The Canary That Strayed Into the Construction Site

The taxi stopped a full two hundred meters short of the construction site gate. The driver's face twisted with distaste, and he refused to go any further, as if afraid the muddy road would swallow his wheels.

Ji Yan paid and pushed open the door. A smell mixing damp earth, rust, and cheap diesel instantly enveloped him, choking him until he nearly gagged. He had lived his entire life in temperature-controlled, spotless environments with faint, elegant fragrances—even the smell of hospital disinfectant was hard for him to bear, let alone this coarse, turbid air.

He instinctively stepped back half a pace, but his heel hit the car body. The driver honked impatiently, so he had no choice but to steel himself and step out.

Beneath his feet was not solid asphalt, but a stretch of muddy ground pockmarked and crushed by heavy trucks. The low-key casual outfit and brand-new white sneakers he had deliberately changed into today now seemed utterly conspicuous and foolish. With his first step, speckles of mud splashed onto the expensive shoe leather, and a chill dampness seemed to seep through the soles.

Ji Yan's body went rigid.

He had never imagined he would one day set foot in a place like this. Towering cranes loomed against the sky like steel beasts, emitting dull grinding sounds as they rotated. Pile drivers thundered, each hammer blow feeling like it was slamming against his heart. Workers in yellow hard hats carrying steel bars and pushing carts brushed past him, casting glances of curiosity or scrutiny.

Those glances felt like rough sandpaper, scraping against his skin until he was thoroughly uncomfortable. He felt like a lamb that had wandered into a pack of wolves, every inch of his skin exposed to ill-intentioned appraisals. He was used to being looked up to and envied, but never had he been stared at so nakedly, with eyes full of class-based judgment.

His stomach churned violently, and he forced himself to swallow the nausea.

He couldn't back down.

The prophetic dream flashed through his mind again—him being driven out of the Ji family, like a stray dog in a rainstorm, while the real young master, carrying the same dust and wildness that pervaded this very place, took everything from him.

And there was Lin Shao's provocative text message: "Little Master Ji, want to know about your origins? Want to get back your 'longevity lock'? Come to Binjiang Construction Site, Lot 3. Late, and the price won't be the same."

The longevity lock… the item he had only seen in dreams, said to be the identity token of a Ji family child. How did Lin Shao, the son of the old nanny, know about it? And what did it have to do with this construction site?

To survive, to keep that nightmare from coming true, he had to come.

Ji Yan took a deep breath, suppressing all his delicacy and fear, trying to make his expression look calm and composed. He forced himself to take a second step, a third step, walking deeper into that noisy, chaotic construction site. Mud water relentlessly swallowed his shoes, and each step became heavier and more difficult. He carefully avoided puddles and steel bars on the ground, his movements clumsy like a child just learning to walk.

He needed to find someone he could talk to, someone in charge.

His gaze swept around for a moment and locked onto a man who was standing with his hands on his hips, yelling loudly and spitting at a few workers. The man wore a faded yellow hard hat, had a stocky build and a loud voice, and looked like some kind of foreman.

Ji Yan steadied himself, walked over, and tried to make his voice sound calm and polite: "Excuse me, could I ask..."

The foreman turned his head at the sound and looked him up and down. When he saw Ji Yan's clean clothes—completely out of place in this environment—and his excessively delicate face, the impatience in his eyes shifted into a kind of amused mockery.

"Oh, little young master, who are you looking for? This isn't the place for you." He grinned, revealing teeth yellowed by smoke.

Ji Yan clenched his hands in his pockets, his nails almost digging into his palms. He forced down the urge to turn and flee, plastering a gentle smile on his face instead: "I'm looking for someone. His name is Lin Shao. Does he work here?"

"Lin Shao?" The foreman laughed as if he'd heard a joke. "That slippery bastard? He's long gone! What, does he owe you money?"

A few nearby workers also stopped what they were doing and looked over with interest.

"No," Ji Yan's heart sank, but he forced himself to keep up the lie, "He's a distant relative of my family. We lost contact with him, and they asked me to come check on him."

