February 17, 2026. 3:35 PM. Deep in the mountains of Doi Suthep, Chiang Mai, Thailand.
"Blergh—"
Zhengnan (Steven) dug his fingers desperately into the mud-caked tree roots, his stomach convulsing violently. The half bottle of ice-cold Singha beer he had just chugged, mixed with chunks of undigested green mango, sprayed out onto a line of ants carrying dead leaves.
He vomited until he was dry-heaving bile, his face a mess of tears and snot.
Just three meters away lay the twisted corpses of the three black-clad P-Pharma thugs whom Uncle Fa had dropped with single headshots. The top half of one of their skulls had been blown clean off; a mixture of grayish-white brain matter and warm blood was slowly oozing down the slope, pooling right at Zhengnan's feet.
In his over thirty years of life, this was the very first time he had smelled the stench of human blood at such close range. It wasn't the smell of ketchup you saw in movies; it was a potent, nauseating reek—a horrific blend of rusted iron nails and raw excrement.
He was a law-abiding Malaysian citizen who closed his eyes even when slaughtering a chicken! His mind was supposed to be filled with bikini-clad babes playing volleyball on Pattaya Beach, the imported heavy-duty grill he just bought to roast three suckling pigs at once, and the perfectly legal planting invoices neatly filed in his nightstand!
"Uncle... Uncle Fa..." Zhengnan collapsed in the muddy water, his entire body shaking like a leaf in a hurricane. Even the finger he used to point at the corpses was violently twitching. "You killed them... you killed people! The cops... the cops are going to put out warrants for us! We're going to prison!"
"Prison?"
Uncle Fa was still wearing that slightly yellowed, washed-out white tank top, his black flip-flops caked in mud. His face, usually wearing a permanent, genial smile, was completely devoid of expression. He smoothly ejected the magazine from the M1911, checked the remaining rounds, and slammed it back in with a sharp click.
"Zhengnan, did you not get a good look at the face of that bootlicking dog, Chief Charn, just now?" Uncle Fa said coldly, speaking Thai with a heavy Hong Kong accent. His eyes held a desolate look that had seen through life and death countless times. "In this dog-shit world monopolized by capital, prisons are reserved for poor people who steal bread. But you? You don't even qualify for prison. If Marcus drags you back, your only fate is to be drained of your blood, stripped of your skin, and turned into a pile of 'plant-based protein' in Dr. B's factory."
"Get up! Stop dreaming here!" Sasa rushed over and hauled Zhengnan up from the mud. The sheer resilience of this Thai woman exploded in this moment. She wasn't crying; she merely strapped the black velvet bag containing the "Malaysian Golden Thunder" tightly to her chest. "Steven, run! Do you want to be turned into a burger?!"
Just then, from the burning estate behind them, came the intensified staccato of automatic rifle fire and the deafening blasts of several hand grenades.
"Fuck! Fuck! F**k!"
Accompanied by a string of classic, furious profanities, Snoop Dogg and his two surviving bodyguards scrambled out of the brush, looking utterly battered. Half of Snoop's tens-of-thousands-of-dollars Thai gold-silk bathrobe had been burned away, revealing the outline of a Kevlar vest underneath. A long, bloody gash tore across one of his arms. Of his four tower-like bodyguards, only two remained; the other two had clearly met their end in the greenhouse.
"Those black-skinned bastards have too much firepower! They even brought RPGs! Is this a fucking war?!" Snoop panted heavily, furiously kicking a dead branch as thick as a wrist in half.
"Cut the bullshit and follow me." Uncle Fa asked no questions. He turned and headed into the deepest, thickest part of the jungle, where not even sunlight could penetrate. "Marcus will release a swarm of micro-drones equipped with thermal imaging and poison gas within minutes. Staying on the surface is a death sentence."
Zhengnan, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, stumbled along behind Uncle Fa, half-dragged by Sasa. His mind was a buzzing hive. The image of those honest farmhands who usually helped him turn the soil being dragged away like livestock kept looping in his vision.
After about fifteen minutes of trekking, Uncle Fa stopped in front of a massive, moss-covered rock face. He pushed aside a thick layer of venomous, thorny vines and fumbled around in a crevice in the stone.
*Screeeech—*
A spine-tingling sound of metal grinding on metal rang out. A camouflaged boulder weighing hundreds of pounds slowly slid outward, revealing a pitch-black cellar entrance that reeked intensely of gun oil and the musty scent of a bomb shelter.
"Get in. Don't turn on any lights," Uncle Fa commanded.
The group filed inside. Uncle Fa entered last, hauling the heavy, lead-lined steel door shut and locking down three hydraulic bolts.
