Taoist priest goes to America

Ang Lee dragged the two corpses with his right hand, while his long whip in his left hand was stuck to the building, swinging from one street to another. The two corpses were dragged beneath him.

He found an abandoned construction site where half of a building still stood, with exposed steel bars protruding from the broken floor slabs like rusty iron spears pointing towards the night sky.

Ang Lee tossed the two corpses up one after the other. The first one landed on the left-hand steel bar, its chest pierced through and protruding from the back, revealing a blood-stained red section in the moonlight. The second corpse hung on the right-hand bar, impaled in the same way.

The two corpses hung in mid-air, their limbs dangling naturally, their heads lowered, like things hanging on a clothesline. They swayed gently in the night wind, making a creaking sound of metal rubbing together.

Ang Lee looked at the two strung-together corpses. This was a method he had learned from shrikes, which would string the carcasses of their prey onto the thorns of branches, let them dry, and store them for later consumption.

He stood on the half-floor slab, looked up, and estimated the results of the evening.

Fourteen corpses. If you add up all the money and the price of the corpses, each worth $600 on the market, you could get about $8,400. This was the amount he collected after killing all night. He had to run around to many places and search for a long time to find so many lone targets. His efficiency was too low.

He needs a more focused target, to take down several at once.

Li An squatted on the floor for a while, thinking. Obtaining memories by transporting corpses? This path is not feasible. Li An opened his phone and checked the time. It was already 1:30 a.m. Most of the gang members had either returned home to rest or were wandering around looking for an opportunity to strike. Not many people would gather in the same place.

He couldn't possibly expect to get a gold coin like he did when drawing cards, and just after finishing one corpse, he would find out from the corpse's memories that there was a bunch of gangsters gathered there.

Once Li An finishes processing each body one by one and then checks their memories one by one, his mental energy will be completely depleted, not to mention anything else.

Wait a minute, Ang Lee glanced at the phone with its screen lit up.

He almost forgot about this. He squatted down and took a cell phone out of the first corpse's pocket.

I still have a new skill, [code psychic], that I haven't used yet.

The phone screen was shattered. Ang Lee held the phone with one hand and gently tapped the screen with the other.

The phone was locked. When Ang Lee's fingers touched the glass surface, he could feel a faint vibration. A streak of colored light spread slowly in front of him like paint on water, and then condensed in the air into a Q-version colored light ghost.

"Oi, could you please help me find out which gang hideouts your master frequents? Which places does he go to most often?"

Upon hearing Li An's command, the colorful ghost nodded and reached out a small, colorful hand to grasp Li An's finger.

Li An immediately felt a surge of information flood into his mind, seeing a clear sequence of locations and directions. He collected this information in his mind and marked it on his phone's map, gaining a complete view of the internal movement paths of the gang members.

He followed the path and found some addresses, next to which were several lines of notes, such as passwords or room numbers.

After noting down the locations, Li An searched the pockets of the other corpses one by one for cell phones. American gangsters preferred to use Apple and Samsung phones, and most of the fourteen phones were from them, with one being a Huawei.

Li placed the fourteen phones side by side, then squatted down and pressed each one with his finger.

Soon, fourteen colorful ghosts appeared on the floor of the abandoned building.

After marking all the addresses on the phone map, Li An stood up and stretched a couple of times to loosen his muscles. "OK, next up is the 'bad uncle comes to the door' activity to punish the naughty kids who don't go home to sleep at night."

Ang Lee extended the long whip from his palm and lashed it at the drainpipe of the building opposite. The whip tangled in the pipe, and he gripped the whip tightly, his body swinging off the floor of the abandoned building, his dark red outer robe billowing in the night wind.

……

It was 2 a.m., but the lights in one of the warehouses were still on.

That was a drug distribution den run by a Japanese yakuza group called the Inagawa-kai. The Yamaguchi-gumi in this world had been defeated by the Italian Mafia and the FBI, leaving the Inagawa-kai as the only remaining Japanese yakuza group struggling to survive.

Two men in black suits stood on either side of the warehouse door. A gust of wind blew in from the alleyway, causing one of the men's ties to flutter and then fall back down. He sneezed, bent down to wipe his nose with his sleeve, and then looked up at the night sky.

