"Are you paying now or in a few days?" One of the young men wiped rain from his face with a rough hand, then ran his palm over his shaved scalp, a habit he had developed. Ever since the apocalypse forced everyone to shave their heads for hygiene, he had found the bald look surprisingly convenient and had come to like it.
Jing An hesitated, taken aback by the directness. This was a significant financial decision; he felt he should discuss it with the family inside first. Jing Shu stood to the side, arms crossed, with a cold, knowing smile. "Keep acting. Let us see how far you take this little performance."
Director Zhang, the older man with a weaselly face, stopped the young man with a raised hand. "Don't rush them. At least let them think it over. It's a lot of virtual coins." He turned his oily smile back to Jing An. "But whether you pay now or later, you still have to pay. That's the policy. In a few days, if you delay, we will have to calculate the area again, hmm, with the garage and those outbuildings, it's at least two hundred square meters of illegal construction."
"About the fee," Jing An asked cautiously at last, "you will issue an official receipt as proof, right? Something I can show if asked?"
"Of course," the young man said, puffing out his chest and tapping his clipboard. "See, the internal administrative files already list a clear policy requiring fees for self-built structures on residential property. Your community records will show illegal construction, so the self-built housing fee applies. It's all above board."
Jing An felt the amount was outrageously pricey, 100 virtual coins a month was a fortune, but if it was written policy from above, it couldn't be fake, could it? Doubt warred with his ingrained respect for authority.
Director Zhang kept his smile patient, but his mind was already calculating. An extra 100 virtual coins a month from this one wealthy household, a small cut for the two men under him to keep their mouths shut, and the rest would pad his own account nicely. It would be enough to secure better rations, perhaps even to arrange a marriage for a daughter-in-law from a good family later. Life wouldn't feel so desperate.
Seeing the little confidence play reach what they thought was its final act, Jing Shu stepped forward before her father could waver further. "Dad, let us wait a few days. Let us see when the official, public fee collection begins for the whole community. We will pay directly then, to the proper treasury."
"Hey, you silly girl, you don't know what is good for you," the young man snapped, his fake civility slipping. "In a few days the rate might go up! It could be 200 virtual coins a month! You will regret being stingy now."
"Two hundred?" Jing Shu's tone dripped with pure disdain. "Go on then, bring your demolition crew. Tear all this down." She gestured broadly at their garage and the small storage shed. "Easy to fool, men who have no real sense of money or virtual coins and don't know how to bargain. If Mom were here and heard '200 virtual coins,' she would have flipped the table already."
"You think I won't?" the other young man, the more hot-headed one, boasted. "Just wait. I will bring people over from the public works brigade and have the whole thing demolished. Then you will have nowhere to park your fancy car."
Jing Shu rolled her eyes, the last of her patience gone. "I wasn't going to expose you clowns, but fine. Let us lay it out. You are a 'residential allocation clerk.'" She pointed at the young man. "And you," she pointed at the older one, "are a 'residential allocation director.' Sure, in the current mess, people beg you for good housing placements, I get that. You have some petty power.
But what right do you have to collect virtual coins privately? Don't think I don't know. The state just opened the new asset transfer system to a small batch of housing officials first for trial operation. You are strutting around like peacocks, trying to collect money on the state's behalf before the system is even public? That's called embezzlement."
"Trial operation?" Jing An, who also worked at the Livestock Breeding Center and heard some internal gossip, had no idea about this specific system.
Jing Shu covered her face briefly. Being a foreknower had its headaches. It was like understanding exactly how a magic trick was done and then having to listen to a mediocre magician lie with a straight face. Instead of marveling, you start thinking, Your expression needs work. There's a hole in the trick right here. Fix that and your show would be tighter.
She nodded, speaking clearly. "Yes. Trial operation. Only certain designated official posts currently have access to the new transaction module in the big-data system for testing and calibration. It won't be long before it opens to all citizens. Inside info." She fixed the two men with a piercing look. "In the future, even unpaid mortgages can be paid through the big-data app by yourself. No middlemen needed."
The three men froze, their expressions shifting from bluster to shock, then to panic. Exposed. Someone actually knew the inner workings of the very system they were exploiting. Shame and furious embarrassment flushed their faces. Director Zhang's cheek muscles twitched, his smile turning into a stiff rictus. He tried to sound fierce and failed, his voice coming out strangled. "Nonsense! You are making up stories to avoid payment!"
"Even so," the clerk stammered, trying to regain ground, "you built structures in a public area. You still have to pay virtual coins. Think you can dodge it?"
Jing Shu laughed, a short, angry sound. She hadn't seen audacity like this in a while. "You are in charge of housing allocation for Banana Community, right? Inside the community proper, if you say it's an illegal extension, maybe it is. The state guideline says one virtual coin per square meter per month for approved auxiliary structures. Fine. If that's the official rate, we will pay. But that coal shed by the back hill? Please." She scoffed. "That's beyond the community boundary, on unclaimed slope land. That's beyond your jurisdiction. Go ahead and report us for that. I dare you."
