From dropping out of school to that desperate, one-to-many casino brawl, an entire year slipped by.
Throughout those months, Wei Qian lived a mechanical, day-to-day existence. Life became a piece of coarse, heavy-grit sandpaper, relentlessly grinding away the leftover turbulence and fiery arrogance of his youth like patches of dead skin. The door to his imagined future had slammed shut, and time was snapping at his heels, forcing him to run for his life.
Wei Qian had initially assumed that such days would be pure agony. But he soon discovered that once a person is truly submerged in a "miserable life," their senses dull to the pain. He could even dredge up microscopic bits of amusement from the dirt, savoring them for days.
Against all odds, the year vanished in the blink of an eye.
One of those rare amusements was provided entirely by Wei Zhi Yuan.
The little cub was nothing like Little Bao. Usually, whatever Wei Qian commanded, the boy would obey without requiring a single wasted word. Yet, no one expected that when it came to the simple matter of going to school, this feral pup would actually put up a fierce, desperate struggle.
Wei Zhi Yuan was flatly unwilling to go to school. Having spent his early years clawing for survival in a twisted, predatory environment, his brain was hardwired with a hyper-fixation on basic life-and-death practicalities. Conversely, he was shockingly deficient in the common sense a normal child should possess. He had zero concept of what "school" even meant. Little Bao had tried to explain it to him, boasting that school meant sitting neatly in a classroom to learn how to read and count. Wei Zhi Yuan pondered this, only to decide that he harbored absolutely no interest in either.
In his stubborn, distorted logic, going to school meant sitting idly, being lazy, and turning into a useless parasite who relied entirely on his older brother's back-breaking labor to feed him.
The mere thought filled him with a profound dread. Even though Wei Zhi Yuan had been taken in by Wei Qian for a full year and had spent ten months rolling around with Little Bao—even frequently pinching and brawling with her—the primal terror of being discarded at any moment still choked his heart.
He viewed physical contribution to the household as his only shield against this fear. Scrubbing the floors, running chores, and collecting discarded glass bottles to sell for loose coins were the ways he validated his right to exist. The moment he was "deprived" of his freedom to labor, Wei Zhi Yuan’s survival instincts screamed that this was the definitive precursor to his abandonment. And so, his frantic resistance began.
Wei Qian, busy working himself to the bone every waking hour, naturally lacked the luxury to decipher a child's twisted, fragile psychology. On the morning of the first school day, he resorted to a simple, brutal methodology: he hauled Wei Zhi Yuan and Little Bao out of the flat by their collars. Despite Wei Zhi Yuan's desperate lunges back toward the door to lock it, Wei Qian dragged and carried the two of them down the street like a man clearing out baggage.
Throughout the trek, Wei Zhi Yuan behaved like a stray cat whose fur had been violently rubbed the wrong way. Hoisted in mid-air by Wei Qian alongside his oversized schoolbag, his scrawny feet dangling far above the ground, the boy clawed and thrashed in a frantic, air-swimming dog paddle, drawing startled stares from every passerby.
Halfway down the alley, they ran into Fatty San, who grinned widely at the spectacle. "Yo, Qian'er, what's the play here? The kid's fighting so hard, did you finally decide to slaughter him for meat?"
Wei Qian delivered a sharp, echoing slap to Wei Zhi Yuan's backside, barking, "Do you hear that, you disgraceful brat? A pig heading to the slaughterhouse behaves with more dignity than you!"
Wei Zhi Yuan’s face flushed a violent crimson as he bellowed, "I'm not going to school!"
Little Bao, ever the chaotic instigator, bounced gleefully alongside them, mimicking the boy’s tone with theatrical cheer. "Then I'm not going to school either!"
Wei Qian opened his mouth to snap, but before he could utter a word, another declaration of freedom exploded from a neighboring alley. A little boy, likewise being forcibly dragged toward the gates by his father, was weeping so hard his chest heaved, wailing, "I don't want to go to school!"
The boy's mother followed in frantic, clipped steps, launching into a relentless, exhausting lecture on ideological education. Wei Qian listened sideways for a moment, discovering that her monologue spanned everything from buying braised pork hock for dinner to the grand future vision of Nobel Prize scientists making fortunes. It was a sprawling tapestry encompassing astronomy, geography, and five thousand years of human history.
The teenage big brother couldn't drum up such a tedious, winding educational doctrine. He preferred the shortest route. With a cold sneer, Wei Qian turned his head, sweeping the two unruly brats beneath his noble, freezing glare.
