Unfortunately, his proposal was shot down on the spot by Old Bear without a second thought.
Wei Chain: "Why not?"
In his trademark, leisurely drawl -- the kind that suggested he wouldn't rush even if his house caught fire -- Old Bear stated, "Our worldviews do not align."
Wei Chain: "..."
Bullshit worldview, Wei Chain cursed inwardly.
"Why didn't you bring up our clashing worldviews when you hired me to run your shop?" Wei Chain countered.
Old Bear answered with absolute righteousness: "That was an employer-employee dynamic. Now you want to ride along with capital and form a venture -- that makes us partners. I refuse to take on a business partner whose moral outlook does not mirror my own."
Wei Chain ground his molars, forcing an ounce of patience: "Fine. What kind of pristine worldview are you looking for?"
Old Bear sighed theatrically. "The very fact that you ask proves you lack the vocabulary to define your inner compass. You simply have no concept of spiritual enlightenment. Alas, another pathetic mortal adrift in the secular swamp, living without a moral lighthouse -- how utterly tragic!"
Wei Chain genuinely wondered which psychiatric ward director had neglected their post, allowing this certified lunatic to roam free and menace society.
Old Bear met his glare with placid serenity. "See? You think I'm insane. That is the very definition of unaligned worldviews."
Wei Chain inhaled deeply, preparing to haggle for three hundred rounds.
Yet Old Bear was as stubborn as a turtle biting down on lead. Knowing better than to offend an eccentric with deep pockets, Wei Chain pivoted to brute practicality: "I cover my own food and lodging. On the road, I can haul heavy freight and back you up in a brawl. Treat me as free hired muscle -- you don't even have to pay me a wage. What the hell do you lose by bringing an extra pair of hands?"
Old Bear, who had been feigning a meditative trance, cracked an eyelid and scrutinized the youth with deep suspicion. "Brawl? You know how to throw down?"
Wei Chain: "Yeah. It was my second major."
Old Bear measured Wei Chain’s lean, corded frame, pondered the offer for a long minute, and unexpectedly nodded. "Fair enough. If you have the stomach for hardship, you can tag along."
Satisfied, Wei Chain kicked his bicycle pedal into position. "Deal. Thanks, Boss Bear."
"Hold on," Old Bear called out after him. "We roll out in a couple of days. What about your classes?"
Wei Chain smirked. "No problem. Dropped the books."
A rare flash of genuine admiration spread across Old Bear’s wrinkled, puffy face. "Though our worldviews remain incompatible, I must commend your rogue spirit. Skipping school to seek fortune -- a true warrior."
Wei Chain rode off, tossing his reply over his shoulder: "I took early admission to Ace University. Just waiting for autumn enrollment."
Old Bear: "..."
Seconds later, the duped merchant let loose a shrill, operatic shriek down the street: "You shameless academic fraud! How dare you try to infiltrate the working class?! You -- you little bastard...!"
Wei Chain whistled a tuneless melody, pedaling away into the breeze.
And so, Wei Chain prepared for another high-stakes expedition where he was willing to bleed for cash.
This time, however, he chose not to vanish in total secrecy.
Following Old Bear on a legitimate herbal trade run was nothing shameful. More importantly, two years of hard labor and domestic peace had mellowed his reckless edge. Putting himself in Fatty San’s shoes, Wei Chain knew that receiving a frantic, cryptic SOS out of the blue would drive anyone to the brink of madness.
Time had smoothed away his rough, juvenile arrogance. He recognized that years ago, Pocky and Fatty San had accommodated his volatile temper; now, Old Mrs. Song was shouldering the grueling domestic grind to support them all.
Pocky was gone forever, but those who remained deserved to be treated right.
Before departing, Wei Chain gave advance notice to Old Mrs. Song and Fatty San. Finally, he stopped by Pocky’s home, sat with his crippled mother, and pressed a thousand yuan into her calloused hands, gently lying that it had arrived from her son overseas.
