Wei Qian once fantasized that one day, a reporter would stumble upon their squalid life in the old silo. The reporter would snap a few bleak photos, put pen to paper, and draft a tear-jerking, sickening headline: “Aspiring Teenager Labors for Siblings: Carrying a Family on His Young Shoulders.” Then, government officials would knock on their door to hand over money, and wealthy philanthropists with nothing better to spend their fortune on would shower them with donations. All Wei Qian would have to do was appear on TV, smile, and pose with them while holding up a giant cardboard check.
But though the television screen daily broadcasted the plights of "impoverished college students," "destitute middle schoolers," and "starving primary schoolers," none of those cameras ever turned toward Wei Qian.
Perhaps there were simply too many poor people in those days. To get onto a television broadcast, one had to wait in a queue so long it rivaled the lottery systems of later years.
As the end of the semester drew near, the weather grew progressively colder. When Wei Qian rode his secondhand bicycle out of the gates under the pale moonlight, the sun hadn't even begun to rise.
He didn't own a pair of gloves. By the time he pedaled onto the school grounds, his hands were so frozen they had lost all sensation, forcing him to rush up the stairs with his head ducked, rubbing his palms together as fast as he could to coax the blood back into his fingers.
On his way up, he ran straight into his head teacher, a middle-aged woman, Teacher Lee. She had always treated him with immense kindness. A student like Wei Qian—who took his studies seriously, maintained stellar grades, kept a low profile, and stayed out of trouble—was already a teacher's dream. When such a student also happened to be exceptionally good-looking, he was practically destined to be a favorite among the female faculty.
Teacher Lee called out to him, "Oh, perfect timing! Young man, come over here and help me carry some things."
Wei Qian helped her lug the school’s newly distributed twenty-pound sack of rice and two heavy barrels of cooking oil all the way to her office.
Placing them down, Teacher Lee asked him with a warm smile, "Have you eaten breakfast yet?"
Wei Qian paused, then shook his head.
She reached under her desk, pulled out a loaf of bread and a ham sausage, and pressed them into his hands. "Slept in this morning, didn't you? Go on, take these and eat."
Wei Qian smiled, a flush of embarrassment coloring his cheeks as he accepted the food and offered his thanks.
Teacher Lee remained entirely ignorant of his family background.
All high school students wore the exact same baggy uniforms. Aside from a few boys who took meticulous care of their appearance, everyone looked equally sloppy and unkempt.
Brand-name bags and cheap market knapsacks were stuffed so full of heavy textbooks that they lost their original shapes entirely, and the girls would just rinse out an empty Pringles can and slap it onto their desks as a makeshift pencil holder.
During this era, a precious sort of equality reigned on campus. With a casual glance, one couldn't possibly distinguish the mayor's pampered son from an orphan who had to pull back-breaking odd shifts just to survive.
The only exception was the family background questionnaire distributed at the start of the year. Staring at the blank box labeled Parent's Place of Employment, Wei Qian had hesitated for a long time before finally fabricating a single word: "Self-employed."
No one cared to ask whether this "self-employed" entity was dead or alive anyway.
Teacher Lee tiptoed to pat his shoulder, instructing, "Go on, then. Today is Monday, and you’re delivering the student representative address at the flag assembly.Hurry back to the classroom and read it over a couple of times so you don't forget your words on stage."
The tradition of having a student representative deliver a speech at the Monday flag-raising assembly was an old one. Before Wei Qian stepped onto the wooden podium, he couldn't help but stiffen his spine—not out of stage fright, but because he’d taken a brutal blow from a wooden club to his back during last night’s street brawl.
When he had checked his back in the mirror that morning, a massive, black-and-blue contusion throbbed with agonizing pain.
Wei Qian stood before the student body without a single cue card, flawlessly rolling through a melodramatic speech packed with grand dreams and manufactured inspiration. His performance was rewarded with the usual perfunctory, polite applause from a crowd of yawning classmates.
Letting out a soft, inward laugh, Wei Qian stepped back, handing the microphone over to the student host.
Before descending the stone steps, Wei Qian stood at the highest point of the podium and took one last, slow look at the sprawling campus.
He took in the row of ginkgo trees whose golden leaves were on the verge of falling, the standard four-hundred-meter running track, the red-brick school building, and the sea of uniform-clad students.
In front of the main building stood several large cherry trees, a unique hybrid of southern cherry blossoms and local mountain species. They allegedly covered the asphalt ground in a layer of petals every spring, deep enough to bury a person's ankles. It was a pity he had enrolled in the autumn; he would never have the chance to see it.
Wei Qian looked as though he were trying to carve the entire vista into his memory. Then, he turned and walked down the stone steps without a single backward glance.
