Chapter 5: Robbing the Foreign Firm

He Yuzhu carried that Type 38 Arisaka, which was almost as tall as he was, and swaggered as he kicked open the heavy door of the foreign firm.

"Oh! Your Excellency! Greetings!" Behind the counter, the manager, sporting a slicked-back center-parted hairstyle, instantly filled his face with a fawning smile, nodding and bowing as he came forward, "What brings you here today? What would you like to purchase?"

He Yuzhu didn't even lift his eyelids; the Type 38 Arisaka in his hand went "thud" as the butt of the rifle landed heavily on the polished floor.

He took out that "officer's ID," flashed it briefly before the manager's eyes, then tucked it back into his pocket, and commanded in broken Chinese, in a rough, gruff voice: "The Military Police need two tons of rice! Fifty cans of baby formula! Two hundred catties of salt! Yours! Have it or not?"

"Yes, yes, yes! We have it all!" The manager nodded like a chick pecking at rice, his waist bent almost to ninety degrees, "We have formula from the Netherlands, and also from the British Empire; the quality of the Dutch one is top-notch, it's just the price, it's a little expensive!" The manager rubbed his hands, testing the waters cautiously.

"Want the Dutch one! Exactly how much money per can!"

"Re... reporting to Your Excellency, the Dutch one is one Big Ocean per can." The manager's voice trembled as he stole a glance at that ugly face of "Your Excellency."

"What are you looking at? Yours, lead the way! Mine, needs to go to the warehouse to inspect the goods!" He Yuzhu poked the manager's shoulder with the cold muzzle of the gun.

The smile on the manager's face froze instantly, and the corners of his mouth twitched as if he were having a cramp: "Yo... Your Excellency... this... the warehouse is a restricted area, outsiders are not allowed in." Fine beads of sweat broke out on his forehead.

"Baka yaro! Who is an outsider! Yours, your conscience is greatly bad!" He Yuzhu was instantly "enraged" and violently pulled the bolt of the rifle!

A crisp "clatter" sounded, exceptionally piercing in the quiet foreign firm!

The pitch-black muzzle was pressed directly against the manager's forehead.

The manager was scared out of his wits, his face turned pale as paper in a "whoosh," his legs went soft, and he almost knelt down, "Your Excellency, calm your anger! Your Excellency, calm your anger! This small one deserves to die! This small one will lead the way right now! Going right now!" He dared not waste another half-sentence and scrambled to lead the way in front.

The manager tremblingly opened the large brass lock and pushed open the heavy, iron-clad door. Inside the warehouse were rows of shelves, piled high with all kinds of goods.

The manager led He Yuzhu to a corner of the warehouse and stopped; here were rows of storage shelves, filled with all sorts of things. There were cans of formula of various sizes; colorful candies; sake in glass bottles, canned goods in tin, boxes of matches—the items were simply dazzling!

In the corner, there were also mountains of sacks stamped with "Northeast Rice" and bags of snow-white flour.

Seeing these goods, even He Yuzhu, who had seen the world, had his eyes light up! In this era of chaos and war, to still have such abundant goods, it was simply a mountain of gold and silver!

Just as the manager was bowing and scraping in front of him, preparing to introduce the items, He Yuzhu suddenly raised his palm and precisely chopped down on the back of the manager's neck!

The fawning look on the manager's face hadn't even faded when his eyes rolled back, and he collapsed to the ground with a "thud."

At this moment, He Yuzhu was like a mouse that had entered a rice jar; he didn't delay for a single second! He moved his hands rapidly, and wherever he passed, the mountains of formula cans, boxes of candy, canned goods, bags of refined rice and white flour... one by one, pile by pile, they disappeared into thin air!

Just as he was having a field day in the warehouse, a loud shout suddenly came from outside the warehouse door, "Wu-san! Wu-san! Get out here! The Military Police urgently need 5 tons of white sugar! Immediately! Load the truck right now!!"

He Yuzhu's heart sank! His movements froze instantly! He didn't have the slightest hesitation; he grabbed the collar of the unconscious manager on the ground, and with a thought, he and the person vanished from the spot with a "whoosh"!

