What Are They Doing 2022 Chapter 4

1

Li Cu watched Yang Hao light a cigarette. He went up and tried to grab it but Yang Hao grabbed his hand and stopped him.

The two men looked at each other for a moment before Li Cu yanked his hand back and shook his arm out.

This strength…Yang Hao had practiced well.

“It’s not much money this time,” Li Cu said to him. “Among the things you’ve learned, there’s no such thing as free service, right?”

“I’ll temporarily increase the price,” Yang Hao took the cigarette out of his mouth and released a mouthful of smoke, “when you call for help.”

Li Cu looked at him and smiled.

Su Wan was off to the side, making a phone call, “There’s nothing better? I don’t need insurance. My parents don’t need the payout if I die. I need someone with rich experience. Yes, yes, I know I’m the team leader but there’s no rule that the leader can’t hire another leader.”

Su Wan hung up the phone and said to the two of them, “Their vehicles aren’t any good. The A-pillars⁽¹⁾ won’t be able to withstand the impact if the the vehicles roll over. We’ll have to change cars.”

Li Cu looked at the other people gathered by the side of the road. The motorcade had converged here, and many people from the civilian rescue team were busy loading and unloading the equipment.

“These people regard saving people as a hobby,” Yang Hao said.

Su Wan sighed, “You’re still saying that?”

Yang Hao turned around and flicked his cigarette butt into the sand. He used so much force that the sparks from the cigarette butt flashed like a streaking bullet, forming an afterimage in the air before hitting the sand in a shower of dying sparks.

Then, he peed in the desert by the side of the road, watching the sunset in the distance.

2

In Wushanju, Wang Meng looked at his father sitting in a chair with a blank expression on his face.

He was sitting at the cash register, looking at his unresponsive father with a very complicated feeling in his heart.

If his father still remembered him, Wang Meng knew he certainly wouldn’t be able to get along with him because he could never forgive his father for what happened with his mother.

But his father didn’t recognize him now. It seemed that the part he had hated so much had disappeared because his father’s personality had changed.

He turned back to his computer, where he was registering Wushanju’s online shop. It had always been a business venture he wanted to start.

Now that the online store was successfully registered, he needed to upload a product for testing.

He wasn’t very good at using the system yet, and his computer was also new. There was only his father’s photo ID card in the picture folder from when he had taken him to re-apply for an ID card after he was released from prison.

When he uploaded it, he clicked on his father’s ID photo, wrote “Dad” as the name of the product, marked it with a price of 99,999,999 yuan, and then clicked upload.

The system was well made. As soon as he refreshed the page, the first product appeared in Wushanju’s online shop:

Dad: 99,999,999 yuan.

He was very satisfied. Now all he had to do was take some beautiful photos of the things in the shop and upload them.

Actually, this was a very tedious job.

He got up and went to the back to take a dump. Although the doctor told him not to play with his phone while squatting like that, he still started flipping through a bunch of short videos anyways.

Then, he suddenly saw a notification pop up in the online store’s mobile app: Goods have been bought.

Wang Meng paused. Within seconds, another message popped up in his e-wallet: 99,999,999 yuan has been deposited.

Wang Meng couldn’t believe it at all and looked at it carefully. That’s right, he thought to himself with a sneer. It must be some kind of new scam.

He opened his e-wallet and saw that the latest deposit really was 99,999,999 yuan.

Wang Meng rubbed his eyes and looked again.

There was no doubt

It was 99,999,999 yuan.

He swore, “Fuck me.”

Then, another notification popped up on the online store’s app: The customer has confirmed receipt of the goods.

Wang Meng, feeling puzzled, pulled up his pants and went outside, only to discover that his father’s chair was empty and his father was gone.

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Author’s Note:

These “What Are They Doing” chapters will consist of a lot of short stories which may or may not be related to each other or the main story.

<What Are They Doing 2022 Chapter 3><Table of Contents><What Are They Doing 2022 Chapter 5>

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TN Notes:

(1) Pillars are the vertical or nearly vertical supports of a car’s window area—designated respectively as the A, B, C or D-pillar, moving from front to rear, in profile view. So the A-Pillar is either one of two support posts that are positioned on either side of the windshield. More info here.