As the heavy door sealed shut, the gunfire outside, the roar of the helicopters, and even the headache-inducing hum of the signal jammers were instantly cut off. The cellar was plunged into a deathly silence, broken only by their heavy breathing and the *clack-clack* of Zhengnan's chattering teeth.
*Click.*
Uncle Fa switched on a low-intensity red tactical flashlight and set it face-down on the table. The dim crimson glow barely illuminated the thirty-square-meter space.
Under the red light, Zhengnan got a clear look at his surroundings and nearly pissed himself again.
This was no retired old man's cellar; this was a small-scale underground armory and tactical command post! The walls were lined with various vintage, chip-free Soviet and American firearms—AKMs, Remington shotguns, and even an RPK light machine gun stained with dried blood. Stacked in the corners were crates of 5.56 and 7.62mm ammunition, alongside several barrels of military-grade diesel.
"Uncle Fa... what... what exactly do you do?" Zhengnan cowered on a tarp in the corner, staring at his neighbor who was expertly assembling a sniper rifle, his voice trembling like a leaf in the wind.
Uncle Fa didn't look up. He merely grabbed an unlabelled bottle of hard liquor from a nearby shelf and tossed it to Zhengnan.
"My name is Chow Yun-fat. I used to make a living in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong. Later, I spent a few years keeping the books in the Golden Triangle for a man named 'Brother Kwan'." Uncle Fa's tone was as flat as if he were discussing what he had for dinner. "Later, when all my brothers died, I fled to Chiang Mai to be an ordinary man. I thought I could die peacefully in a rocking chair, but you youngsters went and brought hell right to my doorstep."
Snoop unceremoniously snatched the bottle of liquor from Zhengnan, bit off the cap, and took a massive, head-tilting swig. The burn brought tears to his eyes.
"Don't blame this weed-growing kid." Snoop shoved the bottle back to Zhengnan. "Blame the world. Blame that son of a bitch Epstein."
Hearing that name, the hand Zhengnan used to grip the bottle jerked violently. He browsed the internet; of course, he had seen those conspiracy theories—how that American billionaire threw underage sex parties on his private island and eventually "was suicided" in a maximum-security prison.
"Boss, those are just internet gossip, what does that have to do with us?" Zhengnan asked, his voice breaking. "I was just legally growing cannabis in Thailand!"
"Legal? Gossip?"
Snoop suddenly began to laugh coldly, the sound incredibly eerie inside the cramped cellar. He walked over and stood over Zhengnan, looking down at the naive civilian.
"Zhengnan, did you really think that island was just for sex parties? Do you think the names on that list—Boss M, that tech freak who loves Diet Coke; Dr. B, the former richest man who's always on TV teaching you how to be charitable; and Prince A, that balding British royal—do you think they risked utter ruin to go there just to screw a few little girls?"
Snoop violently grabbed Zhengnan by the collar, his bloodshot eyes glaring like an enraged beast. "No! The sex was just the ticket in. It was the leverage they filmed to control them! The real reason they went to that island was to **dine**!"
Zhengnan gasped, his stomach churning violently again. "Dine... dine on what?"
"Adrenochrome."
When Snoop uttered that word, even Uncle Fa paused his gun-cleaning, his eyes turning ice-cold.
"It's a chemical compound." Snoop released Zhengnan in frustration and leaned against a cold ammo crate. "When a child... or any living human being... is tortured to the absolute limit, in the moment of ultimate terror when they feel death descending, their adrenal glands secrete a hormone at its absolute highest concentration. Those sick freaks believe that if they extract this terror-laced blood, refine it using P-Pharma's technology, and shoot it into their own veins, it will slow down aging. Even reverse it."
"But Epstein is dead! That island was raided and shut down!" Sasa covered her mouth, her voice trembling with horror.
"The island is gone, but the business model remained. And it was upgraded." Snoop pointed upward. "Dr. B and P-Pharma took over that **'List'**. They used the videotapes from the island to blackmail over half the world's elite and politicians. They were no longer satisfied with sneaking around an island kidnapping a few kids. They wanted to **industrialize** it."
Snoop drew a large circle in the air with his finger. "So, they rolled out **'The Great Reset'**. Step one: release synthesized mutant viruses globally to manufacture panic. Step two: mandate the fourth booster shot, heavily laced with **Graphene Oxide nano-chips**. The neural pathways of anyone injected are monitored in real-time by the 5G network. The moment they feel fear, anger, or try to resist, the chips release a micro-current that turns them as docile as sheep."
"And step three?" Zhengnan asked, his teeth chattering.
