Billion to One

Promises Made

He missed his uncle but with everything going on this last year, he hadn't had time to schedule a visit.

Uncle Sāng sometimes wrote Cóng Bō and asked him to befriend his cousin when he got lonely. His cousin was also a bit of a loner. And he had made an attempt a few times, but other being close to the same age, he and Niè Lǎng had very little in common. Cóng Bō suspected that his uncle really just wanted him to check and make sure Niè Lǎng hadn't burned the place down.

Although, ofttimes, his cousin seemed more concerned about his calligraphy, his DǒuYīn or Insta followers, and/or the sharpening of his appearance rather than his blades, he appeared to be running the business well. But because the place looked fine from the outside, Cóng Bō made a mental promise to his uncle to stop by the shop sooner rather than later, and make sure things were okay on the inside.

~~~~~~~~~

The rest of the market was mostly quiet. Many businesses remained shuttered: unable or unwilling to reopen because the local economy was unable to support them. Travel off the main strip and anyone could see why.

The community that once thrived in the area was almost all gone. Without the money to repair the damage from the quakes, modest houses quickly eroded under the elements. Generations of memories crumbled into piles and was then loaded and trucked away to trash and recycling plants.

Spaces were cleared and ancestral homes were replaced by tents and other makeshift shelters. Instead of stone or picket-fencing, wood from storm-felled trees, lined property divides. Their ancient stumps finding use as communal fire pits for large families and close neighbors.

Most could only hope to stave off land foreclosure or seizure long enough to receive the government assistance they were promised, but they weren't holding their breath. The antiquated infrastructure, responsible for providing those funds had been in desperate need of an upgrade prior to the disasters.

When people had come in droves, applying for aid that should have been readily available, the wave overloaded the current system to the point of standstill. Families lost their already precarious financial footing and neighborhoods, such as this, sank quickly into an abyss of debt and poverty.

Cóng Bō's skin bristled at the stark contrast between the 'return to normalcy' spoken of in some circles and what was actually taking place on the ground.

People cloistered themselves, traumatized and still frightened by the possibility of more apocalyptic-level events. No one had completely recovered, and the stalled government response gave Cóng Bō the feeling that some people in power didn't want them to.

He was usually never wrong, that was his superpower.

Cóng Bō was not like most of the members of SID. He was not extremely brave or exceptionally moral. He was just a whistleblower whom at one point, suffered from a painfully distended ego. He once believed that the only way people could live freely, was if they knew the whole truth of the world. Not the truth corporations and big government wanted people to know, but all the truth.

He spent the majority of his successful career exposing the secret behaviors of the morally corrupt. Unfortunately, some powerful people took notice and decided to weaponize his skills. Before he realized it, Cóng Bō found himself walking a one-way path of good intentions.

The marginalized and the unseen became acceptable collateral damage, and somehow, SID, their protectors, were forced into the crosshairs.

Cóng Bō was tasked to place Zhào Yúnlán and his dealings under a microscope. Just watching the man for a few weeks and it was obvious that he and SID were hiding a treasure trove of information from the public, and he became hyper-focused on exposing their corruption.