"Extremely bustling," the elderly customer who walked into the shop alone declared clearly in Chinese, beaming. He walked straight to an empty table in the corner and sat down.
Guo Xiu was the first to approach him. The old man gave him a benevolent smile, opened the menu, looked over the food, nodding with obvious contentment.
The senior guest ordered à la carte: the two-broth vegetarian hot pot—a clear broth and a thick broth—served simultaneously in a single, divided pot, allowing him to taste both styles of soup. For the actual dishes, he ordered the vegetarian items gradually, one by one. He would try a single bite or two from a plate, then immediately order another new dish.
At first, Liu Gang saw a sprawl of dishes across the table, none of them finished, and worried the food was unsatisfactory. But observing the man's demeanor, he decided the customer was more likely a connoisseur. His handling of the bowl, chopsticks, and spoon was fluid and seamless, neither fast nor slow. He would lift a single piece, chew it deliberately, his face reflecting deep consideration, followed by a look of satisfaction and a faint smile.
But the most interesting thing about this guest was the tipping.
The elderly patron was extraordinarily liberal; any server who approached—whether to deliver food, refill tea, or simply inquire—always received a gratuity pressed straight into their hand. He seemed intent on calling over every single employee in the restaurant to ensure the tips were distributed thoroughly.
Even Wang Dong, the head cook, was summoned from the heat of the kitchen and invited to speak—and to collect his own wad of cash.
"Lao Wang, you fat turtle! Getting tipped just hiding back in the grease," Liu Gang muttered to himself, a genuine spike of alarm and suspicion shooting through him. Was the old bastard one of Boss Deng's secret backers, come to eyeball the operation? With that thought, he rushed forward, all smiles and obsequiousness, to refill the old man's tea himself.
"Exquisite vegetarian food, excellent service," the old man declared, his smile benevolent as he raised a slow thumb in approval. Liu Gang bowed low, introducing himself, and dipped his head several times. The old man maintained his soft smile, reaching inside his jacket and extracting a thick, folded packet of bank notes. He handed it to the manager with a startling, almost deferential motion of both hands, praising the fine service and the hot pot's holy day flavor without pause.
Cai Shen Ye—the Chinese God of Wealth—had come for a visit. The weight of the folded cash, tucked safely into his breast pocket, felt real and solid. Liu Gang ran quickly through a dozen plausible reasons for the old man's lavish spending, but none of them quite fit the man's demeanor.
Then, the reason hit him square between the eyes when the old man finally spoke: "Mr. Manager, I have a small imposition to ask. I would like to reserve two tables for guests tonight, after your closing hour. There are a few small special requests, but I am prepared to pay handsomely for the shop and for every single employee."
A Special Request. No surprise the bastard was hemorrhaging cash
Liu Gang thought.
"Name your price," Liu Gang chirped, his smile painted on thick. We were ready to serve him, all right. He felt the old familiar itch of suspicion deep in his gut, but when the request finally dropped, heavy as a stone, he snapped that acceptance shut instantly, the hesitation gone.
The reason:
The old man didn't want much: two catering tables. But the specifications were tight, chillingly so. The first table needed exactly ten chairs. The second, sixteen. Not one seat less, not one seat more. And he wanted the full vegetarian hot pot buffet laid out for both. For this, the gentleman was willing to pay triple the standard freight.
He justified the expense easily: his party would roll in late, possibly long after the last dishwasher had clocked out and the doors were locked. He expected them to be treated as well as he had been.
The old man lowered his voice, almost pleading now. These were his 'special guests,' every single one of them. He wished he could stay and preside over the meal, but regretfully—pityingly—he was just an old, humble wreck, physically unequal to the task. He begged Liu Gang to look after them in his place. He would be eternally grateful.
"When you get old, you just can't hack the late hours anymore, Manager. It grinds the bones down. You understand an old man's limitations, don't you?" the old man asked, his mouth curved in a generous smile, before gripping Liu Gang's hand and pressing more folded bills into his palm.
Liu Gang bowed low, the gesture feeling oily and dishonest even to him. He offered a robust assurance: he would look after this patron's party perfectly. He'd stay until the damn sun came up, and he wouldn't complain!
The old man laughed, satisfied, swallowed the last of his tea with a noisy slurp, and demanded his own check. Then, he strolled across the floor to pay the cashiers, Lin Ling and Ma Suzhen.
He asked the price for the dinner booking and immediately did the calculation—tripling the charge, adding the hefty staff bonus—in his head so fast the expert cashier was still stabbing keys on her plastic machine when he counted out the precise stack of New Dollars and handed it over.