The only person he kept in the dark was Wei Zhi Yuan.
There was no helping it -- ever since that terrifying journey to the south, Wei Chain had developed a lingering dread of the boy's obsessive clinging.
The kid was shooting up like a young bull, yet he clung like an abandoned stray. Two years ago, it had been summer break; this time, Wei Chain feared the boy would abandon his own graduation exams and stow away beside him again. Wei Zhi Yuan was entirely capable of such madness.
Yet the boy picked up the scent anyway.
On the eve of his departure, Wei Chain brought home a small pack of emergency medical supplies. Just as he set the bag on the table, Pocky’s mother called out from below in her wheelchair, shouting that her television set had shorted out.
Wei Chain rushed downstairs to repair the wiring, completely forgetting the supplies on the table.
When he returned, Wei Zhi Yuan was sitting motionless beside the counter, inspecting the blister packs one by one.
"Brother," the boy asked, his voice low. "Where are you going?"
Wei Chain felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. A sudden, irrational panic flared in his chest -- not unlike an unfaithful husband caught red-handed. Stumbling over his words, he stammered defensively to his young ancestor, "Go... go where? What are you talking about? Summer's coming -- people get heatstroke easily. I'm just stocking up."
Wei Zhi Yuan looked up at him in dead silence, quietly returning the medicine to the plastic bag. He had clearly spotted a pack of Dramamine and a few glucose shots inside.
Old Mrs. Song, having been strictly warned not to rile up the kids, hurried out from the kitchen with a steaming platter, attempting to cover for him: "I told your brother to buy those! He's not going anywhere. You boy, always overthinking! Hurry up and grab your chopsticks -- dinner is served!"
Her clumsy, operatic cadence was completely see-through.
Wei Zhi Yuan glanced at the table: several heaping plates of freshly boiled pork dumplings. Dumplings for departures, noodles for returns. The old woman had adhered strictly to northern superstition.
Wei Chain swallowed a sigh at his ally's terrible acting. Entrusting a secret to Old Mrs. Song was a form of self-inflicted torture; her concept of discretion was making sure the entire neighborhood took notice.
Wei Zhi Yuan was not a mild-tempered child, nor had he ever learned the art of throwing spoiled tantrums. No matter how deep the betrayal cut, he never screamed; he merely projected his disappointment through freezing, stony silence.
He had already gathered what his brother was planning, and Grandma was in on it.
Once again, they had united to treat him like a clueless, fragile toddler -- even though he had long stopped playing the fool, stopped wrestling with Little Bao, and was sprinting toward adulthood at a desperate, punishing pace.
At thirteen, the volatile surge of puberty and rapid physical growth made his brother's protective dismissal almost impossible to stomach. Unable to vent the burning resentment in his chest, he forced it down into the core of a dormant volcano.
Before turning in for the night, Wei Zhi Yuan stepped forward, sliding a crisp permission slip across the desk. "Sign this for me."
His posture resembled a student submitting a formal self-criticism -- chin down, eyes fixed on the floorboards, expression entirely wooden.
Wei Chain skimmed the paper. "A summer camp? What kind of camp?"
Wei Zhi Yuan answered flatly, "Our school held a selection trial for the Mathematics Olympiad. I placed first. The summer training camp is for the municipal cohort... Completing it guarantees direct placement into the top key high school division."
Any other child would have puffed their chest out to fish for praise, yet Wei Zhi Yuan acted as though he were merely fulfilling a legal guardian requirement, his handsome features taut and joyless.
He felt no pleasure in it. Before his older brother, his triumphs always felt small and powerless.
Yet his young guardian was genuinely thrilled. Seeing that only a single student had been selected from the entire grade, a flush of pride washed over Wei Chain’s face. A genuine grin tugged at his lips, though he quickly cleared his throat to suppress it, masking his pride behind a stern, parental scowl: "Since the school selected you, work hard and don't embarrass your teachers. Don't drop the ball when it counts."