"Step three is exactly what Marcus was doing up there just now," Uncle Fa interjected coldly from the side. "By monopolizing the meat supply, they push **'plant-based meat'** packed with high doses of estrogen and sterilization drugs. This completely eradicates the resistance gene in lower-class males over a generation. And those struggling at the bottom—the 'undocumented' who refuse the vaccine—will be legally abducted by the **'Biological Asset Recovery Department'**, just like your farmhands."
Uncle Fa paused, his tone laced with bone-chilling frost. "The young, fresh ones are sent to underground labs. They're kept like livestock, systematically tortured to harvest 'Adrenochrome' for the elites on the List. The drained, defective ones are injected with 'tenderizing enzymes,' ground up, and made into artificial meat burgers, sold to the clueless idiots above ground. It's a perfectly closed loop."
Zhengnan completely broke down.
He hugged his head and buried his face in his knees, letting out whimpers of sheer despair. The "legal world" he took such pride in was nothing more than a meticulously constructed slaughterhouse. Human laws, morality, even those politicians spewing righteousness—they were all accomplices in this ghoul's banquet.
He was just a farmer who wanted to go back to Malaysia and build a house. Why did he have to know all this? Why was he dragged into this nightmare?
"Stop crying like a bitch. Act like a man!" Snoop kicked the sole of Zhengnan's shoe hard. "Did you really think you could hide? How do you think they pinpointed your hidden estate deep in this primeval forest within three hours?"
Zhengnan looked up, his face streaked with tears. "I... I don't know... I never told anyone!"
"Take your phone out of your pocket," Snoop demanded, holding out his hand.
Zhengnan trembling pulled out his latest-model smartphone.
"Unlock it. Open that mandatory **'Health & Pay'** app they made you install." Snoop looked at him with sheer mockery.
Zhengnan did as told. The screen lit up, displaying his green health code and his bank balance.
"Do you know what the backend code of this app is? It's directly wired to P-Pharma's central servers," Snoop explained. "When you were in that greenhouse, when you opened that jar and took a deep breath of that 'Malaysian Golden Thunder,' your heart rate, your blood oxygen levels, and the abnormal spikes in your brainwaves were transmitted directly to Marcus's data center through the microphone and biometric sensors in your pocket!"
Snoop pointed at the black velvet bag in Sasa's arms, his eyes burning with absolute fanaticism. "I told you, the specific D-limonene and the unknown divine cannabinoids in this weed dissolve the nano-graphene they injected into people! The second you smelled it, the system registered a severe anomaly in your **'Compliance Index'**—you broke out of their control! In an era where even a fart is logged by Big Data, you managed to grow a super-bug capable of crashing their entire system!"
"That's why they had to erase you within the hour. It wasn't about the drugs; it was to stop the antidote from spreading!"
Uncle Fa walked over and snatched the phone from Zhengnan's hand.
*Smash!*
Uncle Fa slammed the phone onto a steel anvil. With a heavy iron hammer, he brought it down relentlessly, instantly reducing the thousand-dollar smartphone to a pile of sparking, crushed plastic and shattered glass. Then, he grabbed Sasa's phone and his own, smashing them to smithereens as well.
"In this day and age, anything with a battery is a knife held to your throat." Uncle Fa tossed the hammer aside. "Now, we are completely blind and undocumented in this world."
"Uncle Fa, what do we do now? Just wait here to die?" Sasa clung tightly to Zhengnan, her voice shaking.
"It's not safe here. Marcus brought ground-penetrating radar. Before sunrise, they'll tear this mountain apart." Uncle Fa walked to the wall and ripped down a dust-covered tarp, revealing a yellowing, hand-drawn map.
It was a map of the underground smuggling routes across Southeast Asia.
Uncle Fa's finger traced a dashed red line from Northern Thailand, slowly sliding toward a mountainous, lawless tri-border region completely unmarked by modern civilization.
"Zhengnan, didn't you say you wanted to live? Didn't you want to protect your wife and your life's work?" Uncle Fa turned his head, a terrifying, razor-sharp glint erupting in his aged eyes. "On this entire planet, there is only one place where Dr. B's vaccines cannot be pushed, where P-Pharma's trucks cannot drive, and where not even American satellites can pierce the poisonous miasma."
Zhengnan looked at the spot on the map and swallowed dryly.
"The Golden Triangle."
"There's a bunch of savage warlords there who refuse the vaccine and make a living by murder and pillaging," Uncle Fa said coldly. "If we want to survive in this world overrun by dancing demons, we have to go into the deepest pits of hell and strike a deal with the true devils. Get ready. We're crossing the border."