On the afternoon of the Mid-Autumn Festival, Wei Qian bought two boxes of mooncakes. Passing by the hospital, he stopped in to drop one off for Pocky’s mother.
Pocky had pushed his mother’s wheelchair outside for a bit, but the woman felt deeply uncomfortable. Half her face was pitted and scarred from scalding oil, leaving her horribly disfigured and hypersensitive to the gazes of strangers. If people stared, she cowered in fear and shame; if they deliberately looked away, she felt patronized and humiliated.
She could only truly relax around Wei Qian and Fatty San. The two boys visited her even more frequently than her own son. Even with her face scorched like charcoal, they had long grown accustomed to it.
"Auntie, I bought a couple of boxes of mooncakes," Wei Qian said, setting a box on her bedside table. "It’s the festival after all, so we ought to celebrate a bit. Have a piece later." He hadn't bought cheap, bulk mooncakes—these were neatly boxed.
Pocky’s mother chided him gently, though her eyes softened. "Why did you buy these? Spending money again!"
Wei Qian readily went along with her tone. "Tell me about it! I don't even see what's so great about these sweet, paste-filled pastries, but my two little 'bosses' at home can't live without them."
Pocky’s mother chuckled. "You can't spoil them like that, or they'll turn into wild brats."
Though she didn't say it aloud, she constantly felt like an unbearable burden. Without the financial means to hire a professional caregiver, she spent most of her days alone in the hospital ward with no one to talk to. Having an acquaintance stop by to chat about trivialities was a rare comfort.
Not to mention, her son had spent the entire afternoon pushing her around the courtyard outside.
It had been a long time since Pocky’s mother had been this happy. On this day, even if her scarred smile was hideous, it was genuinely radiant.
Truth be told, Wei Qian was unused to long, rambling chit-chat. He sat with her for a while until his reserve of smiles was completely drained and his throat felt dry. Only when his jaw felt stiff did he finally take his leave.
Throughout the visit, Pocky remained characteristically silent, standing in the corner and listening quietly.
Leaving the hospital, Wei Qian felt as if a heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He and Fatty San had already made up their minds—if worst came to worst, they would take turns taking care of Pocky’s mother. After all, Wei Qian had no mother of his own; having one more elder to look after changed nothing.
The moment Wei Qian pushed open the front door of his flat, the two little creatures sitting on the sofa perked up simultaneously like a pair of alert meerkats, whipping their heads around with identical, wide-eyed stares.
Little Bao was just about to mouth off with an accusation, but the moment her eyes landed on the box in Wei Qian’s hand, her gaze locked dead straight. Jumping up, she babbled incoherently, "Mooncakes! The TV is broken!"
"..." Wei Qian stared at her. "Fine, I'll fix it for you."
Song Lee Lee wagged her tail in delight, giggling silly. "Heh heh heh heh!"
Having talked too much in the afternoon, Wei Qian was too exhausted to open his mouth again. He simply pointed a single finger toward the kitchen. Little Bao followed his hand with a clueless look. "Are there more mooncakes in the kitchen?"
Wei Zhi Yuan, however, had already trained himself to react instantly. Leaping off the couch, he darted into the kitchen and dragged out the metal toolbox from under the storage bin.
The little pup's attentiveness had reached a point where he could practically read minds. Wei Qian felt deeply relieved, yet at the same time shot a dissatisfied look at Little Bao. "Move over. Talking to you is like talking to a brick wall."
Little Bao protested indignantly, "You didn't say a single word!"
It wasn't the first time the TV had broken down... In fact, almost every appliance in the flat had been fixed by him more than once.
Having long since mastered the trade, Wei Qian sat cross-legged on the floor, unscrewing the TV set's casing in three swift motions. Little Bao sat drooling beside the mooncake box, making sweet eyes at it, while Wei Zhi Yuan leaned obediently over Wei Qian’s shoulder, intently watching him inspect the wiring.
Wei Qian shot the boy a side-glance, thinking to himself that this little cub was far more perceptive and sweet-tempered than the girl.
Wei Zhi Yuan gazed at him with glowing admiration. "Brother, you're amazing! I want to be a TV repairman when I grow up!"
Wei Qian: "..."
Wei Zhi Yuan blinked at him with big, innocent eyes.
Wei Qian grunted, "Your old man paid for your schooling just so you could become a TV repairman?"
Wei Zhi Yuan hesitated for a second before offering, "Then... I can sell TVs!"
Wei Qian cracked a rare smile—the little brat playing dumb was almost cute.
Ever since Wei Zhi Yuan began attending school properly, his report cards had fully showcased his intellect. Wei Qian himself had been unusually precocious as a child, but looking back, even his own grades hadn't necessarily surpassed the boy's.
That evening, after fixing the television, Wei Qian sliced the mooncakes with a kitchen knife. He sat down with the two cubs, eating pastries and watching television together.