Wei Zhi Yuan gave a low, obedient nod.
Wei Chain patted his pockets, remembered something, unlocked the wooden nightstand drawer, pulled out a small stack of bills, and sealed them into an envelope. In his rush, his elbow knocked over a bottle of floral water that Little Bao had left on the desk. Though he caught the glass quickly, a splash of fragrant liquid soaked into his bare wrist.
Wiping his skin with a napkin, Wei Chain passed the envelope over. "Take this for your allowance. If you're staying in the dorms, don't skimp on food."
He reached out, his broad hand ruffling the boy's messy hair.
The scent of floral water mixed with the sharp bite of alcohol lingered in the air. Feeling the warmth of those long, calloused fingers against his scalp, a sudden jolt of electricity shot straight through Wei Zhi Yuan’s skull. A dark, burning flush crept from his collar up to his ears.
Following the blush came an inexplicable wave of shame and frustration -- a suffocating taste he couldn't name.
"Brother..." the boy blurted out.
Wei Chain glanced back.
Wei Zhi Yuan wanted to tell him that from this moment on, he was carving his own path. He was growing into a man who would never cling to his brother's coattails like a pathetic stray, never chase him across thousands of miles only to end up a helpless burden.
He was going to become a pillar of iron, not a useless shadow.
Yet catching Wei Chain’s warm, tired gaze, the words stuck in his throat, dissolving into a flock of silent crows.
He lowered his head, shaking it quietly. "Never mind."
The following morning, Wei Chain waited until he saw Wei Zhi Yuan pedal off toward school with Little Bao on the back of his bicycle. Letting out a long breath of relief, Wei Chain slung his travel bag over his shoulder and marched to the pharmacy to meet Old Bear.
Sporting oversized aviator sunglasses, a wide straw sunhat, and aggressively chewing gum, Old Bear offered a final warning before turning the ignition: "I agreed to bring you, but let’s get this straight: the railway doesn't reach the plateau yet, so we have to drive the whole way. Where it's flat, the altitude will choke you; where it's low, the roads are a nightmare. Especially the mountain tracks -- every year, countless poor souls plunge off the cliffs to hang on the canyon walls forever. We won't be back until late July at the earliest. It’s a brutal, hellish run -- are you absolutely sure you want to risk your neck?"
Wei Chain nodded without blinking.
Old Bear shook his head, drawing a breath to launch into another hypnotic, rambling sermon.
Wei Chain cut him off: "Boss Bear, listening to you talk always reminds me of a classical poem."
Old Bear glanced over. "Which one?"
Wei Chain: "From the hands of a loving mother, the thread is tightly woven; her heart frets for the wandering child, dreading a delayed return."
Old Bear stared through his dark lenses, turning the verse over in his mind as the truck cleared the city limits. After twenty minutes of dead silence, he blurted out in sudden outrage: "Wait a minute! That poem is about an old matriarch fretting over her son! You little shit, are you calling me your grandmother?!"
Wei Chain sighed inwardly. It was bad enough that the man was functionally illiterate; what made it truly tragic was that despite his ignorance, he insisted on pretending to be a refined scholar... A truly magnificent specimen of a fool.
With Wei Chain’s departure, the flat fell into an eerie, prolonged quiet. At first, the occasional long-distance payphone call came through to report safe transit, but soon all communication ceased as the convoy pushed deeper into the remote mountain ranges.
Little Bao whined about her brother's absence a few times, while Wei Zhi Yuan never uttered his name once. Old Mrs. Song suspected the boy was simply burying his fury deep within his ribs.
Sleeping alone in the empty bed, Wei Zhi Yuan stayed up past midnight every night. When his school notebooks ran out, he used a staple gun to bind discarded scrap paper into thick calculation booklets, covering every square inch of margins with dense mathematical proofs. A thick pad was consumed every three or four days.