"Damn...it's so windy tonight."

His name is Tsugami, and he's been in the US for over a decade. His Japanese has a slight English accent. The man standing next to him is named Yoki, a few years younger than him, with very short hair and a straighter posture than Tsugami.

Yang Shu didn't complain, but just looked around warily.

"I kind of miss Japan." Tsugami pressed his tie back down. "It reminds me of Japan whenever the weather is like this. Back in my hometown, when it got windy and cool, my mom would make sukiyaki soup for the family."

Hearing this, the wary Yoki remained silent for a moment. "Tsugami-nii, I... sometimes think about it too."

Tsugami glanced at him, took a cigarette from the pack, and put it in his mouth. "When are you going back to your hometown?"

"next month."

"Really?" Tsugami's hand paused on the lighter, not pressing it again. "Going back next month?"

"The tickets have already been bought." Yang Shu took out a photo from his inner pocket and handed it to Jin Shang to look at.

The photo shows a girl in a school uniform with shoulder-length hair and two dimples when she smiles. The background is a cherry blossom tree, most of the flowers have already fallen, with only a few clusters of pink still hanging on the branches.

"Her name is Haruko. We'll have the wedding when I get back; the banquet is scheduled for next month."

Tsugami took the photo, looked at it for a while, and then handed it back. His expression was a little more somber than before.

"You're really lucky. Your grandfather made your family fortune by going to Tokyo University during World War II. Even if you didn't do this job, you wouldn't starve."

"You said you came to America to study at university, but ended up in a gang, got noticed by the boss, made so much money, and now you're going back to marry such a beautiful girl..."

Tsugami lowered his head and pressed the lighter twice, the flame being blown out by the wind. "And me? My parents abandoned me, no one cared for me or asked about me growing up, I had no family to support me and nowhere to go. I joined a gang before I was even an adult, fighting and killing my way through life, and now I don't even have a home..."

Yang Shu put the photo back into his inner pocket. "Tsugami-nii knows way more than I do. I... I was just lucky."

Tsugami didn't speak, and pressed the lighter twice more. The wind blew into the alleyway again, extinguishing the flame in his hand.

"Damn it, Lian Feng is deliberately going against me!"

He glared at the perpetually extinguishing lighter through gritted teeth, then flung it away.

"Hey, Haruki, can I borrow your lighter?" Just as Tsugami was about to turn around to ask Haruki for a light, a hand reached out from the side, holding a lit lighter between its fingers. The flame was steady and the wind hadn't blown it out.

When Tsugami saw the fire, he immediately leaned forward and held the cigarette close. The flame touched the cigarette butt, and the tobacco began to burn.

He took a drag, squinted, and comfortably exhaled a puff of smoke, which billowed out of his nostrils and was dispersed by the wind.

"Thanks, Yang Shu, this lighter is pretty good—"

Tsugami turned around, about to thank Yoki for his help.

Yang Shu was still standing in the same spot, but his head was no longer above his neck. His body remained in the same standing posture, his hands hanging naturally at his sides, his tie flapping against his chest in the wind, but his head rested on the ground at his feet.

Yang Shu's head was facing upwards, his eyes were half-open, and a trace of fear, which he hadn't had time to react to, still lingered on the corner of his mouth.

Blood gushed from the severed neck like a fountain, then was blown off course by the wind, splashing onto the wall behind Yang Shu and flowing down the wall.

"Yoki—" Just as Tsugami was about to shout, a dark red arc of light flashed across his face before he could utter a sound.

The thin blade entered through Jinshang's chin, moved along a straight line towards his forehead, past his mouth, philtrum, and bridge of his nose.

He felt no pain, but the embers in his cigarette went out, and the cigarette slowly split in two.

Tsugami's body fell backward, his legs went weak, and he fell flat on his back to the ground. His head split open from his philtrum, revealing a clean cross-section in the moonlight.

Ang Lee emerged from the darkness, moonlight illuminating his dark red outer robe. He stepped over the pool of blood on the ground where two people lay, and entered through the half-closed iron door.