The world was still caught in that indecisive hour between the retreat of the stars and the full, brutal assertion of the sun when Michael guided the Wuling Sunshine out of Cinder Town. The settlement slept, a collection of huddled shadows breathing the shallow breath of exhaustion. The van, its missing windshield a yawning black socket, moved with a thief's caution, its engine a low grumble swallowed by the vast, pre-dawn silence. In the back, shifting and clinking with every bump, was the fruit of a night's desperate, degrading labor: his kingdom's treasure, bound for the scrapyard.
They had stripped the skeletal vehicles beyond the wall like carrion birds. The pickings were lean. Decades of scavenging had left only the bones—rusted frames and glassless windows. His haul was pathetic: two catalytic converters, heavy as sin and caked in strange, oxidized deposits; five copper engine bearings, green with verdigris; a tangled nest of wire, its insulation peeled away by calloused, impatient fingers; a few lumpen pieces of aluminum whose original purpose was a mystery lost to time. It was, in the grand ledger of interdimensional commerce, a joke. A few hundred pounds of metal, torn from the corpse of a dead civilization, to feed the living. He had no idea what it was worth, only that whatever pittance it fetched would be transformed into grain. A ton of it. The quality of that grain would be dictated entirely by the weight of these sorry metals in his van.
The journey to the cave was a short, grim pilgrimage. He couldhave opened the portal right there in the town's well-house, he supposed. The new, internal sense of the gateway was a constant, cool presence in his mind, a key waiting to be turned. But that was a secret for another day, a trump card to be kept close. Only Zach, loping alongside with the promise of an entire caseof Spicy Strips ensuring his silence, knew the full, humiliating extent of this errand.
The transition was, as ever, a gut-punch. One moment, the cool, mineral smell of the cave and Zach's hopeful grunt. The next, the damp, leafy aroma of the Shizhu Mountain pre-dawn, the distant groan of a garbage truck the sweetest music he'd ever heard. By ten a.m., the Wuling was parked on the oil-stained concrete of a scrapyard on Yangcheng's industrial fringe, a place where the city came to forget its metal sins.
The transaction was conducted with a brutal, unsentimental efficiency. A man in stained coveralls poked the catalytic converters with a magnet, weighed the copper bearing on a hook scale crusted with dirt, and eyed the aluminum with profound disinterest. The numbers on his calculator were a quiet tragedy. When the final tally was announced—one thousand, nine hundred and twenty-seven yuan—Michael felt a hollowness that had nothing to do with hunger. It was the sound of a grand, desperate plan landing with the thud of a tin can.
Added to the three hundred-odd yuan in his pocket, it was a war chest of 2,300. It felt obscenely small.
His next stop was the wholesale distributor, the one with the knowing smile and the back room. The proprietor, a Mr. Liu, greeted him not as a customer, but as a fellow conspirator in the grey-markets of survival. Twenty minutes later, Michael stood in a warehouse vast enough to hold a football field, the air thick with the dusty, comforting smell of stored carbohydrates. Mountains of rice, partitioned by invisible lines of quality and fate, surrounded him.
Mr. Liu, a tour guide in this temple of discounted sustenance, began his sermon. "These," he said, slapping a sack so white it seemed to glow, "are Thai jasmine. For hotels, fancy restaurants. You, I'm thinking, are not in the hotel business." Michael's vigorous head-shake was all the answer he needed.
They moved deeper into the cavernous space, the quality of the illumination decreasing along with the price. Mr. Liu stopped before three distinct mounds. "Alright. Reality. This pile," he gestured to the left, "is 'approaching best-by.' One month, maybe two. Tastes a bit… flat. Canteens, factory kitchens. 3,800 a ton."
He moved to the center mound. The sacks were a duller white, and a closer look revealed a fine, almost poetic tracery of tiny holes along the seams. "This… is 'recently best-by.' The previous tenants have moved in." He brushed a sack, and a few small, pale larvae wriggled into view before vanishing into the grain. "You wash it. You wash it a lot. The protein content, incidentally, goes up. 2,000 a ton."
The final mound, to the right, had a faint, sweet-rotten smell. The sacks were discolored, stained with ominous yellowish patches. "This," Mr. Liu said, his voice dropping to a grave, legalistic tone, "is 'long past any debate.' Aspergillus flavus. Aflatoxin. You feed this to anything with a liver, and you are not in the farming business for long. We are clear?"
The choice, in the end, was no choice at all. Two thousand yuan bought one metric ton of recently expired, protein-enriched rice. As he loaded the sacks into the Wuling, the van's suspension groaning in protest, Michael clung to a desperate, nutritional positivism: Maggots are just grubs. Grubs are energy. It's fine.In the rearview mirror, he saw Mr. Liu watching him, the man's expression one of perfect, cynical understanding. The narrative was set: another corner-cutting pig farmer, trying to squeeze a profit from the city's waste. Michael found he didn't have the energy to correct him.
