And so, the little boy stayed after all in that dilapidated silo.
Years later, when the boy recalled those days, he felt as though he had achieved an absolute miracle.
As his asshole older brother grew older, his talent for playing the villain only reached peerless heights. Wei Qian naturally developed a heart of solid iron; once he made up his mind, he never wavered. Sometimes the boy genuinely wondered if there was anything in this world capable of changing Wei Qian’s mind.
Yet that year, after months of careful observation and weeks of stubborn persistence, he had actually managed to leave an impression on that cold-hearted bastard.
Once he settled into Wei Qian’s home, the little boy slowly regained his voice. However, he remained silent most of the time, as if terrified that making too much noise would draw unwanted attention, dislike, or physical abuse. At first, he didn't even dare set foot on the bed or the sofa. At night, he simply curled into a corner and slept on the cold floor like a stray dog.
To him, having a roof over his head, a few gulps of clean water, and a scrap of food to keep the elements at bay was already the ultimate luxury.
Wei Qian watched his quiet, desperate compliance and couldn't help but recall his own childhood. Back when he was this small, he had been just as hyper-vigilant, constantly walking on eggshells to please his deadbeat stepfather. Because he understood the raw fear behind those actions, Wei Qian didn't find the boy's behavior bizarre. Instead, a quiet, invisible thread of empathy began to bind him to the child.
Of course, he would never let it show. Wei Qian firmly believed that as the head of the household, he had a duty to maintain a certain high-and-mighty authority.
He patiently gave the little fellow a thorough scrubbing. Fearing the boy might have contracted lice, Wei Qian shaved his head clean and scavenged an old shirt of Little Bao’s for him to wear. The little bald kid ended up wearing a cheap, lace-trimmed shirt with the lace torn off. Surprisingly, he didn't look ridiculous in it; it was obvious the kid had a naturally good bone structure.
Wei Qian stood over him, sizing him up with a critical eye for a long time before his cynical mouth uttered a typical backhanded compliment: "Well, look at you. almost looking like a decent human being."
Still, Wei Qian figured most children looked decent when they were small, probably because their minds were empty of adult worries, leaving their eyes bright and clear.
This ridiculous theory was immediately rejected by Fatty San. Fatty San argued that beauty was beauty and ugly was ugly—both were determined at birth, and age didn't have a damn thing to do with it.
Fatty San, Wei Qian, and Pocky had grown up together. They shared the kind of blood-brother loyalty born from raising hell together since they were in diapers. Fatty San was three or four years older than Wei Qian, while Pocky was born in the same year. They had played in the mud together as children and run the streets as low-level punks as they grew. Though they hadn't done a single productive thing together in their lives, their loyalty to one another was absolute.
Upon reaching puberty, Wei Qian shot up vertically, growing leaner and taller by the day. Fatty San, on the other hand, expanded horizontally. At seventeen or eighteen, he already possessed the sluggish, slovenly aura of a middle-aged man. As for Pocky, his height and weight didn't even matter; his face was so heavily cratered with deep acne scars that his head resembled a jagged asteroid. A single glance at him in the dark was enough to scare a toddler to tears, which completely overshadowed any other traits he possessed.
Fatty San, that dead weight, looked like a knock-off cartoon swine himself, yet he had the nerve to judge everyone else's appearance. Every time he saw Little Bao, he couldn't help but let out a theatrical sigh, because the little girl was truly no beauty.
Trading on their years of friendship, Fatty San was blunt with Wei Qian—customarily delivering the exact truths Wei Qian hated to hear.
Every time he dropped by the apartment, Fatty San dramatically scooped up Little Bao in a chokehold, mourning her appearance as though he were at a funeral.
"Sister! My bitter little sister! How is your face so dark? If you fell into a coal pile, we'd never find you again!"
Wei Qian snatched Little Bao back. "Fuck off. Around here, we call her 'Black Beauty.'"
Fatty San continued his theatrical wailing. "Your brother is legally blind! How can anyone call those tiny, bead-like eyes Beauty?"
Wei Qian shot back defensively, "What’s wrong with small eyes? Her face is tiny too—what do you want, eyes the size of a bullseye? Look at your own pancake face, your eyes are practically a single slit!"
"Get lost! My face is a perfectly proportioned frying pan!" Fatty San snorted. "Hey, joking aside, small eyes aren't the real problem. Look at our sister's nose—this tiny, flat button of a nose is going to worry me to death. It looks like it got slammed in a door. Qian'er, seriously, why doesn't she look a thing like your mom? Even if she had inherited your look, we wouldn't have to worry."
Wei Qian muttered, "Bullshit. She wasn't born to me anyway."
With that, Wei Qian lifted Little Bao until she was level with his eyes, carefully inspecting the features she had inherited from her biological father. Even through the lens of sibling bias, he had to admit Fatty San had a point. Little Bao's flat little nose looked as though it didn't possess a single nose bone.
Wei Qian made a mental note to protect her eyesight at all costs. She absolutely could not become nearsighted; with a flat nose like that, her face wouldn't even be able to hold up a pair of glasses.