A Japanese man wearing round-rimmed glasses and a suit walked in, cursing and swearing: "Baka! Wu-san! Where the hell did you go to slack off?" Seeing no one answer, he wandered around the mountains of goods like a headless fly, muttering curses under his breath.

Finding no one, he kicked the rice sack next to him in a fit of rage, sending dust flying, and only then did he turn around, cursing, and slam the door as he left.

He Yuzhu's figure appeared quietly like a ghost.

He began to spare no effort in collecting the mountains of rice and white flour.

Not until a car drove into the courtyard did He Yuzhu quickly hunch over and nimbly circle to the deepest part of the warehouse.

That section was piled with discarded empty wooden crates; he used his hands and feet to pry open a dusty, inconspicuous ventilation window and "slipped" out.

His small figure instantly merged into the hustle and bustle of Wangfujing and disappeared without a trace.

In the Siheyuan, He Yuzhu pushed open the creaking door of his home.

A faint scent of freshly boiled rice porridge, mixed with the familiar smell of medicine, drifted out.

On the kang, his mother Shen Guizhi was half-leaning against the bedding; although she was still haggard, the alarming sallow color on her face had faded quite a bit, revealing a faint flush, and her eyes were no longer the stagnant pool they had been yesterday.

Seeing him return, Shen Guizhi's eyes held a question, and also hid a trace of deep worry: "Zhuzi, you, how come you skipped school again? When your father comes back, he will definitely spank you!"

"I asked for some time off! Went out to buy formula for my sister. My father is unreliable; he snatched two Big Oceans from my hands, promising to buy formula for my sister, but changed his mind in the blink of an eye. Mother, you be careful of him!"

"You stinky brat, how can you talk about your father like that! He took your money because business at Dongxing Lou isn't good and it might close down; he's worried in his heart, afraid our family will run out of food."

He Yuzhu grinned and, as if performing a magic trick, pulled two cans of formula with iron tins printed with foreign text he couldn't read from his tattered schoolbag.

"Mother! Look, this is formula; you can mix it with hot water later, and then you can give it to my sister to drink. This stuff is super expensive."

Shen Guizhi's gaze fell on the two cans of formula shining with a metallic luster, then slowly shifted to her son's small face, which had been blown red by the cold wind. She immediately shed tears of emotion.

"Zhuzi, did you buy this formula at a proper shop?"

"Of course! Could it be stolen?"

"Mother believes you, it's just that I'm still a little scared in my heart." Her voice carried an irrepressible tremor.

"Mother! Just put your heart in your stomach! I bought this; yesterday, I actually found 8 Big Oceans and lied to my dad. I was afraid he would find another woman outside, so I only gave him two."

"Stinky brat, your father isn't that kind of person!"

He Yuzhu secretly slandered in his heart; He Daqing was just a scumbag father—anyone who could abandon his children to run off with a widow couldn't be a good person.

On the other side, the Special Higher Police interrogation room.

The commotion He Yuzhu caused during this "visit" was not small; it actually alarmed the Special Higher Police section chief Kameda Jiro, who prided himself on being a "Little Zhuge."

The light in the interrogation room was ghastly white, and the air was stagnant.

Kameda Jiro stared like a cold, poisonous snake at a clerk who worked at a Japanese firm, who was trembling like chaff on the opposite side.

"Yours, did you see clearly what that person looked like? Was he Chinese or Japanese?"

The clerk frowned, thought for a long time, and said: "Your Excellency, that person spoke Japanese, and the tone was exactly the same as yours. As for which country he is from, I really couldn't tell."

"He, what did he look like, do you still remember?"

"Your Excellency, I didn't dare look carefully, I just saw that he wasn't tall, probably, probably half a head shorter than me, his face wasn't big, thick eyebrows, those two eyebrows were almost touching each other, had dark circles, two little mustaches, and several black moles on his face, really not good-looking!"

Kameda Jiro kept drawing with the pencil in his hand, and when the clerk finished speaking, he handed his sketch to the clerk to look at.

After the clerk finished looking, he thought for a moment and said: "His eyes were bigger than the ones you drew, and his mouth was smaller than the portrait; I, I can only remember this much."