“Wait here, I’ll go get it…”

Ethan Foster didn’t mind the heat, tore off a strip of rabbit meat and stuffed it into his mouth, then jumped up and walked into the room. When he came out, he was holding a gourd in his left hand, just a bit bigger than his palm. The aroma of the wine was already wafting out through the lid.

“That’s really the scent of monkey wine…” Chad’s face lit up with delight. He snatched the wine gourd, pulled off the lid, and took a swig straight from it. His already small eyes immediately squinted with pleasure.

“Good wine, really good wine…”

Chad smacked his lips, still unsatisfied and wanting to drink more, but Ethan Foster snatched the gourd back from him and said grumpily, “I only managed to brew this little bit in three years. Today, three sips each—no one gets more…”

Brewing wine requires fermentation. The monkey wine brewed by the previous troop of monkeys had who knows how many years of fermentation behind it, leaving only a little bit of the original stock. But Ethan Foster had brewed this batch himself. Just this one gourd of wine—who knows how much effort it took—so of course he wasn’t willing to let Chad drink too much.

“Three sips it is…”

Chad tore off half a rabbit and took a bite, then reached his hand out to Ethan Foster again, mumbling, “I, Fatty, have traveled all over and tasted plenty of good wine. That Maotai and Wuliangye are nothing compared to this monkey wine—can’t even hold a candle to it…”

“Maotai?” Ethan Foster asked, “You’ve had Maotai? My master says that’s top-notch stuff. What does it taste like? When I go down the mountain, I want to try it too…”

Following a master who loved to drink, Ethan Foster’s skills might be up for debate, but his drinking capacity was definitely trained up. Usually, he drank grain liquor brewed by the old Daoist himself, always at least fifty proof. He’d also heard his master talk countless times about the best wines in the world, with Maotai always ranked number one.

“I… I’ve smelled it, never drank it…”

Hearing Ethan Foster ask about the taste of Maotai, Chad’s chubby face actually turned red for once. He’d been working as a security guard in Shanghai for the past six months, earning just a thousand or so yuan a month—how could he afford Maotai?

But Chad really had smelled Maotai before, and it was just recently. Three days ago, he’d been helping a resident in the community where he worked carry some things, but accidentally dropped two bottles of Maotai on the ground. He got to smell the aroma, but lost his job because of it.

“Tch, so you were just bragging…”

Ethan Foster knew his childhood friend, who’d grown up with him in split pants, all too well. The look on Chad’s face gave it away—he’d never actually drunk Maotai. As for Wuliangye and the like, Chad had probably only smelled them too.

“It’s just Maotai, what’s the big deal? When I, Fatty, have money in the future, I’ll buy two bottles at a time—drink one, pour one out…” Chad said indignantly, clearly still bitter about being fired for breaking those two bottles.

“You’re right. In the future, the two of us will drink Maotai every day. And we’ll eat rabbit meat every day too…”

As the saying goes, a growing boy can eat his family poor. One rabbit was barely enough to fill the teeth of Chad and Ethan Foster. In just a few minutes, all that was left in their hands were a few bones picked clean of any meat. If Chad hadn’t brought five or six steamed buns, the two of them probably wouldn’t have even filled their stomachs.

“Ethan Foster, it’s not easy out there. I, Fatty, have been hustling for years, and even now I can only afford four-yuan cigarettes…”

His eyes reluctantly left the wine gourd in Ethan Foster’s hand. Chad pulled out a pack of Hongmei cigarettes from his pocket, expertly put one in his mouth, lit it, and lay back in Ethan Foster’s rocking chair, taking a satisfying drag.

“Drinking is one thing, but when did you start smoking too?” Ethan Foster smacked Chad with annoyance. He liked wine but never smoked, and as far as he remembered, Chad hadn’t smoked before either.

“Just started… when I was feeling down.”

Chad sighed and said, “Ethan Foster, someone like me, aside from having been a soldier, doesn’t have any other skills. In the big city, all I can do is be a security guard. Do you know, people call us ‘security boys’—no one respects us…”

To be honest, Chad was quite a character. At fifteen, his father, who was the village party secretary, pulled some strings to get him into the army, hoping he’d make a name for the family. But unexpectedly, Chad ended up as a cook in the army.

Revolutionary work is all honorable, but Chad just loved to eat. In those three years in the army, he made up for all the food he’d missed as a kid, and his figure went from slightly chubby to downright fat—he gained fifty or sixty pounds in three years.

No one cares about a cook’s figure, and Chad actually had a chance to become a volunteer soldier. But after he secretly stewed the new regimental commissar’s old hen for soup, that dream went up in smoke, and he had to return home in disappointment.

Chapter 3: The Daoist Goes Down the Mountain (Part 1)