Still, he refused to admit his sister was plain, arguing stubbornly, "What's wrong with a flat nose? A prominent nose on a girl doesn't look good anyway... people with high noses don't look like trustworthy folks."
He said this because his biological mother had possessed a strikingly straight, beautiful nose—the crown jewel of her features. It had given her a spirited, unforgettable look. And Wei Qian harbored a deep, visceral hatred for every single one of his mother's traits, whether beautiful or ugly.
In Wei Qian's mind, as long as Song Little Bao didn't look like their mother, he would find her cute even if she grew up to have a face as heavily cratered as Pocky's.
Knowing the messy history of Wei Qian’s family, Fatty San uncharacteristically let the subject drop. He pulled Little Bao back into his arms and began gently pinching the bridge of her nose. Years later, when her nose didn't turn out completely flat, it was largely thanks to her fat older brother’s manual "molding" sessions.
As Fatty San pinched, he chanted, "My sweet little sister, the sister I'll never be able to marry off..."
Seeing Fatty San’s premature anxiety over other people’s marriage prospects, Wei Qian concluded that this fat idiot was destined to become a neighborhood matchmaker or a pimp.
At that moment, Pocky pushed the door open, a wide grin on his face. "Brother...S-San... Q-Qian'er... Little... L-Little Bao."
Fatty San instantly cupped his hands over Little Bao's ears as if defending against an invading army. "Oh, mother of mine! Don't talk like that in front of the kid! If she picks up your stutter, her brother will chop you into dumpling meat!"
Pocky wasn't blessed with a sharp tongue, so he simply took the path of least resistance. He didn't take offense, merely scratching his head and giggling. He patted Little Bao and the newly adopted boy on their heads, pulled two cheap candies from his pocket, and handed one to each.
Pocky had dropped out of school years ago, not because his family lacked money, but for reasons that were frankly embarrassing.
By the fifth grade, Pocky could only count to 99. The moment a number hit three digits, his brain short-circuited. His teacher had grown so infuriated that she ordered him to copy the numbers 100 through 200 a hundred times as punishment. Pocky had grunted and sweated his way through the task, completing every single line with neat, diligent, and entirely honest effort. But when the teacher graded his work, she realized he had copied the sequence in the wrong order over and over again.
Fatty San stared at his stupid, pockmarked brother with a look of pure misery, resuming his chant: "My sweet little brother, the brother who will never find a wife..."
Wei Qian felt deeply depressed by his choice of friends. One was a stuttering fool, the other was a theatrical idiot, and he was sandwiched right between them. It gave him a grim, tragic sense of “the whole world is mad, and I alone am sane.”
Pocky opened his mouth again, struggling to get the words out. "B... Brother Le... asked me to... to ask. Your... your tuition... is it sorted?"
The question stabbed straight into Wei Qian's raw nerve. The pleasant mood he had managed to cultivate sank instantly, as if his chest had been stuffed with a block of ice.
He didn't have a damn cent sorted out, but refusing to show weakness or lose face in front of his two idiot friends, Wei Qian waved a hand dismissively. "Oh, that? No rush."
The theatrical idiot Fatty San chimed in immediately. "Aiyo, my ancestor, please don't play God at a time like this! How can you not be in a hurry? School is about to start! Seriously, how much are you short? Just say the word. We can pool our resources and figure something out... Look at us, we’re a bunch of street trash who never had a fate with school. You’re the only one who can actually study. Even if we have to carry you on our shoulders, we have to push you through that door!"
Wei Qian felt as though his heart had been squeezed by a hot-warm hand. For a second or two, his throat locked up. His lips trembled imperceptibly, but in the next instant, he reclaimed his stubborn, rigid armor, wrapping himself back in his aloof, proud exterior.
"Come on, what's the big deal?" Wei Qian said carelessly, keeping his eyes on his feet. "I have it under control. You guys don't need to worry. Tell Brother Le it’s fine."
He quickly changed the subject. "Hey, by the way, that little brat—I asked him his name, and he told me his name was 'Kid.' What kind of brain-dead parents give their kid a name like that? I’ve been trying to think of a proper name for him these past two days."
Pocky looked anxious, wanting to press further about the money, but the more worked up he got, the more his tongue tied itself in knots. Ultimately, Fatty San cut him off.
Knowing Wei Qian's stubborn pride—the kind of kid who would starve to death before begging for scraps—Fatty San went along with the subject change, talking nonsense to ease the tension. "Alright, your name is Wei Qian, so let’s call him Wei Xu."
Wei Qian laughed, kicking at him. "Fuck you. Wei Xu? Sounds like 'stomach deficiency.' Why don't we just call him 'stomach ache'?"
The three of them joked around, eating the dry rations they had brought before finally dispersing.
Wei Qian sat in the quiet room, pondering. Since Brother Le had asked about him, he needed to pay him a visit. It would be foolish to ignore the gesture. To earn pocket money, Wei Qian had run with the local street gangs since he was a child. Brother Le was the undisputed boss of their gang, the most influential figure in the area. He was older than the rest of them, had run the streets for years, and his family had some seriously heavy backing, and possessed a sense of loyalty to his boys, never acting high-and-mighty.