With a few hours of daylight left, he made a detour to a dealership, thinking vaguely of rectifying the windshield situation. The quote—three hundred yuan—was a moral injury. He drove away, the wind whipping through the empty frame, a sudden and profound appreciation for the concept of 'open-air motoring' dawning on him. He'd stick to back alleys.
The remainder of the afternoon was spent in a bizarre, comforting parody of his old life. He visited four agricultural supply stores, playing the part of the eager, helpful salesman. It was at the second one, when the owner grumbled about a delayed shipment, that Michael experienced the second shock of the day.
"Need to get these fifty-kilo bags from the back," the owner muttered, gesturing to a pallet of urea. "My usual lad's out."
"I've got it," Michael said, the words out before he thought. He squatted, got his arms under two of the bulky sacks, and lifted. The expected strain, the familiar burn in his lower back… didn't come. He straightened with a fluid, powerful motion that felt utterly foreign. The weight was there, a solid hundred kilograms, but it was manageable. He carried the sacks to the front, stacking them neatly, his heart hammering not from exertion, but from a dawning, eerie realization. The owner stared, then broke into a grin. "Blimey, A-Biao! Been hitting the gym! I'll have to tell everyone—the Ruinuo rep is a one-man loading crew!"
He left that store with a modest order and a strange, buzzing awareness in his limbs. The Wasteland, or the portal, or some alchemy of both, was changing him. The hunger, and now this. It was a transaction with an unseen cost, paid in metabolisms and muscle fiber.
That evening, in a small, brightly lit congee restaurant, he was finally treating himself to a hot meal, savoring the simple perfection of stir-fried pork and green peppers over rice. The familiar flavors were a balm. Then, a conversation at the next table sliced through his contentment.
"...I'm telling you, Zhou, it's not the price! The truck overturned on the ring road! And who says I'm using sub-grade rebar? I'll sue for slander!... Don't talk to me about night crews! I'm offering double and I can't get bodies to move bricks, let alone steel…"
Michael glanced over. The speaker was a archetype: a middle-aged man with a prosperous belly, a thick gold chain nestled in his chest hair, rings on three fingers. A contractor. But the words… 'sub-grade rebar'… 'cheap steel'… They landed in Michael's mind with the weight of those urea sacks.
He knew the practice. Demolition steel, straightened and re-rolled, sold at a discount to projects where inspectors asked few questions. It was the dark backbone of a thousand cheap buildings. And the Wasteland… the Wasteland was nothing butdemolition steel. Miles of it. Rusted, yes. Bent, certainly. But metal. The shame of being a scrap king curdled, then transmuted into a hard, clear opportunism. Face is temporary. Cash flow is eternal.
Waiting for the man to end his call, Michael stood. He pulled the blue packet of Furongwang from his pocket—a badge of a different, slightly more successful persona—and approached. "Boss Wang, is it?" he said, his voice easy. "A moment of your time?"
The contractor eyed him, waved away the cigarette. "Talk here."
Undeterred, Michael leaned in, his voice dropping. "I have a line on some number three rebar. Surface rust. Some bends. Nothing a straightener can't fix. 1,800 a ton. Interested? New is what, 3,200? 3,500?"
The man's eyes, previously dull with irritation, sharpened. The gold chain glinted as he shifted. "How much?"
"Depends on what I can source. Could be a few tons, could be… more." The lie came smoothly.
"Length? I need six-meter sections minimum. Shorter is useless."
Michael's mind raced. The Wuling couldn't carry six-meter steel. He gestured outside. "My van won't take that. But if you had a flatbed I could borrow… temporary swap, for the first load? Builds trust."
The contractor, 'Boss Wang,' studied him, his gaze calculating the risk of a swapped vehicle against the lure of illegally cheap materials. The math, apparently, was favorable. He gave a slow, deliberate nod. "Could be arranged."
The atmosphere shifted. The threat was gone, replaced by the warm, greasy camaraderie of a mutually profitable understanding. A bottle of beer appeared on Wang's table, a second glass for Michael.
"So, young man, what do I call you?" Wang asked, pouring.
"Niu," Michael said, the name (Ox) springing to his lips with an instinct he didn't question. "Just doing bits and pieces, here and there." The fiction was effortless. He was Niu now, a man of obscure trades and flexible morals. He raised his glass, a slow smile spreading across his face that had nothing to do with the cheap beer. The King of Scrap was dead. Long live the Steel Merchant.