"Wait!" Seeing that the boss was about to be shot, Stuart's hair stood up and he shouted with force.
The two guards and the trembling boss kneeling on the ground turned to look at Stuart.
The injured guard yelled: "Who the hell are you?!"
Ming Ming made breakfast for them with his own hands yesterday, and served them tea and water as if they were serving important people. Today, he looked like he was seeing them for the first time.
The pampered Stuart has not felt such disrespect for a long time: "I am the guy here!"
"Get out of here!" The guard didn't bother to talk to Stuart, and he didn't really want to kill the boss. He hit the boss on the head with the butt of his rifle, revealing his true face, "Compensate the medical expenses for our captain!"
"Ouch!" The boss suddenly had a bloody head and was curled up speechless.
"Okay! Sirs, how much do you want?" Stuart helped answer the question.
"One hundred thousand Pakistani dollars!"
As soon as the guard opened his mouth, it was a big number.
One hundred thousand gold grams in Bashi is approximately equal to one hundred gold grams in Brexi.
And one hundred gold grams in Heping Street, where life is difficult, may be the income of a breakfast shop for a whole year!
Stuart almost couldn't help but scolded the two guards. How could he spend so much money on his hands?
"Okay, okay! I'll give it! Don't shoot!" The boss slowed down and agreed to pay the excessive compensation, "Stuart, help me, help me up!"
"Okay..." Stuart bypassed the two guards, helped the boss up, and carried him to his bedroom.
"Just wait at the door..." The boss was very alert and left Stuart outside the bedroom. He found a hundred thousand Pakistani dollars in banknotes and said, "Take it, give it to them."
"Yeah." Stuart handed a thick pile of money into the hands of the two guards.
The guards, who were grinning in pain just now, looked at each other and smiled, stuffed the money into their pockets, stood up and left: "I'll let you go this time, don't be so short-sighted in the future! Otherwise, you won't be able to eat and walk around!"
"Sorry, sorry, you are welcome to come again next time." Stuart smiled broadly and cursed secretly.
After sending away the two guards, the boss moved out of the bedroom holding on to the wall.
"Let me bandage it for you." Stuart saw that his boss was almost unconscious, so he stepped forward to help him sit down, found the medical kit, and treated his injury.
"Here, these bastards..." The boss stared angrily, shaking with anger, "The water in the water glass was obviously warm water, not hot at all... He deliberately knocked over the glass and blamed it on my head... This is blackmail!
Blackmail!"
"I've told you before, they just think of you as someone who took advantage of you. When you are thinking about trying to please them, they are also thinking about how to get a lot of money out of you." Stuart shook his head.
"Ha... do I have a choice? If I don't fawn over, they won't treat me as their scapegoat?"
"The more you fawn over, the more they think you are easy to bully."
"If you're easy to bully or not, don't you end up with the same fate if you really mess with them? You just came here and you don't understand anything yet, so don't say meaningless words lightly. Just bandage the wound casually, clean up and prepare here
Let’s do business.”
Stuart knew that it was useless to talk to his boss about this. This was the rule that was followed here, and it was not something ordinary people like them could change.
"Forget it, let's close today." Just as Stuart was putting the things back in the medical cabinet and planning to prepare breakfast, the boss hesitated and changed his mind.
"Huh? Okay." Stuart didn't ask the boss why he was like this. Anyway, he was eager to have a day off, at least to go out for a while, so that he wouldn't have trouble finding a kitchen.
"Help me go back and lie down..." The boss called Stuart over.
Stuart put down what he was doing and helped his boss back to the room to lie down: "Then today I..."
"Let's take a day off." The boss waved his hands while lying on the bed, just wanting to be alone and quiet.
"Okay, then I'll go out for a walk and come back before noon to make lunch for you." Stuart was afraid that the boss would return, so he quickly left the bedroom and hung a 'Closed Today' sign on the door of the breakfast shop.
He put on his clothes and went out.
Heping Street can neither be said to be lively nor deserted.
The reason is simply that there are always those individuals on the block.
