Chapter Twenty: Fortune and Misfortune

The factory was medium-sized by the standards of W City, but its operations had remained fairly stable. In all these years, it had never suffered any serious business crisis.

As long as the factory was still there, finding out what had happened back then would not be difficult.

After a simple lunch, the two of them located the factory. Once they identified themselves, they were promptly granted an audience with the current factory director.

The current director had held the position for less than a year and a half and knew nothing about what had happened eight years earlier. Still, he was extremely cooperative. He immediately tracked down several longtime employees to ask about it, and after a great deal of searching, they finally found someone who knew the truth.

His name was Sun Wan. He was a workshop supervisor and had worked there for more than a decade.

Sun Wan was also in his fifties, around Chang Rong’s age, so he was naturally more familiar with what had happened to him back then.

“I know about this! I know it all too well!” Called to the director’s office, Sun Wan let out a sigh and wiped his face when he heard what they wanted to ask about. “That Chang Rong was terribly unlucky. That day was supposed to be his day off, but someone else happened to have an emergency and asked if they could swap shifts with him. Chang Rong agreed.

“Then, as luck would have it, the factory installed a large piece of equipment that very day. There had been an oversight during the installation, and one of the parts that needed to be secured hadn’t been fastened properly. At first, it looked perfectly stable, but once the machine started running, the vibrations grew intense. It didn’t take long before the part was shaken loose.”

Sun Wan rubbed his hands, still visibly shaken. “Of course, we only found that out later. If anyone had known something like that was going to happen, no one would have gone near the danger in the first place!

“At the time, everyone thought there was no problem. The machine had been installed, and there had been no trouble during its test run, so we all went back to whatever we were doing. Then, all of a sudden, we heard this tremendous crash. It scared the life out of us.

“Next thing we knew, someone was shouting, ‘Hurry! Come here! The machine’s fallen over—it’s crushed someone!’”

“How many people did it hit?” Ning Shuyi asked.

“Just one. Chang Rong himself.” Sun Wan shook his head. “If there had been several more people underneath it that day, this factory probably wouldn’t exist anymore. We’d have been ruined paying the compensation!”

After saying this, perhaps realizing that speaking so bluntly in front of the current director might sound like tempting fate, he gave the new director an apologetic, awkward grin.

The new director was remarkably broad-minded. He waved a hand. “Don’t look at me. Say whatever you have to say. What happened in the past has nothing to do with me. There’s no need to hold back. I’m only here to listen and learn from history, so we don’t repeat the same mistakes.”

“Exactly! Exactly!” Sun Wan finally relaxed. The deeply lined face of the older man revealed a look of regret. “Chang Rong really was terribly unlucky! That machine wasn’t even his responsibility. The person assigned to operate it had just stepped away, and Chang Rong was merely passing by.

“Tell me, who could have imagined that things would line up so disastrously?

“At the time, none of us saw where he was. We only saw blood flowing out from beneath the machine. We were terrified. We didn’t even know who had been hit. Judging from the situation, we couldn’t tell whether the person was still alive—or even in one piece. The whole place descended into chaos.

“Normally, you’d call an ambulance for something like that, but the machine was so huge and heavy that even if the ambulance came, they couldn’t possibly have moved it.

“And if you called the fire department, the firefighters weren’t doctors. They couldn’t treat or rescue him!

“Eventually, someone managed to calm down and told everyone not to panic. We called both the fire department and the ambulance. It took an enormous amount of effort, but in the end, we finally managed to pull Chang Rong out from beneath the machine.

“If you want to talk about bad luck, that day did have one fortunate aspect. He had been crushed in a recessed section, so he suffered only minor fractures. But the first metal rod inside the machine had pierced him beneath the ribs and gone straight through his chest.”

Sun Wan told the story with vivid gestures and dramatic inflection, like a professional storyteller performing for an audience. When he reached the part about the metal rod piercing Chang Rong’s chest, Ning Shuyi found herself imagining it so vividly that her own ribs seemed to ache in sympathy.

Huo Yan, however, remained perfectly calm, as though such scenes were nothing unusual to him.

Ning Shuyi could not help glancing at him again, wondering what he must have experienced in the past.

But she did not allow her attention to wander and continued listening to Sun Wan’s account of what had happened back then.

“That single rod nearly took Chang Rong’s life on the spot. By the time they got him out, he barely had half a life left.” Sun Wan shook his head and sighed. “When he was taken to the hospital, I remember the doctors had already issued a critical-condition notice.

“I was the one responsible for contacting his family. Everyone at the factory had an emergency contact on record. I called the number, and his son answered. The moment the boy heard that something had happened to Chang Rong, he rushed over. When the doctors at the hospital told him they didn’t know whether his father would make it, he crouched down in the corner outside the operating room, covered his face, and began to sob.

“He was a grown young man, barely in his twenties, but he cried so bitterly that even those of us standing nearby felt miserable listening to him.”

“Didn’t Chang Rong’s wife go to the hospital?” Ning Shuyi asked.

At the mention of Deng Qingrong, Sun Wan’s expression became rather peculiar. He gave a half-smiling, half-sneering grunt. “She did. At first, the boy was so panicked that he forgot to contact her.

“Later, we reminded him that he still had to bring his mother there. No matter how you looked at it, even though he was legally an adult, someone in his early twenties was still just a child.

“That was when he called his mother and asked her to come.

“But once she arrived, we saw that while Chang Rong had always been an honest, unassuming man at the factory—never showing off, never making waves—his wife was quite a formidable woman.

“That woman didn’t shed a single tear when she reached the hospital. First, she rounded on her son, shouting, ‘All you do is cry! What good is crying at a time like this?’

“Then she started demanding to know what had happened. The moment she heard that a machine had toppled over and crushed him, she became furious. Chang Rong was still undergoing emergency treatment, but she was already causing a scene at the hospital, insisting that the factory give her an explanation.”

“Her demand wasn’t unreasonable, when you put it that way,” Ning Shuyi said, following his lead. Although she already knew what the answer to her next question would be, she asked anyway. “Did the people in charge at the factory agree?”

“Well, asking for an explanation certainly wasn’t unreasonable. It was entirely justified. The factory leaders admitted that the factory did bear responsibility, but they said they should at least wait until the rescue was over and see what condition Chang Rong was in. Only then could they sit down and discuss how to handle what came next.”

Sun Wan let out a long sigh. “But Chang Rong’s wife refused to back down. She insisted on an explanation, saying that their son was still young, barely in his twenties, with no job and no income of his own. Chang Rong was the pillar of their family.

“Whatever the circumstances, that pillar had now been put in mortal danger because of the factory’s negligence. It was no different from cutting off the only means of survival for her and her son. She insisted that the factory give them a satisfactory answer.”