Meet Mike Chang...

...Ex-policeman, family man, billionaire businessman, most of all, an honourable man. And, next-in-line to become ‘Dragonhead’ of the 14K Triad.

Buy HELL MONEY, the first novel in a new series of Fantasy/Thrillers for fans of Fonda Lee's THE GREEN BONE SAGA.

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Chapter 1

地狱银行

Bankers are sadists. Bankers are killers. Bankers are warmongers. Bankers are scum-sucking maggots. Emperors should not have to listen to maggots, but the Bank of Hell had stipulated ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’ and so, it lay up the whip-whipped 5th hole of Royal Birkdale Golf Course. Chop-chop. An altogether Chinese fate in Scouseland.

On a wild July night, an unblinking CCTV camera caught a spindly man being buffeted around outside, gusted this way, and that. The lone security guard in the clubhouse, a chancer with a potato for a heart, decided to ignore the trespasser. Drunk as a skunk. Had to be. And there was no fucken way he was going out in a Force 8 gale to chase that loony down.

Dismissal was not an entirely surprising response. Westerners are blind to the spirit world, or rather look sharply away when they see ghosts, demons, or gods. Especially foreign ones.

Hence the assassin, Yanluo Wang, was able to close-in on his victim. Slowly though, mind you, for it was hard to see in the roiling dark. With the stormy Irish Sea flinging salt into his new face. Blinking away searing tears. His new legs veered off-fairway into a bunker. Red and yellow fireworks were exploding in the back of his eyeballs.

The thirst of a Uyghur nomad was upon him. Tongue like a strip of seitan marinated in bird’s eye chilis. The Fujian Cook must have fried his brains—helluva migraine—wokking all night long in the belly of The Red Dragon restaurant. More likely though, it was methamphetamine.

A yaa baa comedown.

This would explain the pain fraying the nerves of this new body. The rampant self-consciousness of his host. Yes. The Fujian Cook was a pill-popping addict, or a crazed crystal fiend, sucking nebulae, stars, planets, entire galaxies of yenning from the burning bulb of a pizzo.

Yanluo Wang’s legs were not his own. Stubbing a big toe on the lip of the bunker, he tripped, going down in wisps of rough grass. A grunt. A sigh. Picking himself up, dusting himself off, but his new body, stolen like a car a mere half an hour before, was as responsive as the Chinese state limousine, the Hongqi CA72.

Given a choice, he would not have chosen to possess the Fujian Cook’s carcass. It was tall but burnt-out-scrawny. Fit only to slice bok choy. But chop-chop, get a grip, there was business to be done! Hell money to be made! Yanluo Wang was here, at 2.00 AM, on the first night of the seventh lunar month, when the Gates of Hell opened, to fulfil the $10-trillion contract issued by The Bank of Hell.

10 stalked by 12 zeroes.

Yes, $10,000,000,000,000 said that Sir Richard Simmons, a mandarin of the British Civil Service, a so-called Under-Secretary in the Department of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs had to die. Painfully.

Bloodily.

Appallingly. Taxmen, the very worst kind of statesmen. Taxmen—calculating bureau- creeps, human-algorithms. Worse even than the worst bankers. The way taxmen insisted that there was no escape from death or taxes: most objectionable. To compare the power of Death to that of worldly government—when worldly government relies totally on the power of Death, to exist at all. Travesty.

Blasphemy.

Fraud, in fact. Sir Richard Simmons had clearly avoided taxation for he lived in a £3,500,000 mock-Tudor mansion, which backed onto the 5th green of one of the most expensive golf clubs in the world. Royal Birkdale was one of the links that hosted ‘The Open’, the oldest and most pointless tournament of its kind in the world.

For Sir Richard Simmons loved Golf. Would stroll out at dawn, bag of clubs slung over his shoulder, onto the links through a little wooden gate in a tall wall. This was the Taxman’s idea of heaven. Teeing-off.

He would sometimes even play night-golf when he could not sleep, goofily go off in pursuit of a tiny luminous ball he’d thwacked off into the dark. Who in their right mind would waste precious qi playing golf, day and night?

Yanluo Wang walked up to the little gate, turned the handle and, as he pushed in, stooped, to avoid banging his meth-fried head. His temples were pulsating enough already without adding injury to takeaway-misery. No alarm sounded upon his entrance.

All windows remained dark. So much for the state-of-the-art SERCO security system that was supposed to protect the property from intruders.

A security light, mounted on the house, illuminated his trespass, giving him a tail—a long jerky shadow, looming across the immaculately barbered lawn.

Infrared cameras recorded him on the back steps, facial recognition software zooming in on the grim look as he drew two traditional meat cleavers out of his coat.

All the technology in the modern world could not stop him fulfilling the Bank of Hell contract. It stipulated ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’. ‘Lingchi’ was the term they wrote into the contract, and he was a stickler for details, always satisfying the demands of the client. Trust was the key to repeat trade. It was no concern of his why the bankers wished the Taxman to be hacked to pieces. How mattered. When mattered.

Where mattered. Yanluo Wang had his reputation to uphold. Lord of the Earthly Court. God of Death. Dread Emperor of Hell.

The back door was wood framed, with an upper and lower pane of glass. An Englishman’s home was his castle—how this was supposed to preserve one from attack Yanluo Wang did not know? He tested to see if it was locked.

