Little Bao remained in the hospital for an entire week.
On the day she was discharged, a fierce blizzard had buried the city, yet by the time she was discharged, the temperature had soared by more than ten degrees, heralding the early blooms of spring.
At home, Old Mrs. Song boiled a large, steaming pot of pork dumplings to welcome her back.
Little Bao quickly noticed that the once saber-rattling tension between her big brother and grandmother had miraculously dissolved into a quiet truce. Moreover, seeing how sick she had been, Wei Zhi Yuan no longer bothered to hold a grudge against her, voluntarily pulling out his neat class notes from the past week to help her catch up.
Inside that dilapidated, one-room flat on the third floor of the shantytown silo, the air suddenly carried the unmistakable warmth of a real home.
With Le Xiao Dong dead, the suffocating, knot of hatred lodged in Wei Qian’s chest seemed to dissipate alongside the man's passing. His very demeanor underwent a profound transformation... Though Fatty San couldn't quite articulate the exact nature of the change, he simply felt that the razor-sharp, lethal hostility surrounding the youth had noticeably softened.
Either way, it was a welcome turn of events.
When the time came to pick up Pocky’s mother from the hospital, Fatty San brought Little Ho and Wei Qian to Pocky’s old bungalow.
Spitting into his palms, Fatty San began furiously shoveling dirt from beneath a large locust tree. "That kid Pocky was like a gopher -- buried everything underground. He definitely left something here! Hey, Master Qian, you're just going to stand there with your hands tied behind your back? Mind pulling over your honorable paws to help your old man?"
Wei Qian knocked the dried mud from his boots, replying without bothering to lift his head, "The Master is doing you a huge favor letting you burn some fat. Cut the bullshit, put some muscle into it, and dig."
After speaking, he pulled a cigarette from his pocket, popped it between his lips, and lit it. Instead of smoking it, he carefully planted the lit cigarette upside down in the dirt beneath the locust tree, gently patting the rough bark of the trunk. "Haven't had a drag in a while, have you? It’s cheap tobacco, but make do."
The large locust tree stood quietly in the spring breeze, its branches rustling softly as a thin spiral of pale smoke curled upward around its trunk.
It truly bore a resemblance to Pocky -- always standing silently in the corner, offering a foolish, quiet grin to whoever looked his way, never asking for anything, never making a sound.
Before long, Fatty San unearthed the buried cash. Sealed inside a thick plastic bag along with the money was a folded note. In it, Pocky wrote that he was leaving for a distant hometown and had no choice but to entrust his mother to his two brothers... The word "entrust" was misspelled with the wrong character, and the handwriting was a scrawling, jagged mess.
This illiterate street fryer, despite being the oldest among them, couldn't even write a farewell note as cleanly as Wei Zhi Yuan had after his first two months of primary school.
After conferring for a moment, Wei Qian and Fatty San decided to permanently conceal Pocky’s death. They handed the cash and the note to his mother, inventing a uniform lie: Pocky had joined a group of traders traveling overseas to save up money for her medical treatment, heading all the way to Cambodia to sell coffee beans. The "Cambodia" detail was Fatty San’s idea -- he figured a far-off, exotic land fit the vague phrasing on the note quite well.
Having lost an arm and a leg in the accident, Pocky’s mother qualified as disabled. By official regulations, she was eligible to apply for government welfare support. However, navigating the bureaucratic nightmare of securing certificates and filing paperwork was a grueling process. Years ago, Wei Qian could have applied for similar aid as an orphan, but he lacked the time, energy, and connections to chase paperwork through government offices.
Now, though he and Fatty San possessed both the time and the means, the application hit an immediate dead end -- because of Pocky’s mother herself.
When Wei Qian tentatively brought up the idea of government assistance, the old woman firmly refused. She firmly believed that since she had a nearly grown son who was capable of working -- and who had now gone abroad to trade coffee beans and earn good money -- she shouldn't exploit the government for tiny subsidies.
Her unyielding sense of moral integrity gave Wei Qian a splitting headache. When he got home that day, he gave Fatty San a heavy beating for coming up with such a convincing, elaborate lie -- talk about lifting a rock only to drop it on their own feet.
Wei Qian never returned to the nightclub scene, nor did he care who seized Le Xiao Dong’s territory after his death.
The fierce street enforcer known as "Brother Wei" vanished right alongside the late Brother Le, washing his hands of the underworld entirely. He played his part as a hitman to perfection. Everyone knew he was just a guard dog kept by Brother Le; no matter how sharp his teeth were, nobody paid him any mind. The rest of them had plenty of other reasons to go crack each other's skulls.
