would never be a time when she would need it. She didn't expect it to suddenly appear today.
She thought about the situations of those people and couldn't stop her heart from beating.
But Hong Kong was really in chaos at that time. Before it even got dark, someone was trying to kill someone in public. It was so scary.
After she calmed down a little, she immediately took a long hot bath and did not leave until the next afternoon when she had to sell tea and deliver purses.
Three days passed like this. When she felt that everything was fine, she went out in the morning to sell tea at the nearby market.
She didn't hear any news in the market, as if the incident with those thugs had never happened.
But after selling tea in the morning and packing up to leave, she saw a familiar figure.
She pursed her lips and stood still.
The other person came over and whispered to her, "Talk to me somewhere else?"
Tang Yuan nodded and followed her to the edge. He was still nervous and held the bag carefully.
The other person lowered his head, glanced at her hands, and said softly: "That person was still alive after you took action. I was the last one to take action."
Tang Yuan looked up suddenly, suspecting that she knew what he was thinking.
The other party smiled and said, "You are a law-abiding citizen, and you certainly don't want to be responsible for someone's death. However, those people deserved to die. They were poisoned, and if they were alive, they would harm the people."
Hearing this, Tang Yuan finally breathed a sigh of relief. Regardless of anything else, anyone who has been exposed to drugs deserves to be put to death. This should be an idea engraved in the bones of every Chinese.
She listened to the other person's Cantonese accent and spoke in Mandarin: "Are you okay? I saw that you were seriously injured that day, and did you encounter any danger later that day?"
After hearing her words, the other party looked at her in surprise and asked in Mandarin: "You can actually speak Mandarin?"
"Well, someone in my family is from the mainland," Tang Yuan loosened his grip on the bag and looked at the previous injuries on the other person's body, "Are you okay?"
"It's not bad," he nodded. "After you ran away, I dealt with you for a while, and then I ran away too. There are many cases of slashing in Hong Kong, and the police don't care. No one will care about this case either. But you must be panicked when you suddenly encounter such a thing. If it wasn't for me, you definitely wouldn't do it."
"I just think I shouldn't see you get into trouble," Tang Yuan said, looking at the pale face of the person in front of him. He was glad that he brought a gun and that she was okay. "Since you are okay, then this matter is over. That's good."