103 Kung Fu

Every crossing brought the same jolt of surprise.

Li Daniu felt it again when he opened his eyes and found the world turned completely upside down.

“System, what film world is this?” he asked. He was standing in an empty alley.

“You are currently in the film world of *Kung Fu*,” the System replied.

Kung Fu? Stephen Chow?

Li Daniu looked carefully at the buildings on both sides of the alley. They really did resemble the old Shanghai of that movie.

“What time is it now? How far has the plot gone?” he asked impatiently.

“Not available,” said the System.

“How is it that answer again?” Li Daniu began to suspect that he had misunderstood everything before.

He had once thought that if Tuvalu’s national strength improved, or if the standard of living in Tuvalu rose, the System would reward him. To discover that his second question here was answered with “Not available” was humiliating.

“System, how much time have I spent in this crossing?”

“You have crossed over for four months this time.”

“How much?” he asked, only half-believing it. He truly expected to be wrong.

“Four months. Until you return to the real world: three months, twenty-nine days, twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes.”

Damn, a whole extra month gained in one go?

“Is that because Tuvalu’s living standards have improved?” Li Daniu could think of only one reason.

“Not available,” it said.

He had become almost nervous around those four words. Since there was nothing else to improve, why did the System respond so smugly?

“Then, for this return, is the weight and volume of what I can carry increased compared with before?”

“When you return to the real world, you may carry items up to three times your body’s volume and three times your body weight.”

So it was true: not only had his time increased, but his carrying allowance had increased as well. Clearly he had to keep raising Tuvalu’s strength and the people's standard of living.

Satisfied with this answer, Li Daniu stepped out of the alley. Beyond it, people came and went in steady streams, traffic throbbed all around.

He knew this film well. He had watched it at least five times, and he believed that many compatriots in his previous life had seen it more than ten times.

The story in *Kung Fu* unfolds in 1940s Shanghai, one of the most chaotic times in China’s history. Shanghai, once one of the country’s most prosperous cities, was then choked by gang rule, with legal codes reduced to little more than scrap paper.

At a store window Li Daniu saw his reflection and confirmed that he had once again taken on the face of a Chinese from that former era. He looked up at the unfamiliar architecture and felt a little lost. Though he knew the plot, he had no idea what those buildings were.

The crucial question now was where in the story he had landed: was Ah Xing still a child, or had he grown into the man the film centers on?

If Ah Xing were still young, Li Daniu need not worry too much. The firearms level in this world was not developed; there were no high-precision missiles and such. Most gangs still used cold weapons—the Axe Gang, for instance, relied on axes. Even the Shanghai police were not entirely useless, but their rifles jammed so often that after each shot someone had to pull back the bolt. Li Daniu could keep out of their line of fire. He was not faster than bullets, only faster than the men firing them.

But if this was after Ah Xing had grown up, then he had to be careful.

Not only the Fire Cloud Demon, who was said to be invincible under heaven, but even the first two blind killers the Axe Gang called back were not men Li Daniu could casually handle.

In the film, the landlord couple defeated those two blind assassins with ease, but that was only because they were true masters. The landlord husband practiced tai chi; the landlord wife used the style called Lion’s Roar. Both arts were highly profound, and this couple had been famous as a legendary pair for more than twenty years. After two more decades of hidden cultivation, who knew how deep their skills had become?

Those two blind men could hurt others simply by projecting their inner power through an instrument, almost like hurling force from a qin. Their method was not something Li Daniu could currently “blast” directly; they could shape it. What was that, besides what the Six Meridians Divine Sword would do? Otherwise, how could those three outer-style masters have been dispatched by those two blind killers so easily?

He checked his pockets. As expected, not a single coin and no key—nothing except an identity card.

The card read: Li Daniu, XXXXXXX.

“System, does this have to be so extreme? Having no money is one thing, but not even a key—does that mean I don’t have any place to live?”

“This system has assessed that you are now fully capable of earning your own keep.”

“Then I assume I can’t carry everything from the real world into a film world, right?”

“Not available.”