Instead, Wei Qian asked Fatty San’s father to secure him a job as a factory order laborer -- which, plainly speaking, meant manual freight loading.
It was temporary, piece-rate manual labor. Pure, bone-crushing physical work. A free lunch consisted of two plain steamed buns per worker. Within a few days of starting, Wei Qian’s palms were covered in massive, blood-filled blisters, his clothes permanently caked in grime, forced to swallow his pride and cater to the whims of site managers.
The glory days of "Brother Wei," the feared street fighter, vanished into thin air like a fleeting dream.
By his third day on the job, Wei Qian sat on the curb during his break, using a sewing needle to pop the dark blood blisters on his hands. His heart felt extraordinarily calm -- a quietness that surprised even himself. In the past, he had believed that such menial labor would snap his young spine. He used to think that the light-years of distance separating his grim reality from the concept of "success" would make his heart bleed as if cut by a blade.
Yet it didn't.
His burning ambition to "make something of himself" hadn't faded in the slightest. He still dreamed of making massive sums of money; he still needed cash to feed his family. But having witnessed enough superficial grandeur and experienced bone-chilling life and death, his soul had unconsciously settled into a deep, unshakeable bedrock.
The person most overjoyed by this transition was Old Mrs. Song.
Even though Wei Qian was ordered around like a low-tier servant at the loading dock every day, she felt immensely relieved that he had finally gotten onto the "right track." Coming from a farming background, she saw nothing shameful about manual labor; earning an honest living through physical sweat was natural and honorable. Doing odd jobs, even if it meant eating plain coarse grains, was infinitely better than wearing gold chains and wielding knives in night venues.
Subjectively believing that Wei Qian now possessed a respectable future, the old woman finally recognized that this seventeen-year-old youth was genuinely shouldering the weight of an entire household. Her attitude toward him softened considerably.
She tracked down an herbal ointment for bruises from somewhere and secretly placed it on Wei Qian’s bedside table. To help supplement the family's income, she began waking up at three in the morning to boil tea-marinated eggs and sweet corn, heading out to sell them to morning commuters. In the afternoons, she roamed the alleys collecting cardboard boxes, scrap metal, and plastic bottles to sell at recycling stations.
Even Wei Qian had to admit that this eccentric old woman was a formidable character. Despite waking before dawn and working straight through the night, she still managed to cook three meals a day for the children at home, remaining energetic enough to fight three hundred rounds of verbal warfare with the wicked old hag next door.
Scared off by Wei Qian’s childhood display with a kitchen knife, the wicked old woman didn't dare step outside for a face-to-face clash. Instead, both households kept their front doors chained shut, leaving a crack open for audio transmission, launching full-scale shouting matches across the hallway.
The two elderly women elevated cursing into a fine art form, spewing filthy profanities with such creative precision that even Wei Qian, a seasoned street enforcer, found it unbearable to listen to.
Whenever Fatty San wasn't out sourcing goods, he would sit in the hallway, grabbing a handful of sunflower seeds, happily munching while listening to the daily performance. When the battle concluded, he would brush the seed shells off his pants and clap loudly, his booming voice single-handedly creating the applause of a full theater.
That was usually when both Old Mrs. Song and the wicked old hag turned their combined artillery onto him.
Old Mrs. Song screeched, "You half-wit punk!"
The wicked hag echoed, "You full-blown dipshit!"
Fatty San, delighted to have completed the "total dumbass" duo, wiggled his fat ass and waddled away contentedly.
Eventually, Wei Qian walked over, kicked open the door latch of the wicked hag's house, and had a massive row with Old Mrs. Song at home, ordering both old women to clean up their mouths so they wouldn't corrupt the children.
...As it turned out, the two shrews couldn't win against him individually, so they tacitly shifted their shouting matches to late afternoon -- when the children were still at school -- and declared a strict ceasefire on weekends and public holidays.
Wei Qian quit smoking; cigarettes were simply too expensive.
For Wei Zhi Yuan, two distinct scents defined his childhood memories: one was the sharp reek of cheap tobacco, and the other was the medicinal aroma of the bruise ointment that came later.
During those hot summer months, every night when Wei Zhi Yuan finished his homework and looked up, his big brother was already dead to the world from sheer physical exhaustion, sleeping soundly on the narrow cot. As the weather grew warmer, Wei Qian wore only a sleeveless white tank top and loose cotton shorts, a thin sheet pulled over his waist, leaving his back exposed to the boy.