From time to time, a few couldn't bear it and left, and from time to time, a few defected and came. Rejected by the locals in Bashi, they formed a small, semi-closed circle.
"Connie!" After walking a few hundred meters, Stuart saw Connie's figure on the street.
Connie was assigned to work as a servant in a well-off family, and she happened to go out to take out the trash.
"Stuart?!" Connie greeted Stuart in surprise, "Don't you work in a breakfast shop? How come you have time to come here?"
"I have a rest today, so I'll go out for a walk..." Stuart briefly told Connie what happened in the breakfast shop.
"These guards are too much!" Connie clenched her fists, wishing she could bump into these two people.
"Now I kind of understand the meaning of us coming here to do hard work." Stuart picked up the bag and took out a packed breakfast, "Have you had breakfast?"
Connie smelled the aroma and couldn't wait to grab the breakfast from Stuart's hand: "No! The people here are so stingy! They can only eat two meals a day and sleep in the utility room."
"No need to grab it, this was originally brought to you." Stuart specially made several breakfasts and brought them out, intending to give them to his comrades. "Actually, it's similar there. I can only eat one meal a day.
There is no utility room, so if I want to sleep, I lie on the floor in the kitchen, and bugs keep stinging me in the middle of the night..."
"Okay, I'm mentally balanced." Seeing Stuart roll up his sleeves to reveal the red spots on his arms, Connie made a joke.
"Did you gain anything?" Stuart asked.
"To be honest, no... I'm exhausted every day. I have to do all kinds of things, big and small. I don't have time to think about those things." Connie frowned, "It would be great if I could change my place. I'm suitable to be a thug."
"
"I still want to go into business! But what are the conditions? And if you really do what you are good at, isn't it the same as staying in your comfort zone? What kind of training is that? You can learn something.
What?" Stuart's state of mind changed dramatically, and he became inclined to accept these things and learn from them.
"Didn't you see?" Connie said with a surprised smile, "We secretly guessed that you would be the first one to be unable to persevere, but we didn't expect that your ideological awareness is higher than anyone else's now."
Stuart puffed up his chest unconsciously and said proudly: "That's because you don't understand me. I am very adaptable. No matter where I am assigned, I will be able to do the job."
"I see. Okay, let's stop talking. If I don't throw away the trash and go back to work, that family will reprimand me and deprive me of my lunch. Just keep walking on this road, and you should be able to meet Oscar.
.He was doing street cleaning, and I often saw him walking around on the street..." Connie didn't chat much with Stuart on the street. After saying goodbye, she threw away the garbage and quickly returned home to start housework.
.
"Okay." Stuart watched Connie go in. There was a mixed rebuke from the male and female owners in the room. He shook his head slightly, then continued walking forward with breakfast in hand.
Sure enough, he didn't walk long before he saw a familiar figure again. It was just that this figure was more miserable than Connie and himself.
"Oscar?" Stuart didn't even dare to be 100% sure that it was the comrade who came with him even when he walked up to him.
"Huh?" Oscar, whose hair was messy and oily, and whose face was stained with black ash from nowhere, turned to look at Stuart, "Stuart?!"
"It's really you, I'm afraid I've recognized the wrong person!" Stuart felt a little pity for Oscar's situation.
People are all compared.
This is so well said!
"I miss you so much!" Oscar seemed to have been greatly wronged. He pushed away the garbage truck and was about to hug Stuart.
"Stop, don't move!" Stuart didn't want to have any contact with the dirty Oscar, "You haven't had breakfast? I brought you breakfast."
"It smells so good!" Oscar took the breakfast and started eating it directly. He said with envy, "How good is it there? Can you get so many delicious food out there?"
"That's so good, I'm..." Stuart recounted his experience.
When Oscar finished listening, he had already wiped out a breakfast: "What are you talking about? I'm much worse off than you. I can only sleep three or four hours a day..."
After listening to nearly ten minutes of complaints, Stuart guessed that Clark and Quentin were mature and stable and would not be in a bad mood, so he left the remaining two breakfasts to Oscar: "Here, take these,
Eat when you're hungry, and I'll get it for you later if I have a chance."