"Did I ask for your opinions?" he muttered, his voice dripping with ruthless indifference. "Did either of you say 'no'?"
The words landed like lead weights. Wei Zhi Yuan instantly choked back his protests, snapping his jaw shut. Little Bao, purely a creature of trend, recognized the shift in the wind and wisely ceased her troublemaking. Even the neighboring stranger's child, who had been crying inconsolably, caught a glimpse of Wei Qian’s icy gaze and whimpered into an abrupt, terrified silence.
Wei Qian dropped Wei Zhi Yuan onto his feet at the primary school gates. Jerking his chin toward the entrance, he offered a curt, cold dismissal: "Get in."
Little Bao trotted forward two paces, but realizing Wei Zhi Yuan remained rooted to the spot like a stone monument, she hesitated and stood still.
Wei Qian’s thin veneer of patience evaporated. His expression darkened as he glared at the boy. "You want to cross me? What the hell do you want?"
Wei Zhi Yuan stubborned his neck, refusing to speak.
Wei Qian let out a sharp, mocking laugh. "Suit yourself. You think anyone's going to beg you? If you’re so tough, scram."
Wei Zhi Yuan instinctively took a step back. He was never afraid of his older brother's violent rages, but he was utterly terrified of Wei Qian’s detached, impersonal cynicism.
Too lazy to coddle the boy's psychological tantrums, Wei Qian spun on his heel and walked away.
A wave of profound grievance flooded Wei Zhi Yuan’s chest. All this time, he had been clawing his way closer to this man, begging to do more, to bleed more, just to ease his burden. Yet it seemed that no matter how hard he tried, the other party remained entirely unappreciative. The big brother was an impossible god he could never please, always leaving him with nothing but a cold, retreating back, his rare smiles locked far out of reach.
In a sudden surge of feral desperation, Wei Zhi Yuan pounced forward, sinking his teeth savagely into Wei Qian’s wrist.
Wei Qian instinctively snapped his arm back. The teenager’s dense, hardened wrist bone slammed brutally against the boy's front tooth. Wei Zhi Yuan’s jaw flew open with a sharp gasp.
Wei Qian looked down. There, spat out upon the dirt, lay the child's very first baby tooth.
Wei Zhi Yuan’s features froze in absolute horror. Growing up in the wild, no one had ever explained the concept of losing baby teeth to him. If a tooth was knocked out in a bloody street fight, that he could comprehend. But for a piece of his own skeleton to simply detach and fall out on its own? It was beyond his understanding.
In his primal worldview, limbs could be severed, and as long as the bleeding stopped, you survived. But a body part falling off for no reason?
The boy stood there like a hollow shell, staring blankly at the bloodied tooth in the dirt, his face twisted in a mask of sheer terror—looking exactly like a doomed patient in a melodrama who had just been handed a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Wei Qian was thoroughly entertained by the sheer absurdity of the boy's expression. The dark, brooding cloud on his face instantly cracked. Fearing he wouldn't be able to maintain his stern composure, he hurriedly turned around, a broad smile bursting across his face as he walked away, entirely forgetting to punish the pup for the bite.
But Wei Zhi Yuan remained trapped in a universe of pure dread, alongside his sole comrade, Little Bao—a girl who was utterly useless but an expert at causing trouble.
Spotting the blood, she shrieked in theatrical horror, "Aiya! Your tooth fell out! You've been deeply poisoned! Your time is running out!"
Not long ago, Wei Qian had spent five Yuan to acquire a broken, discarded television set from a neighbor, fixing it up. Little Bao had spent the last few weeks glued to historical martial arts dramas, absorbing a mouthful of absurd, melodramatic dialogue.
The speaker meant nothing, but the listener took it to heart.
Wei Zhi Yuan’s face drained of all color. He instinctively raised his eyes to look for Wei Qian, only to find that his brother’s tall silhouette had already vanished around the corner.
In that instant, a vast, freezing desolation swallowed the boy's soul. Lost and hollowed out, he allowed Little Bao to drag him through the school gates, his mind repeating a single, dead thought: I am going to die.
From that day forward, Wei Zhi Yuan ceased his rebellion against school. He was a dying man; all struggles had lost their meaning.
During those weeks, Wei Zhi Yuan was plagued by midnight terrors. He would frequently bolt upright in the pitch-black living room, touching his remaining loose teeth, fully convinced that his life was ticking down to its final hours. Enduring the silent torment of a looming death, he would stare greedily at Wei Qian’s calm, sleeping face in the dark, desperately trying to burn his big brother’s image into his retinas so he could carry the memory into the next world.