He slipped back into his classroom before the assembly dismissed, rapidly packing his belongings into his bag. Grabbing his pre-written withdrawal form, he headed straight for the Registrar's Office.
The academic director was unfamiliar with Wei Qian's personal circumstances and merely asked for his reasoning as a matter of routine. Wei Qian refused to make himself look like a pitiful, destitute dropout—complaining was useless anyway. Out of sympathy, the school might have eventually scrambled to secure him a minor bursary after a mountain of bureaucratic red stamp, but a tiny stipend wouldn't solve his core crisis.
He needed real money, and more importantly, he needed the time to earn breads to support his family.
If a problem was fundamentally unsolvable, why drag his fragile, bleeding ego out into the light for others to pity?
So, adopting a cold, mature detachment, Wei Qian simply explained that his family was relocating out of the province and he could no longer continue his studies here.
Leaving the administration building, he passed the basketball courts where the athletic recruits were practicing. A stray ball came hurtling toward him. He reached out nimbly, catching it on the fly, and tossed it back with a sharp whistle.
The athletic boys waved from a distance, "Thanks, mate!"
Wei Qian flashed a brief smile, but the warmth quickly vanished from his face. He didn't linger, ducking his head as he walked briskly past.
He carried his heavy schoolbag to a scrap collector down the street, dumping every single textbook and sheet of paper onto the scale. It sold for exactly one Yuan and twenty Fen. Wei Qian dug into his pocket to find another eighty Fen, pooling the money to buy a single carnation for two Yuan.
While Teacher Lee was teaching a class, he slipped back into her empty office and quietly placed the flower on her desk.
Then, carrying nothing but an empty canvas bag on his shoulder, he walked out of the school gates.
As he pedaled his bicycle back to the neighborhood, Pocky and his mother hadn't packed up their breakfast stall yet. Spotting Wei Qian, Pocky called out in surprise, "Q-Q-Qian'er! How... how are you b-back? Did you... forget s-something...?"
Wei Qian dismounted, tossing his empty canvas bag onto his shoulder, and calmly cut him off. "No, Pocky. I’m done with school."
Pocky's sluggish mind struggled to process the words. He repeated blankly, "D-Done... done with school?"
"Yeah," Wei Qian said flatly. "I dropped out."
Pocky’s cognitive delay was severe; Wei Qian sometimes wondered if he was the type of person who wouldn't feel the pain of a slap until a full minute had passed.
The pockmarked young man stood frozen in place for more than thirty seconds. Slowly, his scarred face—where large acne craters lay stacked upon smaller ones—flushed a deep, suffocating crimson, his chest heaving violently. A moment later, his eyes welled with fat, sudden tears.
Without warning, Pocky lunged forward, shoving Wei Qian’s chest with savage, uncoordinated force. Stumbling backward, Wei Qian lost his footing, and his bicycle crashed heavily onto the dirt, its wheels spinning uselessly in the cold air.
Pocky opened his mouth, letting out a series of raw, guttural howls. The more panicked he became, the more his tongue failed him, the veins in his neck bulging like thick cords. Finally, unable to bear the constriction, he let out a piercing, desolate wail that echoed down the street, loud and grating to the ear.
Though he couldn't speak, he possessed an exceptionally powerful voice for weeping.
The constriction in Wei Qian’s chest felt so severe that it seemed ready to rupture.
In the grand scheme of a long life, dropping out of high school might have seemed like a minor detour. But to a teenager who had poured every ounce of his soul into his studies, believing it was his only ticket out of the gutter, dropping out felt as though the fragile roof he had spent his youth holding up had finally collapsed, crushing him beneath the burden.
But even if the roof had fallen, Wei Qian refused to engage in a theatrical, weeping embrace with Pocky in the middle of a public road. It was too ugly.
He bent down to lift his fallen bicycle, using the physical exertion to mask the raw agony flickering across his features.
When he stood back up, he forced a mocking, dismissive smirk onto his face. "What the hell are you crying for? You idiot, I’m not dead yet. So I dropped out—big deal. Aren't you guys all out of school too? It's not worth a single fart, so why are you making such a damn scene?"
Pocky only wept harder, his voice growing hoarse, utterly deaf to Wei Qian’s posturing.
Wei Qian said nothing more. Clutches of bitter, dry wind and salty tears stung the raw, bleeding cracks in Pocky’s frozen hands, exposing the tender flesh beneath.
This endless winter began with the guttural wails of a scarred, simple-minded boy.
Wei Qian officially embarked on his career as a professional thug, rising to become a notorious fighter under Brother Le.
At fourteen or fifteen, he was still just a half-grown kid whose muscles had yet to keep pace with his rapidly lengthening bones. His face still held traces of childhood soft-roundness. Yet, when he watched over Brother Le’s venues, he remained entirely silent. He had absolutely nothing to say to those crude, vulgar men whose every sentence was laced with obscenities. But when a fight broke out, he was consistently more savage and ruthless than anyone else, as if his chest harbored a bottomless reservoir of silent, toxic fury.