On screen, The Legend of the Condor Heroes was playing—Guo Jing had just left Mongolia, following the Seven Freaks of Jiangnan back to the Central Plains—when a sudden knock echoed from the front door.
The knocking was light, hesitant, and uncertain, tapping a few times, pausing, then tapping again.
Assuming it was one of his street brothers, Wei Qian didn't bother putting on a shirt. Bare-chested, covered in thick white bandages, and dangling a lit cigarette between his lips, he went to answer the door.
The moment he pulled it open, he froze.
Standing before him was a strange old woman.
Her hair was stark white, yet she looked spritely and energetic. Short and lean, barely reaching Wei Qian’s shoulder, her skin was dark and weathered. She wore an old-fashioned, double-breasted cloth jacket commonly seen on elderly women from remote villages, paired with cropped, dark trousers that hung loosely around her dry, bony ankles.
She carried a dusty traveling sack on her back and held a plastic bag stuffed with empty aluminum cans and plastic bottles in her hand. Her white hair was combed back neatly without a single strand out of place, and her clothes were impeccably clean. Though she appeared to be in her sixties or seventies, her spine was straight as a ramrod.
She looked like a ragpicker, yet she was the most dignified ragpicker Wei Qian had ever laid eyes on.
At the same time, the old woman eyed the youth before her with cautious apprehension. Facing a shirtless young man covered in bandages and smelling of stale smoke—obviously no law-abiding citizen—she clearly hadn't expected such a person to open the door. Yet she didn't retreat. Subconsciously puffing out her chest and lifting her chin, she asked in a sharp, defensive tone, "Does Song Da Wei live here?"
Her attitude was far from friendly, laced with a sharp, guarded hostility. But before Wei Qian could take offense, the name "Song Da Wei" struck him -- it was too familiar, yet for a split second, he couldn't place who it belonged to.
Seeing his blank expression, the old woman added sharply, "Then does Song Lee Lee live here?"
"Song Lee Lee?" Wei Qian frowned, checking her. "What do you want with her?"
Inside the flat, Little Bao heard her name and came bouncing out. "Hey! Who's looking for me?"
The moment the little girl popped her head out, the withered, proud old woman suddenly trembled violently. Gazing intensely at Little Bao’s curious, round face, her frail frame began to shake uncontrollably. Then, before Wei Qian could react, she dropped her bags, threw her arms around the little girl, and burst into an unreserved, agonizing wail.
Only then did Wei Qian remember -- Song Da Wei was Little Bao’s father, his short-lived stepfather who had given him a few peaceful, well-fed years during his childhood.
And dramatically enough, this old woman was his stepfather's biological mother.
In those early years, long-distance train tickets were prohibitively expensive for rural villagers in remote provinces. The wave of migrant workers was just beginning to form, and it was entirely common for men who left for the cities to go three to five years without returning home. Telephone lines were scarce in rural villages, so families relied almost exclusively on mailed letters and postal money orders to keep in touch.
When Song Da Wei’s letters abruptly stopped, the old woman had been desperate to travel north to find him. But at that exact juncture, her husband suffered a massive stroke. Paralyzed and bedridden, he consumed her life for years. The letters she begged others to write to her son sank into the ocean without a trace -- for by then, Wei Qian’s mother was already trapped in the nightmare of drug addiction, dragging the household into ruin.
Finally, just after that year's Loong Boat Festival, the old woman's bedridden husband breathed his last, kicking the bucket and leaving her behind.
Mrs. Song had become a thoroughly solitary, abandoned old soul.
After weeping through her husband's funeral, she packed her few meager possessions, scraped together whatever savings she had left, and spent months scavenging her way north along the train lines, following the return address on the old post office money orders to find her son.
When she knocked on the door, she had puffed out her chest and held her head high, clinging to her fierce rural pride despite the bag of empty cans in her hand.
Yet that final shred of dignity shattered into dust the moment she realized her only son had died years ago.
It was the Mid-Autumn Festival -- a night reserved for family reunions across the nation. Yet inside this dilapidated shantytown, an old woman stood frozen in horrific realization: her husband and her son were both gone. There was no one left to care for her in her twilight years, no one to bury her when her time came. Her entire life had been lived in vain, leaving her stranded in a desolate, hopeless evening.
She collapsed onto the floor, her ear-splitting wails echoing through the hallway, ruining the holiday mood for everyone before they could even finish their mooncakes.
Wei Qian examined the faded black-and-white photograph the old woman brought—the silly young man in the picture bore a vague resemblance to his late stepfather—and checked the old postal money orders. He was reasonably convinced she was indeed Little Bao’s biological grandmother.
Blood was thicker than water. Though Wei Qian found the noisy old hag thoroughly irritating, he couldn't bring himself to kick her out into the cold on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival. He temporarily took her in, settling her in the small bedroom with Little Bao.
Yet the old woman proved entirely ungrateful.