After Wei Qian's mother died, Brother Le had looked out for them, offering help and pulling strings when needed. At one point, Wei Qian had genuinely viewed him as his own flesh-and-blood brother.
When Wei Qian arrived, Brother Le greeted him warmly. After a few pleasantries, he brought up the topic. "I heard about that little thing you brought home. No one knows how far that kid traveled to end up here. For a tiny folk like him to survive this long is no small feat. I have a feeling he’s going to grow up to be quite a character—someone who might go much further than the rest of us. How about we call him 'Xiao Yuan', means Go Further? No... the syllabels don't sound quite right. Let's add a character. Wei Zhi Yuan—to reach far. What do you think?"
Since Brother Le had bestowed the name, Wei Qian was naturally pleased.
At fourteen, Wei Qian was still young and lacked the cynicism of a grown adult. Though he had one foot planted firmly in the criminal underworld, his age limited his understanding of the transactional nature of adult society. He didn't truly understand what kind of man Brother Le was.
At that point in his life, even if Brother Le farted, the fourteen-year-old Wei Qian would have found it deeply philosophical.
Brother Le asked, "How old is the kid?"
"He says he's eight," Wei Qian replied. "But he doesn't look it. He's barely the size of Little Bao."
"He’s legally a ghost," Brother Le said, letting out a soft hum. "Then have you thought about what to do with him in the future? It doesn't matter how grand his name is if he doesn't even exist on a household registry."
Wei Qian's chest tightened. It was true. Wei Zhiyuan had a name now, but he was still a black-market citizen—undocumented and invisible to the state. In truth, if Wei Qian's mother hadn't been a registered resident of the city before her death, Wei Qian would have been a ghost himself.
The local registry was notoriously difficult to get into, and a teenager like Wei Qian stood absolutely no chance of sorting it out on his own.
Brother Le paused deliberately, letting the silence weigh heavily on Wei Qian’s shoulders before offering casually, "If you trust me, why don't you let me handle this for you?"
Wei Qian froze. "I... I couldn't possibly..."
For a moment, his tongue tangled, and he let out a self-deprecating laugh. "Damn, I'm about to catch Pocky’s stutter at this rate."
Brother Le gave him an affectionate pat on the head, waiting for his answer with a patient smile.
Though young, Brother Le was an ambitious man—specifically, a man with a talent for crooked schemes.
He was highly calculating, suspicious, and knew that if he wanted to rise to the top, he needed a circle of diehard loyalists. He was actively paving his own path, and he had set his sights on Wei Qian. At fourteen or fifteen, Wei Qian was at the perfect age—old enough to understand the world, but young enough to be easily manipulated. Treat him well now, and he would gladly lay down his life for you later. Out of all his young followers, Brother Le favored Wei Qian because the boy knew how to hustle, how to fight, and how to stay sharp. Those three traits were rare enough on the streets, and Wei Qian also knew how to study.
When Brother Le first heard this kid had aced his high school exams, he had been utterly shocked. Even though Brother Le was a big shot in the local underworld, he was still just a thug who had risen from the ranks of street punks; he had absolutely zero connection to "intellect."
A kid like Wei Qian, even if born into a poor but normal family, would have become a formidable talent in the future. But fate had abandoned him in the gutters, and Brother Le felt as though he had gone shopping for a cheap garden stone and accidentally walked away with a priceless antique.
The only problem was Wei Qian’s characteristic. The boy was incredibly difficult to control. Though he showed Brother Le a rare sliver of respect, he possessed a fierce, unyielding pride. He would never beg.
Putting a teenager through high school didn't cost much money—with Brother Le's current financial backing, even sending a kid to study abroad was like paying a pocket change. Offering help when a person was at their absolute lowest was the easiest way to guarantee that Wei Qian would repay him with his life in the future. Brother Le could see that this kid possessed a heavy conscience and dignity; a person like that could never bring themselves to be ungrateful.
Back then, the household registry laws were far looser than they would become in later years. As long as you had the pull and the pockets to back it up, there was always a way to slip through the cracks. But that manipulation was still light-years beyond Wei Qian’s capabilities. Wei Qian thought it over and didn't stupidly refuse. He quietly note the debt in his heart—another massive favor he would have to return.
Brother Le chatted with him for a bit longer, deliberately avoiding the topic of tuition. While the boy could accept help with the registration since it was impossible for him to solve on his own, bringing up the tuition fees would easily wound the teenager's fragile pride.
But Brother Le was in no hurry. He could see that Wei Qian desperately wanted to study—otherwise, his grades wouldn't have been so outstanding. He would simply wait. One day, Wei Qian would have no choice but to come to him and beg.
Before Wei Qian left, Brother Le looked at him with profound intensity, patting his shoulder. "Why are you being so polite with your older brother? Qian'er, remember this: if you ever run into any trouble in the future, come to me. You hear? As long as it's within my power, I'll hold up the sky for you. Don't carry it all on your own. We're brothers, aren't we?"
Watching the helpless teenager nod, Brother Le felt a deep sense of satisfaction. He had laid his trap beautifully, burying a thread that would run for thousands of miles. For a talent like Wei Qian, it was only a matter of time before the investment paid off.