"A relative?" The foreman laughed even harder. "Little young master, don't go claiming poor relatives like that—it cheapens you! That kid has sticky fingers. He's always scheming about how to cut corners and slack off. Last month he got into a fight and tried to extort money from the site, so I kicked him out."

Sticky fingers...

Ji Yan's heart skipped a beat. He seized on this key information and pretended to ask casually: "Is that so? I heard... when he left, he took something that didn't belong to him?"

He asked cautiously, as if testing the depths of a murky pool.

The foreman's smile slowly faded. He squinted, re-evaluating Ji Yan before him, as if weighing the significance behind those words. "You even know about that?" He was silent for a moment, then spat on the ground. "That's right. That kid's a thief. He stole something from one of our workers here. A silver longevity lock."

BOOM. Ji Yan's mind exploded.

It really was the longevity lock! Lin Shao hadn't lied—he had actually gotten his hands on that crucial piece of evidence!

"Then..." Ji Yan's voice was a little dry. He licked his parched lips and forced himself to calm down. "The person who had it stolen... is he still here?"

"Yeah, he's still here, why wouldn't he be." The foreman snorted, a hint of sympathy creeping into his tone. "That lock was supposedly a keepsake his mother left him. He treasures it like his own life. For that, that kid Cheng Yan nearly beat Lin Shao to a pulp. If we hadn't held him back, there would've been a murder."

Cheng Yan.

That name pierced Ji Yan's eardrums like an ice-cold awl.

Exactly the same name as the man in his dream.

Ji Yan felt the world spin around him; he could barely stay on his feet. He instinctively reached out to steady himself against a neatly stacked pile of bricks, the cold touch helping him regain his senses.

"Cheng Yan..." he murmured, repeating the name. He looked up at the foreman, an urgency in his eyes that he himself hadn't noticed. "Where is he? Can I meet him?"

The foreman was taken aback by his intense reaction, then jerked his chin toward the highest point of the construction site, his tone turning odd. "See him? Hah, right up there."

Ji Yan followed his direction and abruptly looked up.

His gaze traveled past layers of scaffolding and busy workers, finally landing on that towering crane. The massive boom stretched across the air like a silent steel bird. The cabin hung like a suspended glass box, lonely at the very top of the mast.

"He drives that thing," the foreman said. "He's our crane operator. That kid—few words, tough as nails. Doesn't say more than two sentences all day. Good luck finding him."

Ji Yan's pupils abruptly contracted as he stared fixedly at the enormous crane. His heart pounded wildly in his chest, as if trying to break free.

Cheng Yan... was that crane operator.

The man who held the secret to his origins, the one from whom Lin Shao had stolen the longevity lock, was up there.

In that unreachable place, like a deity, looking down on this noisy land, and on him—tiny as an ant.

A gust of wind swept through, kicking up dust from the ground and stinging Ji Yan's eyes. He blinked hard, and his vision cleared. He saw a lean, upright figure climbing up the nearly vertical steel ladder of the crane, rung by rung.

The person wore a gray work uniform and a hard hat, moving with clean, steady precision. Every step was firmly planted, as if he had merged with the cold steel structure itself. Even from such a distance, Ji Yan could feel the power contained in that body—a strength perfectly attuned to this construction site.

Was that Cheng Yan?

Ji Yan craned his neck until the tendons in the back ached in protest, yet he didn't dare blink, afraid of missing even a single frame. He watched as the figure climbed higher and higher, like an agile gecko, about to disappear into that suspended cabin.

Just as the man grabbed the edge of the cabin door with one hand and prepared to swing himself inside, his motion stopped abruptly, without warning.

Ji Yan's heart seized, as if squeezed by an invisible hand.

The next second, the figure suspended in midair slowly turned around. Supporting his upper body solely with the strength of his arms, he looked down at the ground from his commanding height.

Across nearly a hundred meters of vertical distance, through the ceaseless roar of the construction site and the drifting dust, a wild and dangerous gaze—like a precisely guided nail—pierced through every barrier and nailed itself firmly onto Ji Yan.

There was no curiosity in that look, no scrutiny. Only a kind of near-cruel assessment, like a beast whose territory had been invaded, evaluating the incongruous prey before it, weighing its worth, calculating where to strike for a fatal blow.