By the third day, domestic order had fully returned to Wei Chain’s household.
Though Wei Chain did little besides nurse his fractured leg in bed, his presence in the flat was like a divine, sea-stabilizing pillar crossed with a lucky household mascot. So long as he sat anchored in the corner, everyone under the roof could breathe easy and go about their business.
Early that morning, Wei Zhi Yuan packed his satchel and bade them goodbye, preparing to check into the municipal Mathematics Olympiad camp. The second he pulled the front door open, an enamel washbasin crashed down from the floor above with a deafening CLANG.
Wei Zhi Yuan pulled his toes back just in time, glancing upward through the open stairwell.
Hovering outside Fatty San’s front landing was a rather handsome woman, unleashing a million-decibel sonic boom straight through the iron bars:
"Bear Beau! Drag your miserable ass out here right now!"
Inside the apartment, Old Bear had bolted the outer security grille tight, peeking out through a hair-thin crack in the wooden inner door, whimpering like a scalded cat: "M-Madam... sweet wife... please, find peace in your heart..."
"Peace my foot!" Madam Bear was practically crying blood from sheer rage, her huge, double-eyelidded eyes glaring like a giant, furious rabbit. "Oh, you've developed real courage, haven't you?! Gone for months without a single whisper -- I thought you were dead in a ditch! Why didn't you just expire in the wild?! The moment you crawl back to town, you scurry straight into the nest of some little hussy! Let me tell you, BEAR BEAU, you're well past thirty -- would it kill you to show an ounce of shame?!"
Down below, Wei Chain nearly sprayed a mouthful of fresh soy milk. Hobbling forward with uneven steps, he nudged Wei Zhi Yuan out the entrance: "Hurry up and get to school. Don't linger around for the drama."
Leaning his shoulder against the doorframe, Wei Chain crossed his arms over his chest, tilting his head up toward the floorboards above with the serene, blissfully entertained expression of a man enjoying front-row seats at the opera.
Upstairs, realizing that an explosive domestic tribunal was about to spill into the hallway, Fatty San frantically elbowed Old Bear out of the sightline, threw his security door wide open, and pleaded in a frantic whisper:
"Princess Iron Fan, I beg you on bended knee -- take a good, hard look! Does this fat face of Pigsy look anything like a 'little hussy' to you?!"
Madam Bear froze. The colossal expanse of Fatty San’s round mug instantly monopolized her entire field of vision, leaving her completely speechless for thirty seconds.
Seeing his opening, that wimpy coward Old Bear attempted to tiptoe out the landing. Unsurprisingly, his wife spotted the retreat in a heartbeat.
With a roar like thunder, Madam Bear thrust out her manicured hands, swatting the two-hundred-pound Fatty San aside with terrifying leverage. In two strides, she breached the doorway, grabbed Old Bear by the scruff of his collar, rolled up her sleeves, and dragged him down the concrete steps under a relentless barrage of one-sided domestic discipline.
Fatty San stood on the landing in pure awe, shirtless and bare-chested, miming the removal of a gentleman's hat as he bowed them down the stairs. Down below, Wei Chain mirrored the gesture with equal solemnity.
Taking absolute, malicious delight in watching Old Bear get hauled away right before their eyes, the two youths chimed in with a bizarre, unspoken chemistry.
They spoke in flawless unison: "Karma truly is a beautiful thing!"
... The sheer grief and indignation etched into Old Bear’s retreating eyes was beyond human words.
Yet forty-eight hours later, Old Bear was back.
He tapped on Wei Chain’s door. The instant Wei Chain pulled it ajar, his greeting was deadpan: "Impressive. She hasn't hacked you to pieces yet?"
Old Bear paused, his face twitching. "...Still breathing, much to your deep disappointment."
Old Bear laid out two commercial options. The first was for Wei Chain to sell his share of the harvested herbs directly to him at a modest wholesale discount, pocketing his lump sum immediately. The second was to roll his goods in as equity; Old Bear would liquidate the inventory through his commercial networks, splitting the net profits down the line.
Unless Wei Chain had suffered permanent brain damage on the plateau, he naturally chose the second route.
Old Bear clapped his hands together, revealing the true motive behind his house call: "Brilliant. Since your college semester hasn't started yet, you can spend the rest of the summer peddling medicine with me."
Wei Chain thrust his plaster-encased leg right into Old Bear’s face. "Boss Bear, place a hand over your chest and tell me with a straight face that your conscience hasn't been fed to the dogs."
Old Bear responded with a sly grimace. "Don't you want to watch with your own eyes as the sweat and blood of your travels turns into crisp bills, wobbling and marching in single file right into your bank account?"
Wei Chain: "..."
Old Bear’s eyes darted around the flat before offering another proposal: "I find that Mr. Fatty upstairs possesses an aura remarkably harmonious with mine. Moving forward, we should drag him onto our pirate ship as well."
Wei Chain asked with genuine bewilderment, "From what bizarre angle did you deduce that?"
"I sense profound Zen qualities in Mr. Fatty," Old Bear answered solemnly. "Consider his name -- when he was a babe, a passing monk insisted the boy was destined for the temple, eager to tonsure him right then and there. His worldly parents couldn’t bear to part with him, so they compromised. They named him 'Spit-tune' -- short for Spiritual Tune, you see."