Once her tears dried, her small, sharp eyes -- identical to those of Song Da Wei -- glimmered with shrewd, cunning intelligence. A single glance told her that Wei Qian was bad news. After probing him with a few seemingly pleasant questions, she discovered he was a street thug who managed nightclub security with a machete. From that moment on, her disdain became palpable.
To an old woman from a remote village, terms like "triad" or "enforcer" meant nothing -- in her eyes, Wei Qian was simply a trashy, lawless hoodlum.
... Of course, her assessment wasn't entirely wrong.
Naturally, the old woman refused to let her precious granddaughter live with a filthy rascal. But she could also see how deeply dependent Little Bao was on her big brother.
Having lived through the entire modern history of China -- two wars, the rise and fall of regimes, and every political movement since the founding of the Republic -- this old woman had fought against nature and man her whole life. She was as shrewd as a barrel of monkeys.
Knowing that everything required strategy, she refrained from confronting Wei Qian head-on. Instead, she decided to bide her time, quietly plotting how to "rescue" her granddaughter from the clutches of this young thug.
Wei Qian, however, had no time to waste on her scheming.
Because that very night, calamity struck.
At three-thirty in the morning, the front door of Wei Qian’s flat was slammed with violent, frantic force.
Wei Qian bolted upright from his bed. Strangely, being jolted awake from his deepest sleep didn't make him curse -- instead, a layer of cold sweat broke out across his back, an instinctual premonition whispering that something had gone terribly wrong.
Dazedly wrapping a blanket around himself, Wei Zhi Yuan scrambled up. His mind was a foggy mess, but he instinctively jumped out of bed barefoot, following Wei Qian to the door.
Before Wei Qian could pull the door fully open, a thick object stuffed through the crack tumbled onto the floorboards. He picked it up -- it was a heavy paper envelope bulging with thick stacks of cash.
Out in the hallway stood Fatty San, bare-chested, wearing only boxers and slippers. White and fleshy, he had clearly just rolled out of bed. Holding an identical envelope, Fatty San blurted out before Wei Qian could even speak: "It's Pocky! I got up in the middle of the night to take a leak and found this sitting by the door! That bastard must have stuffed it through!"
In that moment, Wei Qian’s mind went terrifyingly cold and lucid. "Where did he get this much cash?" he asked in a low, dangerous whisper.
Fatty San’s voice trembled. "Could he... could he have gone back to dealing for those people...?"
"Impossible!" Wei Qian cut him off sharply. "Impossible! Third Brother, you don't understand that crowd. Once they hook you, they want you selling your life for them piece by piece. They would never hand over this much lump-sum cash all at once!"
Realizing Wei Qian was hinting that Pocky might have done something far more dangerous and lethal than small-time drug dealing, Fatty San’s face drained of color.
"I saw him... I should have realized something was wrong this afternoon," Wei Qian’s mind raced. He reached out, grabbed the landline receiver on the table, and dialed the private line of a street brother working the late shift at the club.
After a long silence, Wei Qian set the receiver down. His face had turned ashen and hard as iron.
"What... what happened?" Fatty San unconsciously held his breath, lowering his voice.
"Something went down tonight. I heard a massive squad of police raided the place inside and out, dragging a ton of people away," Wei Qian said briskly, throwing on his jacket and stepping into his shoes. "They didn't see Pocky. Pray to God he isn't tied up in this..."
Fatty San grabbed his forearm, his hand shaking. "What could he... what could he possibly have to do with a police raid?!"
Wei Qian lowered his voice to a razor-thin whisper. "How the hell should I know? I'm heading over to check the club. You go to the hospital and ask the duty nurse if he's been there tonight."
Wei Zhi Yuan hurriedly jogged forward to follow him out, but Wei Qian caught him by the arm, hauling him back inside. "Where do you think you're going? Get back to bed! You have school tomorrow!"
"I can help you find Brother Pocky!" Wei Zhi Yuan pressed urgently.
"You little brat," Wei Qian shot him an impatient, fierce glare. "You're doing me the biggest favor by not adding to the chaos!"
Wei Zhi Yuan’s footsteps froze, the bright light in his eyes instantly dimming into darkness.
A sudden, agonizing contradiction flared in his young chest -- if he showed his precocious maturity, he couldn't easily earn his big brother's affectionate coddling; but if he played the ignorant fool like Little Bao, he would be brushed aside as a useless child the moment something truly critical happened.
Yet the two adults were already consumed by blind panic, completely oblivious to the silent, swirling storm inside Wei Zhi Yuan’s heart.
"Qian'er..." Fatty San stood rooted to the spot, his palms slick with cold sweat, his voice raspy and dry. "If he really got caught by the cops... what's going to happen to him?"
Wei Qian looked up at him from the dim, unlit living room. His dark eyes gleamed with a lethal, knife-like edge.
"What do you think?" he asked softly.
Fatty San’s heart plunged straight into the icy depths of hell.