He even pressed a few bills into the hands of the two young women behind the register, assuring them it was a "small token."
A major merchant, all right, Liu Gang thought, watching him go. A master of coin. He was the kind of man who knew how to calculate a profit margin right down to the last drop of blood.
The realization settled over him: not a single one of the restaurant's fourteen employees had missed out on a payoff from this walk-in elderly customer. From the manager down to the dishwasher in the back, everyone had been bought. Who wouldn't be delighted by such unexpected cash? Every single one of them promised they would look after the old man's special guests with the utmost care.
It was past nine o'clock—the start of the dead time—when the old man finally called for his hat and coat. Liu Gang, the manager, along with Wang Dong, the head cook, and every last one of the front-of-house staff, left the remaining, legitimate customers inside and flocked out to the door to bid their strange guest farewell. The old man thanked them repeatedly, his voice soft as cotton. But just as he was about to step past the threshold and into the night, the senior patron turned back. His voice was courteously low, but the look in his eye was grim, stripped bare of all pretense.
He gave them his final, cold commands: They were to look after his guests well. The tables must be set exactly—the ten-person reservation needed a round table; the sixteen-person reservation required a long table, with eight chairs exactly placed on each side. No more, no less. And most critical of all: They must verify that the food served was vegetarian in the food's truest, strictest sense!
Every employee lining the exit promised absolute adherence, their voices smooth with agreement. The old man looked profoundly pleased, and again pressed a generous tip into their hands. He offered them a blessing, a terrible smile hovering on his face:
"May your honesty keep you prospering," he said. "Serve nothing but vegetarian food. Not the slightest trace of flesh must slip in. We cannot afford another mistake. And may goodness protect you all tonight…"
He finished his words and was gone. That last pronouncement left the staff exchanging baffled, uneasy looks. They turned to search for the old man, convinced he couldn't have walked far, yet he had vanished into the humid darkness without leaving a trace.
"Strange business," the head cook muttered into the silence, before retreating quickly back toward the kitchen. Liu Gang found his own mind racing, bewildered. He peered anxiously into the surrounding gloom, looking down every stretch of road, but saw only the deep, swallowing blackness of the evening. Perhaps it was the restaurant's location on the city's fringes, where the streetlights were usually weak. Or maybe, he thought, the bulb in the utility pole right outside the door was going bad, casting an unusually faint, sickly glow, leaving him unable to tell which way the old man had walked, or if anything at all had stopped to pick him up.
He must have had a driver waiting somewhere, Liu Gang told himself, soothing the spike of unease. "The old bastard was drowning in money."
He fell in behind the retreating staff, a thin, self-satisfied grin stretched across his face. He patted the pocket where the roll of bills sat—a comforting, heavy weight—and felt that easy, unnatural happiness of unearned luck.
Everyone in the shop was happy, too. They waited, twitching with anticipation, for the old man's exclusive party to roll in.
But eleven o'clock slid past. There was no shadow of a single guest.
The shop usually shut down and locked at ten. The final, loud, chaotic wave of Boss Deng's tour group was long gone by nine-thirty. Ten o'clock meant shutting off the fluorescent lights, sweeping the greasy floor, and getting out. By eleven, the whole weary crew should have been home, buried deep under blankets.
Tonight, eleven o'clock had come and gone, leaving the main dining room lights blazing over empty tables. No one dared touch the front door or start the long process of cleaning up.
The whole restaurant stood in a state of ready service, waiting for a party that remained stubbornly invisible.
Head Cook Wang Dong stomped out of the kitchen, his face a dark, brewing thunderhead. A cigarette dangled from his lips—he inhaled deep, letting out a great, frustrated plume of smoke. His eyes nervously scoured the empty street through the plate glass, searching for the chaos that had been promised.
"Lao Wang! No smoking in the goddamn dining area!" Liu Gang snapped.
"Hmph. Looks like the old bastard's feast was a bust, eh?" Wang Dong spat, utterly unimpressed by the time that had passed. He nevertheless turned and dragged his frustration back toward the rear.
The staff, Liu Gang included, was rapidly reaching the same cold conclusion: The mysterious guests weren't coming tonight. Weariness won the day, and one by one, they began to fidget, thinking of the warm relief of their own beds.
But the cashier, Lin Ling, offered the ugly, irrefutable truth into the quiet. The old man had paid triple the normal rate, stuffing their pockets with unexpected money. If they walked out now, before the job was done, they might have to cough that cash right back up. "The guests might be late, but everyone must stay ready," she commanded, her voice tight with sudden, grim determination, "to honor the fact that we already TOOK HIS MONEY!"