Staring at the incomprehensible equations, Old Mrs. Song preserved the filled notebooks like sacred family relics, wielding them daily to scold Song Lee Lee.
Little Bao suffered endless domestic torment under her grandmother's nagging: "Look at your brother! Then look at yourself!"
"I'm an average student," Little Bao mumbled around her soup spoon.
Whack! The old woman struck her forehead with wooden chopsticks. "An average student is a family disgrace!"
The old woman couldn't even read the Chinese subtitles on the evening news, yet she possessed the audacity to pass judgment on academic percentiles...
Being average is normal -- it's not like I'm a criminal! Little Bao pouted, convinced her grandmother knew nothing about modern schooling.
Her big brother threatened to crop her hair; her second brother was an untouchable prodigy; her grandmother was a walking megaphone. Song Lee Lee felt that in this household, she was nothing more than a wild, bitter turnip pulled from the dirt.
Summer peaked and waned, yet still no word came from Wei Chain.
That afternoon, Wei Zhi Yuan skipped his regular classes for a school mock exam and returned home early. Old Mrs. Song sent him out on his bicycle to fetch a twenty-pound sack of rice from the market.
Pedaling past the district cultural center, Wei Zhi Yuan caught a glimpse of movement through the iron gates and slammed his brakes.
On the open-air stage, an instructor was guiding a group of eight- and nine-year-old children through a dance rehearsal for the upcoming Children's Day performance.
Wei Zhi Yuan’s gaze bypassed the children entirely, locking onto a solitary figure seated on a stone bench below.
The man was in his early forties, with a crooked, hunched back and an unshaven, greasy chin. He wore a stained, rumpled suit that radiated an unmistakable aura of predatory filth.
The man’s eyes were fixed on the young girls leaping to the music. His unblinking stare felt almost physical, slithering across the children's limbs like a venomous reptile.
Even if that degenerate were ground into ash, Wei Zhi Yuan would recognize him in an instant -- it was the very pedophile he had battered away with an iron pipe years ago.
Wei Chain had spent months searching the alleys for this predator back then without success. Who could have imagined the beast would walk right into Wei Zhi Yuan’s crosshairs?
Pulling his bicycle into the shadows behind a concrete pillar, Wei Zhi Yuan watched the man with the terrifying, silent patience of a hunting leopard stalking its first kill.
He waited for over an hour until the children finished their routine. As the group poured out through the gates, the man rose and began trailing closely behind them.
Fortunately, the female instructor accompanied the students the entire way, depriving the predator of any opening.
The man stood on the curb, his neck craned forward like a famished vulture, drooling as he watched the children disappear down the road. His breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps, a distinct bulge forming beneath the fabric of his trousers.
Finding the alley empty, the man shamelessly adjusted himself through his pocket before shuffling off toward the industrial sector.
Hesitating for barely a second, Wei Zhi Yuan locked his bicycle against a lamppost and followed soundlessly on foot.
A newly opened branch of a primary school was located in this remote district -- which explained why the predator had shifted his hunting grounds here.
Wei Zhi Yuan shadowed him through the alleys for forty minutes until the man turned into the side gates of a commercial meat-processing plant.
Without making a sound, Wei Zhi Yuan turned on his heel, retrieved his bicycle, purchased the rice, and pedaled home.
Upon arriving, he didn't breathe a single word. As usual, he and Little Bao split the kitchen duties -- one washing the dishes while the other cleaned up -- before retreating to their respective rooms to do their homework.
Old Mrs. Song collected her canvas apron and headed out for her evening recycling rounds.
The flat was dead quiet, broken only by the rhythmic ticking of the wall clock.
Finishing his advanced calculus problem set, Wei Zhi Yuan looked up, his dark pupils resembling drops of impenetrable ink as his gaze swept across the closed door of Little Bao’s room.
Opening his desk drawer, he retrieved a fresh notebook and calmly penned the date, time, and exact address of the meat-processing plant.