From Uncle You's briefing, Zhang Yi learned the attackers called themselves the Tianhe Gang—a band of construction workers who rented in groups and claimed ties to Tianhe Group to save face. Their leader was a wiry, short man named Huang Tianfang. They weren't amateur scum; they had numbers, brutality, and the kind of experience that made a crowd dangerous.
Zhang Yi ruled out a direct strike. His real edge was the apartment itself—his "steel fortress." Leaving it to hunt twenty-plus men in the storm, even armed, would be recklessly foolish. Instead he and Uncle You agreed on a quieter strategy: don't engage the gang head-on yet. Let the neighbors stew; when the Tianhe Gang retaliated at scale, those same neighbors would beg for protection and reveal their positions. Survival, he knew, was often about picking the right moment.
Neighbors tried to moral-blackmail Zhang Yi and Uncle You into leading a counterattack, inventing reasons—age, lack of food, fear—to excuse their own inaction. Zhang Yi ignored the noise and set Uncle You and Zhou Ke'er to work gathering intelligence. Their reconnaissance produced a chilling map of local danger:
Tianhe Gang (Building 26): No firearms, but brute force and numbers. Their homemade dynamite had been crippled by Zhang Yi's last defense—several members were dead, two more badly injured—so their explosive capability was limited.
Kuanglang Gang (Building 21): A mix of students and petty thugs, led by Wang Qiang and Xiao Lu—young, reckless, and tenacious; around a dozen members.
The Tianhe Gang hated Zhang Yi for the losses they'd taken, but they feared his fortified apartment and the unknown costs of attacking it. So they lashed out elsewhere, brutal and calculating: they struck neighbors and left a message written in blood on a wall—"Zhang Yi, if you don't come out, I'll kill all your neighbors!" —using innocent lives as bait to force him to reveal himself. The threat exposed the gang's tactic: coerce, terrorize, and turn the building's moral panic into a weapon against the one person who stood between them and open looting.