The Ruthless

The Ruthless is a long contemporary urban boys' love novel by Xiang Xiaomo, an author on the Jinjiang Literature City platform. It is the second book in the "Beijing-Flavor Uniform Strong-vs-Strong" series and centers on the gang boss Luo Qiang; it stands on its own alongside the first book, Officer, Lend Me Your Courage (the story of Luo Qiang's younger brother Luo Zhan), and can be read independently. Set in Beijing, the story makes heavy use of Beijing-accented dialogue and everyday settings such as hutongs, nightclub streets and prison wings. Shao Jun is a notoriously brash figure among the capital's second-generation officials; to escape his father's sphere of influence in the public security system, he deliberately takes a job as a guard at Qinghe Prison, where he rises to battalion commander at a young age and has both a protective streak and his own methods for handling the troublemakers in his wing. Luo Qiang is a serious offender held in Qinghe Prison, once a gang boss who dominated both the lawful and criminal worlds of Beijing; he is imprisoned after taking the blame for his brother and is a "national treasure" whom everyone in the first battalion of the third wing watches warily. When Shao Jun goes home on marriage leave, Luo Qiang stirs up major trouble in prison, and the two come face to face; from then on, through misunderstandings, standoffs, the mutual uncovering of the truth and mutual support, their feelings advance step by step amid riots, escape scares and life-and-death moments in the closed and dangerous space of the prison. The plot also involves the reopening of old cases, pursuit by old enemies and earning credit toward sentence reduction, intertwining the characters' fates with the truth of the cases, and it finally leads to the two staying together. The book runs about 560,000 characters, with several extra chapters beyond the main text, and is one of the representative "prison fiction" and "strong-vs-strong" works repeatedly cited from Jinjiang's early years.