Initially, Brother Le was deeply disappointed.
He had placed immense expectations on Wei Qian, dreaming of sending the boy to university to study corporate law or finance. Brother Le calculated that his own business could never truly operate in the light; if he wanted to build an empire, he needed someone brilliant and entirely loyal to navigate legal loopholes and falsify financial records. Wei Qian had been his hand-picked candidate.
Brother Le had already mapped out a grand blueprint for their future, assigning a specific role to every pawn in his game. He had never anticipated that his star pupil would prove to be such a disappointment, dropping out of high school before he could even finish his first year.
For a long time, Brother Le had simply ignored Wei Qian, writing him off as a failed investment.
However, he never expected that, after a year of silent, violent toil, the young man would make a brutal name for himself.
Wei Qian was still a teenager. In terms of raw physical strength, he was no match for grown men. Therefore, choosing to become a "muscle fighter" would put him at a significant disadvantage. Brother Le shared this low opinion, typically relegating him to the daytime shifts at his entertainment venue—a nightclub that served ordinary food during the day, reserving its illicit, high-stakes operations for the night.
It was an industry consensus that rival gangs and troublemakers only made their moves under the cover of darkness.
But as the saying goes, every trade has its master and its master-class bastards, even among thugs, there are those who possess a reckless lack of professional conduct.
A wealthy and powerful rival casino boss in the city was desperate to swallow up Brother Le's local operations. However, he was located too far away to exert direct control, so he dispatched his subordinates to stir up trouble.
The man leading the charge was a wretched creature—possessing a goat-like face, a wheezing breath, and a bottomless capacity for shamelessness. He was a rare specimen of pure, unadulterated garbage.
Knowing he stood no chance of surviving a nighttime confrontation at the club, and terrified of being captured, yet not daring to disobey his boss's orders, this man conceived an ingenious plan: he would launch a daytime raid.
He brought a dozen burly, intimidating thugs to storm the venue during its emptiest hours.
The daytime staff consisted either of legitimate, unarmed security guards or half-grown punks like Wei Qian, who served merely as decorative vases to maintain an illusion of security. No one expected them to engage in real, blood-and-iron combat.
When this group of heavily armed thugs burst through the doors, the few members of staff present shrank back, too afraid to intervene.
The goat-faced leader sat down in the middle of the lobby and immediately began boasting loudly and obscenely. He began pawing at the young waitress who was serving food and drink, smashing wine bottles on the floor, until the few diners in the restaurant scrambled to flee.
The lobby manager frowned, whispering to a runner to slip out the back and call Brother Le.
But before the runner could take a step, Wei Qian—wearing his casino uniform—walked over expressionlessly.
One of the thugs, assuming he was merely a useless kid playing security guard, lunged forward and grabbed Wei Qian by the collar, his voice dripping with condescension. "Call your boss out, kid. Smart little brats don't play hero—"
Before the word "hero" could fully leave his mouth, his voice cracked into a blood-curdling shriek. The man let go of Wei Qian, scrambling backward five or six paces in sheer terror.
A massive, ragged gash had been ripped across his chest, blood geysering from the wound like a fountain. Only then did the crowd realize that Wei Qian was wielding a heavy, rusted kitchen cleaver meant for hacking marrow bones.
Wei Qian fought with zero care for his own survival. He didn't even pause to wipe the hot blood from his face. Gripping the cleaver in one hand and a broken, jagged beer bottle in the other, he offered no warnings and uttered no threats. He simply charged into the fray like a madman hunting down his father's murderer, turning the lobby into a physical slaughterhouse.
As the saying goes, the bully fears the reckless, but the reckless fears the suicidal. These thugs had specifically chosen the quiet daytime shift to avoid a real fight; they were cowards at heart.
In a matter of minutes, a dozen burly men were thoroughly butchered and driven out by a single, blood-drenched teenager who fought as if he had already embraced death. Amidst the shattered glass and ruined mahogany tables, a street legend was born.
By the time Brother Le received the news and rushed over with his men, the battle was long over. The lobby was a battlefield of spilled liquor and dark blood.
Drenched in gore, the teenager sat quietly on a leather sofa, wearing nothing but a thin white undershirt. He extended his arm, allowing Fatty San—who had rushed over in a panic—to carefully pick the jagged shards of broken glass from his flesh. His left hand hung at an unnatural, twisted angle, though it was impossible to tell whether the bone was dislocated or entirely fractured.
Yet, as if he possessed no nerve endings, Wei Qian didn't let out a single groan. He didn't even look up at the crowd. He simply kept his head lowered, focused entirely on inhaling his cheap cigarette.