It was, so he used the razor-sharp point of a cleaver to punch pressure into the upper pane. The tempered glass shattered inwards. A waterfall of ice. Shards skated across the marble-tiled floor.

He reached in, turned the key to a click in the lock.

Crunching his way across the kitchen. Slippery as a frozen lake in the spring thaw. Into the hallway. Traction on the carpet. Fleet as a sibuxiang deer up the staircase. Two at a time, to the top.

It was pitch black up there, black as Chinese History. He turned left on the landing, heard a thud. Then another.

Someone was awake.

The Taxman was a widower and slept alone in the master bedroom, left rear of the mansion. If the Taxman had heard the break-in—he would be phoning the Police right now, and they would be despatching a rapid-response to the house of a V.I.P. in mortal peril.

That left Yanluo Wang five minutes to confront, torture, kill. With maximum force. The door to the master bedroom was ajar. He breathed deep, through the nose, and held it, extracting all possible qi, to be converted to explosive energy when he crossed the threshold and confronted Sir Richard Simmons—who was objectionably standing disgustingly naked, flabby and old, in the centre of the bedroom, pointing.

At Yanluo Wang.

As if he knew who and what was coming? No matter. He raised the cleavers.

‘Heaven and Earth are my pillars and roof,’ Sir Richard said, ‘and the rooms of my house are my jacket and trousers.’

‘Trousers?’ Yanluo Wang was genuinely taken aback.

Sir Richard glared at him. ‘What are you doing in my trousers?’

Was this a joke? In other circumstances Yanluo Wang would have laughed. But he was here to take a life. Only demons laugh as they kill.

Sir Richard lowered his accusatory arm, turned clumsily and shambled towards to the four-poster. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Then flopped over onto his side like a sack of rice. In a second, he was snoring louder than a pregnant sow.

Sleepwalking. Yanluo Wang realised. Sleep-talking. In more than 10,000 years of contracts that had never happened before. It was definitely a weird and wondrous story to tell, a zhiguai chuanqi.

The 10 Kings of the 10 Courts would enjoy hearing it in between cases. They would laugh. There were not too many occasions for laughter in Hell. They would laugh until their pot bellies wobbled uncontrollably.

Chop-chop, he got to work; every story must come to its end. Swinging for the upper left arm. The 12cm-wide razor-edged cleaver cut right through skin, fascia, clunking on the bone, shearing right through all that was arm, into the ribs.

Sir Richard screeched awake, writhing away from the severed limb in horror. Gouts of blackness sprayed over the white sheets. ‘Oh my god. Oh—my—god.’

Swinging for the right arm. Clunk, severing it off, cleanly too. The human body an oddment sitting up, without arms. A weird tree. Squirting branches, twigs, sprigs of sap from its stumps.

‘Please. No.’ Sir Richard tried to roll away. Landed in a crumpled bloody heap beside the bed.

Yanluo Wang dropped the chopper, loomed over and grabbed an ankle. Legs should be next. Then the genitals. Only then—the head. This order would ensure the maximum suffering required of Chinese Torture.

‘Die,’ said someone, a woman, behind him.

A whoosh.

Thunder-pealing up the side of his head. He collapsed, face-first onto the Taxman.

Down in the blood, out of the corner of his eye, a ruddy vision of her. Holding a golf club.

That putter, doubling, quadrupling. Four putters, and who? No one else lived here. No one else was supposed to be here! Who was this?

‘Fucker.’ The woman swung the club down.

Pain blasted hot across his spine, his ribs, a terrible groan gusting from his mouth.

‘Motherfucker.’ The woman swung again.

Yanluo Wang felt a splitting in his left eye-socket, and an instant later, he was spinning in bright white lights.

‘Papa? Hold on. The ambulance is coming.’

In a stream of illumination, Yanluo Wang caught sight of a miniscule figure of a man twirling around and around, in the distance.

No. Not in the distance, no.

Small. Barely three inches tall. Spinning. A whirlwind of cleaver blades.

It was himself, a miniature version of himself, but in appearance as fierce as a yaksha-demon. And in watching himself turn, in this bizarre dance, he understood the meaning of the homunculus.

Yanluo Wang had a job to do. Back there. So, he returned from the spinning light into the heavy fug of darkness.

There was the woman—right in front of him. Sitting, sobbing, cradling the Taxman’s head in her lap. He reached for a cleaver, seized the handle, and stabbed her below the right breast. Where the liver would be. A twist, and withdrawal.

She looked down at the wide Joker-smile beaming from her chest, shocked. ‘You,’ she wheezed. Her last breath was a racist mist of blood that formed the word: ‘monkey.’

‘The Hell of Tongue-Ripping awaits you, Lady,’ Yanluo Wang said. He would have preferred to use the darkest tones of Cantonese for added terrorisation, but when in Rome… ‘And, make no mistake, your next rebirth will be into the peasantry.’

Her eyes glazed, emptying of spirit.

Sirens in the distance. Getting to his feet proved difficult, but Yanluo Wang somehow managed to take a stand and, complete a proper chopping of the target, before the Police arrived, all those cavorting blue lights.

Fleeing the house, onto the golf course, and away into the dunes, the body of the cook began to fail.

Blue, swathes of blue chopping the night into pieces back there. The cook’s bald head was leaking like a split melon, pulp and pips.

Emergency blue. He would have to abandon host. Inhabit another Chinese from the local community to fulfil the next contract. That was—if he could find another Chinese, before the cook collapsed.

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