A month later, three more teeth had fallen out. His speech developed a heavy, whistling leak. To conceal his condition, he stopped speaking entirely, adopting the silent, solemn posture of a soldier waiting for execution.
Yet, during this exact period, while the other ordinary children were still struggling to comprehend Pinyin, Wei Zhi Yuan—driven by an extraordinary intellect and a terrifying, macabre motivation—had already taught himself the advanced Chinese characters at the final part of the textbooks. His sole driving force was simple: he needed to draft a proper suicide note before his final breath.
For the sake of this masterpiece, Wei Zhi Yuan had specifically begged his teacher to instruct him on how to use a dictionary. Every day during recess and lunch breaks, while other kids ran screaming across the playground, he sat huddled over an battered dictionary lent to him by the faculty, memorizing characters with feverish intensity.
His mind was entirely uncorrupted by worldly distractions. A dying man had no need to waste time making schoolyard friends, so he treated his classmates with an icy, detached indifference. Consequently, his tunnel vision prevented him from noticing that half the children in the classroom were also sporting toothless gaps and speaking with the exact same ridiculous whistle.
Finally, as midterm exams arrived, Wei Zhi Yuan—armed with the grim perseverance of the terminally ill—conquered hundreds of complex characters and secured a flawless, perfect score on his Chinese language exam.
He felt no joy, entirely indifferent to the teacher’s glowing praise. Before his remaining teeth could betray him, he completed his final work: the suicide note.
That evening, it happened that both Pocky and Fatty San were over at the flat for dinner. With heavy, solemn reverence, Wei Zhi Yuan approached the table and presented a neatly folded piece of paper to Wei Qian.
Fatty San, asked in his usual scattered way, smirked mid-chew. "Yo, little brother, barely two months into school and you’re already writing love letters to your big brother?"
Wei Qian accepted the paper with his chopsticks still clamped in his mouth. Unfolding it with his free hand, he began to read with keen interest.
Wei Zhi Yuan cast a somber, parting glance at him, lowering his head into a dark, grieving silence. "It's my suicide note."
Fatty San blinked, his ears failing him. "Your what?"
Wei Zhi Yuan replied with the flat, eerie calm of a martyr stepping up to the gallows. "It's my suicide note. I am about to die."
The small dinner table fell into a bizarre, stunned silence. Everyone stared at him.
After a long pause, Pocky stammered hoarsely, "H-How... how do you... how do you k-know you're... you're dying?"
Wei Zhi Yuan felt a lump rise in his throat, his voice cracking with unshed tears. "I’ve already lost several pieces of my teeth. And four more of my teeth are currently loose."
The layers of horizontal fat on Fatty San’s face twitched violently. He leaned in, asking with extreme caution, "Then... didn't you feel the hard, sharp tips of new teeth budding out from the gaps where the old ones fell?"
Wei Zhi Yuan’s composure finally broke, a choked sob escaping his chest. "Isn't... isn't that the rally just before the end!"
The crowd froze for two agonizing seconds. Then, Fatty San and Wei Qian locked eyes—and burst into a deafening, hysterical fit of laughter.
The only one possessing a shred of decency was Pocky, who desperately tried to choke back his own chuckles to shield the boy's pride. "Q-Qian'er... don't... don't laugh at him. Don't... make f-fun... he's still s-small..."
But Wei Qian had already swallowed his own saliva the wrong way. He rolled off his chair onto the worn sofa, coughing uncontrollably as he shook with laughter, fat tears of mirth streaming down his face.
To the children, the older brother had always been an unbending, stern fixture—a parental figure who rarely cracked a smile. They had never seen him laugh with such unbridled, breathless abandon. Wei Zhi Yuan froze on the spot, his mind going entirely blank, the grand tragedy of his "imminent death" completely forgotten in the wake of his brother's joy.
He had never imagined that the big brother—who remained entirely immune to his desperate, fawning attempts to please—could be so thoroughly delighted by a dark, ominous suicide note.
Perhaps out of some strange, lingering sentimentality, Wei Zhi Yuan secretly retrieved the note later that night and hid it away in his personal collection.
---
By the time Wei Qian’s name became a feared legend in Brother Le’s nighttime circuits, both Little Bao and Wei Zhi Yuan had already settled into the second grade.