“Not available” was actually better than an outright refusal. Li Daniu had begun to understand: the System was painfully rigid. If he wanted to know what privileges he might receive later, or what to do to earn them, there was no way this thing would tell him directly. Only when he met the conditions himself—by raising Tuvaluans’ living standards, for example—would the System automatically upgrade his privileges.

He looked up at the sky; the sun was beginning to sink. He was not yet hungry, but he still needed somewhere to sleep.

So where would the money come from?

Of course—take from the rich and redistribute to the poor. Rob the foreigners’ wealth and relieve his own poverty.

At this time, Shanghai had many concessions: the French, the British, and others. China was weak and torn by war, and in this era it had been treated by foreign powers like a private backyard—whatever they pleased, they did. A concession was Chinese territory; if you lease land, you should listen to your host. Yet foreigners treated their concessions as their own domain, and Chinese police did not even have enforcement rights there.

That only fed the arrogance of the Shanghai gangs. A gangster needed only to curry favor with either the police or the foreign authorities in a concession; if he had either side, he could run wild in Shanghai. In truth, many of those local scoundrels harmed their own people far more than the foreigners did.

Li Daniu made around, intending to ask someone where the French concession lay. If he were going to steal from the wealthy to aid the poor, he might as well start with the French.

He had barely moved to stop a passerby when he spotted a familiar-looking woman. She wore a cheongsam, walked with a provocative sway, and hardly moved aside for anyone, as if the street were her own home.

Could this be her? Li Daniu frowned, then suddenly remembered—the woman was the mistress of the Crocodile Gang’s boss. Though she appeared only for minutes, Li Daniu remembered her from that one scene where Brother Chen, with his grotesque line “I never kill women,” turned and shot at her back.

Now seeing her, Li Daniu understood: the plot had already reached the stage where Ah Xing had grown up.

A bit of trouble, he thought. He did not want any conflict with the blind killers or the Fire Cloud Demon. He only hoped to use his superior strength in this world to beat up some of the Axe Gang brutes, or to show the swaggering foreigners in Shanghai a thing or two. Yet the most valuable things in this world were in the hands of the landlord couple and Ah Xing. If he wanted what he needed from them, Li Daniu would have to enter the plot.

And if he entered the plot, how could he avoid running into the blind killers or the Fire Cloud Demon?

Could he actually defeat them? Recalling the film scenes, he realized that if their strength were truly what the film claimed, he had no chance. Even setting aside their combat experience, consider just what they could do. Fire Cloud Demon’s Toad-Crane Skill could make him charge through walls like a fist through tofu, even tearing through several walls of a building at once. It could fling Ah Xing—who had already opened the Ren and Du channels—clean into the air. Li Daniu could not do that.

His own inner force was indeed deep, even as potent as Ah Xing’s after he had opened those channels. But he lacked high-impact combat force. Tai chi has excellent hammering power and can be very strong, but it is still the four-ounces-moving-a-thousandweight style: subtle, rooted, precise. It is not the raw, crushing force of the Eighteen Descending Dragon Palms or the Buddha’s Palm.

“Let soldiers come, and soldiers answer; let waters rise, and the earth blocks them. Who is afraid of whom?” Li Daniu spat out a wad and began to tail her from behind.

Before anyone misunderstood him, this was no random harassment. He simply meant to stay with the Crocodile Gang boss’s woman and observe the gang’s condition now, to pin down exactly where the story had reached.

After two streets, he stopped. She had begun quarrelling with a street vendor, apparently because she had spat on the greens he had laid out.

The vendor, seeing her unusual clothing, felt he at least ought to demand justice for the loss.

He had no idea she was the gang boss’s woman. She could turn violent at once, landed a few blows that spoiled the vendor’s face, and overturned his entire stall.

Li Daniu expected the vendor to at least strike back. But from beginning to end, the man could not even shout in return. In this world, the privileges of the powerful were something beyond imagination.

Li Daniu moved as if to step in and take over the confrontation, when two men in dark police uniforms came running. They seized the woman directly, ignoring her shouting that she was the Crocodile Gang boss’s woman.

“Has it begun now?” Li Daniu thought. He followed them. In a moment, this would be the gang boss’s entrance—a classic scene, and one he did not want to miss.