Report them? To whom? The courts were underwater. The police were overwhelmed. These days, even serious crimes weren't going to trial; the police grabbed people directly and put them to unpaid labor if they had time.
"What, you will drag a busy cop out to the wilderness to arrest us for putting up a little shack on an empty hillside where no one even lives?"
As for the small coal shed attached to the side of their villa inside the community fence, that might have to follow the rules, and it had to be built close to the house for practical reasons. Later, anything burnable would be precious. If it were up on the back hill, opportunists would pry the coal out, shed and all.
Jing An's jaw dropped as he listened. He often wondered why his daughter's information was always more up-to-date and accurate than her parents'. Now he was catching up in real-time.
"So you are saying," he said slowly, "we only need to pay maybe… 4 virtual coins a month for the coal shed attached to the house? If it's even counted?"
Jing Shu nodded. "And they can't touch or charge for anything on the back mountain. That's not residential land." She sighed internally. Fine. She had revealed enough to count as serious inside news. It couldn't be helped.
Jing An ground his teeth, a slow anger rising in him. He had never imagined that people in government, in such a crisis, would try to fleece hardworking families like this. "Aren't they afraid we will report them? For extortion?"
"You think they are stupid?" Jing Shu said. "They target people they think will pay. You pay 100 virtual coins thinking you got a deal to keep your garage, so you won't talk. They won't talk either. It's a silent agreement. The state does say one virtual coin per square meter, to be paid to the local housing bureau treasury. But because management is chaotic right now, they each collect in their own little lanes and can't overstep without drawing attention from rivals. Even if you later refuse to pay, they can't do much without exposing their own scam."
In the second year of the apocalypse, this kind of petty corruption happened a lot. There were opportunists at every level of the fractured government. Residential allocation, controlling who lived where, did come with real, immediate power to make lives easy or miserable.
Director Zhang was completely stunned, his mind reeling. "How does she know the inner workings so well? She speaks like someone from the audit office. Here, take my job. I'm done."
"Fine," Jing An said, her voice hardening. "If it's outside your jurisdiction, you still want to meddle? And you want to extort extra coins from me? I will make sure you really do your job today! Damn it," she said, turning to her father, whose face was growing darker by the second, "I have kept a private stash my whole life, a hundred coins hidden carefully from her, and these clowns think they can con me out of it?"
The sheepish, easy-going temper of Jing An flipped in an instant. A red haze of protective fury descended. He swung fists the size of sandbags. One punch connected with the clerk's jaw, spittle flying. Two punches, and the man's teeth went dancing. Three, and even his own parents wouldn't recognize the swelling mess. Four, and both clerks and the director were hugging their heads, scrambling to run.
Everyone has a reverse scale, a line that must not be crossed.
Touching Jing An's private stash, the symbolic representation of his personal agency, his small hedge against total disaster, was poking the softest, most defensive part of his heart.
What man doesn't hide a little private money? If a wife finds and seizes it, the husband deflates like a punctured ball. Getting scammed out of it by strangers is a hundred times worse, an insult to his intelligence and role as provider.
Jing Shu hissed through her teeth, watching the scene. "So satisfying." The Spirit Spring really was wonderful. Look how it had tuned up her father's physical strength and, apparently, his protective ferocity.
None of the three officials could stand up to a furious, Spirit Spring-enhanced Jing An. At first they spat threats between blows, "Just you wait, I will bring people, you will be sorry!" but by the end it was all whimpers and pleas. The two younger men, bleeding from noses and lips, dragged the dazed Director Zhang away from the gate and fled down the sodden path.
"Sigh," Jing An said gloomily, shaking out his sore hand once they were gone, the anger draining to leave weary resignation. "Looks like my virtual coins will end up in your mom's hands for safekeeping before I even get to warm them. She will hear about this."
Honestly, part of him thought, if the big transfer system never opened to the public, just watching the numbers sit in his account would have been a kind of quiet happiness. Now even that was gone.
…
As for offending that cushy-post allocation director, so be it. He had no real leverage over their family anyway, not with their resources and connections. For people with such crooked hearts, Jing Shu preferred what she thought of as "civilized solutions" nowadays.
Meaning, remove them from their positions of petty power, then let them watch helplessly as her family continued to eat well and live comfortably. She had come to love that specific look on a sworn enemy's face, hating her to death, burning with envy, while being utterly helpless to do anything about it.
"Guess I'm the big villain in their story, huh?" she mused without regret.
It was January 5, 2024, 16:00. The temperature had climbed back to a humid, uncomfortable 36 degrees Celsius. For Jing Shu, it had been a punishingly long, emotionally complicated day.
She was about to turn and go back inside when a growing noise caught her ear. She stared past the gate, down the community's main road. A crowd was gathering, a boiling mass of people moving toward the villa section. Her blood ran cold.
She muttered, her voice flat with disbelief, "Son of a bitch. Did you really bring a thousand people to make trouble? What is this? A mob?"