Word on the street was that on the day of the daytime casino raid, a powerful underground boss from the south, Fourth Master Hu, happened to be in the area. Intrigued by the sheer, suicidal ferocity of the teenager who had butchered a dozen men alone, the boss had secretly dispatched an envoy to hand Wei Qian a sleek business card, attempting to poach him for his own syndicate.
Unfortunately, Wei Qian was heavily shackled by his family commitments and couldn't flee the city, forcing him to politely decline Fourth Master Hu's lucrative offer.
From that moment on, the street-boy "Little Wei" officially transformed into the respected "Brother Little Wei."
Wei Qian’s left arm was indeed fractured. After a trip to the hospital to have it reset and bound in a heavy plaster cast, Brother Le’s attitude toward him underwent a dramatic, 360-degree inversion. The boss became extraordinarily attentive, personally driving the boy back to the shantytown in his luxury car, and explicitly commanded Pocky to tend to his every need. Brother Le granted him an extended medical leave, promising that his full wages would be paid out without a single cent docked.
Pocky likewise labored under Brother Le to support his own household, drawing a meager income by waking up in the predawn hours to scrub down the empty nightclub floors. He was an incredibly diligent worker, but tragically lacking in wit; if it weren't for Wei Qian’s rising, Brother Le likely wouldn't even remember the stuttering boy’s name.
Conversely, as the years ticked by, Fatty San began to gradually distance himself from Brother Le’s criminal circle. Though their bond still clung together like intertwined lotus roots, it was now purely for old camaraderie—exchanging casual favors or lending a hand when trouble knocked.
Fatty San seemed far more passionate about inheriting his family’s traditional trade: slaughtering hogs and selling meat at the market.
Dragging his broken, plastered arm, Wei Qian returned to the flat to recuperate just as the two cubs burst through the front door after school.
Wei Zhi Yuan lunged forward like a heat-seeking missile before he could even slip his schoolbag off his shoulders. "Brother!"
Pocky quickly intercepted him with a frantic hand. "D-Don't... don't pounce! His... his shoulder..."
Wei Zhi Yuan’s brow furrowed into a tight, hard knot. "What happened to your arm?"
Holding a lit cigarette between his lips, Wei Qian muttered vaguely through a plume of smoke, "A stray dog bit it."
Little Bao, entirely devoid of tact, scoffed loudly, "How can a dog bite turn your arm into a giant white dumpling?"
Wei Zhi Yuan’s small features remained taut and dark. He opened his mouth to press further, but Wei Qian, clearly unwilling to indulge them, adopted his terrifying parental authority. "Go do your homework. What’s with all the useless chatter? Keep your noses out of adult business."
With that single, cold command, the two children were thoroughly banished to the corner.
Pocky glanced at the reluctant, lingering Wei Zhi Yuan, rubbing his rough, chapped hands together before turning to Wei Qian. "L-Later tonight... Fatty San will come over to c-cook for you. I... I still have to g-go to the..."
Though Brother Le had generously exempted Wei Qian from work, Pocky didn't dare slack on his own cleaning shifts. He looked at Wei Qian with deep embarrassment, stuttering as he tried to justify his departure. He was an inherently honest, simple soul; if you asked him to sneak away from his duties, he simply wouldn't know how.
Knowing him inside out, Wei Qian waved his good hand dismissively. "Alright, I get it. Get dynamic and get out of here, go!"
With immense effort, Pocky offered one final, desperate instruction: "D-Don't... don't touch the water... b-be careful..."
Wei Qian sighed. "Come on, do me a massive favor and say fewer words. Let your old man conserve some energy so I can live two years longer."
Once Pocky had rushed out and Fatty San was busy clattering pots in the kitchen, boredom washed over Wei Qian. He reached onto the small table, casually picking up one of Little Bao’s extracurricular reading booklets to kill the time.
The thin pamphlet was distributed by the elementary school for second graders, packed with inspirational, heavily sanitized tales of historical heroes. After reading, the children were required to write a formal book review, and the school demanded that a parent review and sign off on the homework.
Wei Qian skimmed through a few pages, suddenly finding the entire concept profoundly amusing yet suffocating.
The figures in these stories were extraordinary—either sacrificing their lives for the motherland at a tender age, or overcoming severe physical disabilities while maintaining a flawless, daily devotion to their studies. It felt as though every single person in these pages faced trials infinitely vaster and more tragic than his own petty struggles, yet they all miraculously functioned as perfect, unblemished role models for the nation.
Holding the booklet in his good hand, the teenage thug let out a silent, cynical smirk against the backdrop of the bubbling kitchen.