Months of heavy manual labor had sculpted Wei Qian’s frame, stripping away every trace of excess fat. Long, tight muscles were packed firmly across his torso; his waist remained narrow, and his prominent shoulder blades flared beneath his skin like a pair of folded wings -- as if as long as one was sheltered beneath them, no harm could ever reach them.
Wei Zhi Yuan would gaze at his brother's back for a long moment before lowering his head to copy his vocabulary homework. The phrase assigned by his teacher that day read: An elder brother is like a father.
The boy wrote the characters five times in neat, precise strokes as instructed. Closing his notebook, he switched off the lamp and climbed onto the bed, following the familiar scent of herbal medicine lingering in the air. Crawling over Wei Qian’s sleeping form, he skillfully burrowed into his big brother's chest.
In his half-asleep state, Wei Qian instinctively lifted a heavy arm to drape over the child's back, patting him softly as a raspy, nasal mutter escaped his lips: "Go to sleep..."
Distilling the exact measure of warmth and favor from those three words, Wei Zhi Yuan closed his eyes with absolute contentment, savoring the most comforting moment of his day.
From that summer onward, whenever the concept of "happiness" was mentioned, Wei Zhi Yuan would recall those childhood nights -- nestled in his big brother's arms, pressing against his warm chest, closing his eyes to await sleep... even long after he grew too large to fit within those arms.
Another six months flew by in the blink of an eye.
It was the day of Little Bao and Wei Zhi Yuan’s final examinations, marking the arrival of the summer vacation.
Under the scorching summer sun, Wei Qian rode a twenty-yuan secondhand bicycle to the wholesale ice cream market. Local vendors bought their stock here, and Wei Qian intended to purchase a whole crate of popsicles to treat the two cubs at home.
Many families with multiple children bought ice cream directly from the wholesale market; popsicles that retailed for one or two yuan cost only forty or fifty cents here, saving quite a bit of money.
Wei Qian was inspecting the price list when a hesitant, middle-aged woman's voice called out from behind him.
"Wei Qian? Is that... is that really you, Wei Qian?"
Wei Qian turned around, spotting a somewhat familiar middle-aged woman. He froze for a second, scrutinizing her features before a sudden wave of recognition washed over him. "You... you're Teacher Lee?"
Teacher Lee walked over quickly in her low heels, asking repeatedly, "It really is you! What on earth happened to you? You dropped out of school without saying a word, and I searched for you for so long but got no single trace! What have you been doing all this time? What went wrong? Why didn't you finish your education?"
After three long years, seeing her again gave Wei Qian an uncanny sense of stepping into a former life. School? That felt like a lifetime ago.
Yet facing his former head teacher, Wei Qian instinctively lowered his head. In that moment, he looked neither like a ruthless street enforcer nor a hardened manual laborer. He suddenly reverted to a normal, somewhat formal middle school student standing respectfully before his instructor.
Wei Qian offered a wry, bittersweet smile. "Teacher... it’s a long story."
When Wei Qian arrived home carrying a large carton of ice cream alongside a refined, middle-aged woman, the entire household was thoroughly stunned -- for as long as the children could remember, their big brother had never treated anyone with such immense deference.
The guest was neatly dressed, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and spoke with polite, cultured elegance. A single glance revealed she was an intellectual, completely out of place in their squalid surroundings.
Once Old Mrs. Song figured out Teacher Lee’s identity, she was so shocked her tongue tied into knots. In her remote rural hometown, the administrative structure went from province to city, then to county, township, and finally tiny mountain villages. Her village hadn't produced a single high school student in decades, let alone a real, living high school teacher.
Old Mrs. Song treated Teacher Lee like a visiting state dignitary, pulling out all her culinary skills to cook a lavish table of high-grade dishes, insisting that the teacher stay for dinner.
Unable to refuse their overwhelming hospitality, Teacher Lee sat down at the small dining table. Taking in the cramped, impoverished household, she gradually understood the crushing weight that had forced Wei Qian out of the classroom.
Accepting a bowl of rice from the old woman, Teacher Lee offered carefully, "Wei Qian, I remember your grades were exceptional back then. Honestly, stopping your education like this is such a tragic waste."
Wei Qian didn't answer directly, picking up a small bowl from the side. "Teacher, let me scoop some soup for you."
Teacher Lee took the bowl and continued earnestly, "You know, I've been teaching at our school for over twenty years. As a senior faculty member, I hold a bit of sway with the administration. And your uncle... well, my husband, he works at the Municipal Bureau of Education. If you'd like, I can have him find a way to reinstate your official student record -- you could transfer directly into the graduating class I'm teaching right now."
The moment those words left her mouth, every pair of chopsticks at the table froze simultaneously in dead silence.