"Is this... okay? Didn't you say that these are intended to be given to Clark, Clark, and Quentin?" Oscar swallowed furiously and asked with his remaining sense.
"Just rest assured, no matter what they do, they won't be able to fill their stomachs. Just take it." Seeing that Oscar's eyes were almost turning green from hunger, Stuart directly put the things away.
Putting it on his hand, "Okay, you can continue your work. I'll go find Clark, Quentin and the others to see how they are doing."
"Okay, then remember to bring me the food you still have." Oscar regarded Stuart as a life-saving straw.
"Don't worry." Stuart responded generously, "By the way, have you seen them in the past few days? Where are they?"
When the sub-station comrades arranged for them to come over, they did not explain in advance what they were going to do, but scattered them and settled in their respective places.
Therefore, they initially had no idea what kind of work each other was doing, and how they lived in seemingly different worlds in this palm-sized place.
"I haven't seen it before..."
"Okay, I'll just look for it." Stuart thought this was normal. He had been staying in the breakfast shop working day and night without seeing anyone, so he said goodbye to Oscar and said goodbye to the other person.
Go one way.
Anyway, Heping Street wasn't that big, and he had plenty of time. He could find everyone after just one or two rounds.
If conditions permit, if the five of them join forces, they might be able to do something else here to make the half-month training time more fulfilling.
As he walked, he suddenly noticed a commotion ahead.
As he got closer, he could see clearly that the guard was arguing with someone.
As he got closer, he saw clearly that the person arguing with the guard was Clark.
How did Clark come to conflict with the guards?
Stuart secretly exclaimed that something was wrong, and hurried over to join the crowd who were hiding far away to watch together.
After watching for a while, he understood what was going on from the conversations of the people around him and the argument between Clark and the guards in front.
These guards from the patrol team came here yesterday to buy cigarettes without paying for them. After the boss insisted on making them pay, they held a grudge. Today they came here to trouble the boss and wanted to arrest him for hiding forbidden books.
, confiscated everything in the store.
Clark, who was serving dishes at the restaurant opposite the cigarette shop, witnessed the entire incident, but because he didn't want to cause trouble and disrupt the operation plan, he kept pretending not to see it.
It wasn't until the owner of the cigarette shop was about to be arrested and his six or seven-year-old daughter appeared, crying and begging the guards not to take her father away, that Clark stood up and loudly pointed out the book that was said to be from the cigarette shop.
The banned books found were actually brought in secretly by the guards and hidden inside.
This made several guards unable to get off the stage in full public view, and the current controversy arose.
"What evidence do you have that we brought this book on Equality?!"
"That's right! Why did we frame him for no reason? Do you think we are idle?!"
"You protect him so much, are you on the same side as him? I knew you had people from the International Equality Alliance hiding here!"
Clark glared at several guards: "Then how can you prove that this book belongs to him?! I think you are clearly here to frame and retaliate because you didn't get an advantage in the store yesterday!"
"What nonsense! We came here yesterday because we saw something unusual, so we made preparations and came to search today!"
"Taking advantage?! When have we ever taken advantage? Isn't it natural to pay for things?"
"I didn't talk about paying for things, why are you so anxious to defend yourself?" Clark laughed disdainfully, "As for whether you have ever taken advantage of it, the residents of Heping Street know it all too well! How can you be so embarrassed?
You shamelessly said such things in front of them?"
"Stop being so messy! I think you and him must be in the same group! They are all rebels! Go! Capture him! Take him back for interrogation together!" The captain of the guard team knew what would happen if this argument continued.
It was becoming more and more unfavorable for him, so he quickly called for Clark to be arrested as well.
"I just can't stand your bullying of civilians! If you don't have sufficient proof, you have no right to arrest him! You have no right to arrest me!" Clark said.
Stuart, who stood aside and watched, was distraught.
He understood Clark's desire to help others, but such actions made it clear that he would not be able to save anyone, and even himself would be involved.
But the situation has reached such a point that it is almost impossible to rescue Clark.