Much later, he gained new achievements: victory on the Battlefields, now in the main team of the Azure Dragons; first place in the Demonic Games; and another victory in the Arena — this time as an adult. Fen achieved all this before the young age of twenty-two. His smiling face frequently lit up magazine covers and billboards. Sony, Snowstorm, Tesla, Nike, Mercedes, Google, Apple — the biggest brands queued up to offer him advertising contracts for tens of millions of phoenixes. If not for his talent for throwing money away, Fen would have become one of the thousand richest people in the world.
From the outside, his path looked easy. The Japanese contingent of fans called Mogwai Kintaro, meaning Golden Boy, a reference either to the limitless support of Glyph, leader of the Azure Dragons, who Mogwai called his second father, or to the druid’s mystical powers in the form of his maxed-out Resilience. That stat wasn’t easy to level up even for the best tanks of the time — equal-level mobs gave only a tiny progress increase, and healers couldn’t keep up with very strong mobs, which caused tanks to die, losing valuable experience.
That said, Fen’s path to victory in the Arena could be called all sorts of things, but certainly not easy. He grew up in a poor family of refugees from North China. After the nukes landed, the city of Harbin was within the radioactive zone. Fen’s parents lost almost everything, and the peacekeepers took away what little they managed to save. Sirens screaming constantly in the night, searchlights beaming through the clouds, explosions, machine guns growling like the hounds of Death, mechatank silhouettes crawling one after the other in the darkness — that’s all Fen remembered, and even that was disconnected, fragmented, though he was already six years old then.
Having survived a grueling evacuation in which three quarters of the refugees died of hunger, infection and cold, Fen’s family reached Shenzhen. For a long time they lived in the poorest places, eking out a living as day laborers — one day carrying goods, the next day cleaning. Sometimes they had enough work to feed themselves, but more often they had to go hungry.
Then Fen’s father began to sell drinking water on the street.
In the store, an eighteen-ounce bottle cost five phoenixes. A fourteen-gallon canister of primitively cleansed municipal water cost thirty, and retailed at a quarter of a phoenix per glass. A local criminal gang took a third of the profits, but a few years later, Fen’s parents still managed to save up enough for their own hovel in the slums of Shenzhen. The boy was thirteen then, but malnourished, so nobody thought him older than ten.
Fen was a sickly child, but he helped his parents where he could. Soon his father bought some industrial filters and stopped buying up water from others. The boy’s task became to carry canisters of purified water from the house to his parents as they wandered the busy streets in search of thirsty souls. Two canisters, two gallons each.
Every day on the street, he was forced to defend his right to be there. He was beaten, insulted and demeaned, called son of a whore, Mongol monster and mutant — due to the radioactive desert that North China had become. Fen patiently took the beatings, apologized, smiled, asked forgiveness, quelled the anger accumulating in his soul, and most of all, kept his hold on the canisters. “Slippery like an eel,” the locals said, amazed at how staunchly the ‘mutant’ withstood pain. “And treacherous as a wicked demon. A real mogwai.” The nickname stuck.
It was a day like many others. Evening approached. Fen was almost home, just one long road to walk down and a street to cross…
But Yi Yun ran out to meet him with a long switch in hand.
“There you are!”
He whistled loud and other boys came out like a pack of hounds. Six in all. There were usually three or four, but sometimes more than seven.
“Mutant!” the smallest one said, grinning and stamping. “Run!”
“He won’t run,” Yi Yun shook his head.
“Then let’s help him. Get off our land, maggot!”
Better do what they say, Fen thought, picking up his canisters and tramping back where he came from.
Whistles, curses and small stones flew at his back.
“Run, don’t crawl! Go on!”
Fen rushed home to jeers and whistles. If nobody stood in his way, he had a chance to close the door behind him and avoid a beating at least for today. It had rained recently; Fen treaded on something slippery and fell right into a puddle, twisting his ankle. He jumped up and checked the canisters right away, sighed with relief.
“I said get out of here!”
Yi Yun struck first, with the switch. Fen curled up right in the puddle, covered his head with his arms. Strikes rained down on him, and then a voice suddenly spoke with authority:
“Disappear.”
And the bullies scattered without a moment’s hesitation. Then the stranger addressed Fen:
“Get up.”
The boy raised himself out of the puddle, hiding the canisters behind his back. The man, leaning on a titanium cane, handed him a plastic bottle of UNB ration and spoke through his teeth, cigarette clenched between them:
“I see them beating you every day through my window. You haven’t once tried to run or fight back. Why?”
Fen was starving, so first, without dropping the canisters, he contrived to gulp down the contents of the bottle before answering.
“If I run,” he said, “they’ll just find me and beat me anyway. Why delay the inevitable? They never beat me twice in one day, it’s too boring for them. If I fight back, then I’ll lose anyway, because there are more of them and they’re older. But