That single phrase—"already TOOK HIS MONEY"—carried the weight of a court order. The staff stayed not out of moral goodness, but out of the raw, ugly fear of having to surrender a fistful of bills already clutched in their grasp. Who would willingly extract the profit of their night's work once it had settled firmly into the lining of their wallet?
But Christ, the waiting was a slow, sickening attrition. Sitting idle, unsure of the timetable, or worse—not knowing if the shadowy party they were meant to serve would ever materialize at all—was a unique kind of grinding purgatory that sucked the spirit dry.
Then, the ancient, sickly glow of the neon clock finally ticked past MIDNIGHT. Head chef Wang Dong, who had slumped at a dining table, raised the huge, cold can of beer and drowned the last gulp with a visceral, deeply satisfying "HOO-ACK" noise. He crumpled the metal container in his fist with a loud KRUNCH! and launched himself to his feet.
"CLEAN UP!" he bellowed, the sound cracking like a whip into the quiet kitchen, snapping the two dozing subordinates into startled consciousness.
"Midnight," Guo Xiu mumbled, scratching the stubble on his chin and yawning wide. "They stood us up." Hu Tingting, slumped beside him, merely offered a tired, tight nod. They'd had plans for this night, but the sheer, exhausting absurdity of the long, tension-filled wait had bled the romance bone-dry.
Liu Gang stared out the window into the gloom, seeing not a soul. There was only the deep swallowing blackness and the streetlights, sickly and weak, sometimes flickering like bad hearts. He didn't lift a finger to stop the staff; it was past the midnight witching hour, so he let the cooks begin clearing the space, hauling heavy pots and pouring the last of the vegetarian broth down the drain, preparing utensils for the scrubbing and storage that needed to be done.
Lin Ling wished they could hold out, but even she knew hope was a dead thing after midnight. They'd been working since the false dawn before ten A.M. (and should have been finished by ten that night), but forcing them into an endless, unreasoning vigil now was simply impossible. All she could do was watch the clock hands crawl.
"They're HERE!" The cry CRACKED the silence—it was Chatuchai, the shop's only Thai boy, just reaching for the main light switch.
That single phrase struck the exhausted crew like a physical blow. Everything stopped, mid-wipe, mid-stack, mid-breath. They dropped their rags and containers and scrambled toward the windows to stare.
The Thai boy hadn't been lying. Outside, across the vast, empty expanse reserved for tour buses, dark, hunched shapes moved. It wasn't one or two figures; it was a considerable mob, silently flowing forward. No cars. No buses. No vehicle had delivered them. They were simply WALKING out of the deep, swallowing blackness of the empty street and heading straight for the shop.
"OPEN FOR BUSINESS!" Liu Gang bellowed, snatching his sanity back first.
Head Chef Wang Dong, his eyes suddenly wide and shockingly alive after hours of drudgery, bolted back into the kitchen, yelling: "LIGHTS ON! POTS BACK ON THE FIRE! Is there any goddamn broth left?!"
The crew scrambled like disturbed insects to return the dining room to a state of grace. Mercifully, the large round table (ten places) and the long table (sixteen places) were still standing, saving them from a descent into utter, unmanageable chaos.
Liu Gang hurriedly positioned himself at the front entrance. The signs and overhead lights blazed brightly, cutting a hard edge against the long, dark stretch of the streetlights, which were dim and sputtering in a long, uneven line.
The large group of guests, having emerged from the swallowing blackness, came into the pool of light. They were clearly segmented into two stark companies. All wore thick, dreary overcoats—some gray, some black, others dark brown or deep blue—making them difficult to discern in the remaining gloom.
The first contingent numbered exactly sixteen souls. Strangely, they walked all hand-in-hand, forming a single, rigid line across the pavement. The second group, numbering precisely ten, followed them. They were clumped together more loosely, walking independently but grouped, spaced some six or seven paces behind the first, marking a definitive split.
"A peculiar company of clientele," Liu Gang murmured softly, the thought barely audible in his throat. Close behind him, Zhou Xingyi, Hu Tingting, and Guo Xiu trailed the manager to participate in the ceremonial greeting.
Excitement was thick among the staff that the old man's special guests had truly arrived. But before anyone could speak or question the anomaly, a cold certainty settled over them all: the hair on their necks and forearms had suddenly, inexplicably stood on end. It was the instinctive physical recoil of the body when it encounters something that is fundamentally wrong with the world.