Wei Chain listened, his eyes narrowing. Realizing Fatty San’s sheer audacity had evolved to a level where he could spin a lifelong humiliation name like 'Spit-tune' into a mystical Buddhist blessing, he scoffed.
"Did he happen to mention," Wei Chain asked coolly, "that his true surname is actually Celestial? That he fell straight out of the heavens, and the Leifeng Pagoda collapsed because he landed on it ass-first?"
Old Bear let out a mournful, philosophical sigh. "Alas, clashing worldviews... Blind, secular mortals..."
"Go recite poetry to your loving grandma," Wei Chain snapped.
Just then, Little Bao came bounding into the room. Old Bear inspected the girl with interest. "This is your younger sister? How old is she?"
Wei Chain rested a heavy palm atop Little Bao’s skull. "Turning fourteen soon. A dwarfish little earth-spirit -- shorter than an average ten-year-old."
"Fret not, she's merely a late bloomer," Old Bear replied benevolently, peering through the superficial surface to assess the underlying anatomy. "Observe those large feet of hers. She'll shoot up like a tower in due time."
Having sustained a barrage of insults only to receive an ambiguous compliment, Song Lee Lee stood frozen, unsure whether to be thrilled or deeply offended.
Walking Old Bear to the entrance, Wei Chain heard him ask in an offhand tone, "Where's your younger brother?"
"Away at math camp," Wei Chain answered.
Old Bear went quiet for a beat. "Camp? Quite the scholar, isn't he?"
Wei Chain offered a modest, insincere smirk. "Hardly. He's just an ordinary kid -- though slightly sharper than me, I suppose."
"Sharp, brilliant, voracious with knowledge," Old Bear mused, shaking his head with a faint, inscrutable sigh. He met Wei Chain’s eyes. "However... you need to raise that boy with exceptional care."
Wei Chain frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Old Bear held up his hands, slicing the air with an imaginary blade. "When a sword is ground down beyond a certain tolerance, the steel vanishes until nothing remains but a razor-thin edge. That is the architecture of cursed demonic blades. Such weapons always cut along crooked paths; once drawn from the scabbard, they cannot return without peeling back flesh and bone. But human beings are not forged of iron. If a boy lives his life too 'thin,' it becomes lethal. A thin life bleeds away good fortune..."
"Hold on -- I'm an uneducated lout," Wei Chain interrupted, digging at his ear with a pinky. "Could your venerable self speak in plain human words for once?"
Old Bear’s sagely expression collapsed into a profound pout of petty resentment. "I mean... how the fuck did I offend that wretched wolf cub of yours?! He actually called the authorities at my house and tipped off my wife! If he pulls that stunt again, I swear to God I won't let him off!"
With that, Old Bear spun on his heel and marched down the stairs with furious, tiny strides.
Wei Chain watched him go, turning the matter over in his mind. Wei Zhi Yuan snitched on him? It was undeniably underhanded -- yet there was an undeniable, wicked thrill in seeing the old bastard get his comeuppance.
Still, since a formal grievance had been lodged, Wei Chain felt obligated to put on a parental show. When Wei Zhi Yuan returned home for the weekend, his older brother crooked a finger from the couch, chin tilted in the air:
"Drag your ass over here."
Wei Zhi Yuan’s pulse missed a beat. He scrambled across the floorboards without a sound.
Propping his cast onto the low tea table, Wei Chain struck a match to ignite a cigarette, adopting the menacing drawl of an interrogator: "Confess. What did you pull behind my back?"
Wei Zhi Yuan’s mind went completely blank. His immediate, horrifying instinct was that the cold-storage incident at the meat processing plant had blown wide open.
Yet his immediate terror had nothing to do with juvenile detention, criminal charges, or the police pounding on the door -- his sole, suffocating panic was: What will Big Brother think of me?
Will he realize how twisted and vicious I am? Will he look at me with disgust? Will he think he nurtured a venomous viper under his own roof?
A sudden, visceral panic seized him, draining every drop of color from his cheeks.
Wei Chain hadn't anticipated such a catastrophic reaction. Taken aback, he quickly reflected on his words -- he hadn't said anything particularly harsh, had he?
Clearing his throat, Wei Chain rolled his eyes, deliberately softening his bark: "Look at you -- how old are you, huh? Pulling cheap stunts like that, and worse, being sloppy enough to get caught and reported to me... Ahem, not that getting away with it makes it right!"
The boy's scattered sanity slowly drifted back into place. Right. If Brother knew about the plant, would he ever summon me in that offhand, lazy tone?
Besides, even though the custodian was dead, the vault had been locked by the graveyard relief guard; the man had wandered into the freezer on his own two feet. All Wei Zhi Yuan had done was buy liquor with the man's own cash. The physical evidence was reduced to ashes, leaving zero paper trail. Even if an investigator reconstructed the timeline, no court on earth could pin a murder conviction on a stray receipt.
The loose stone in his chest fell back into its cage, locking his demeanor into cold, unyielding iron.
Peeking up at Wei Chain, Wei Zhi Yuan silently cursed his own momentary cowardice.
The boy's inner world was like an ocean -- tranquil and glassy on the surface, radiating rationality and quiet obedience, yet harboring a monstrous, volcanic turbulence underneath that balanced permanently on a razor's edge.
Within that dark sea, a thought emerged: What if Big Brother truly know? He had long sworn an oath to protect this man for the rest of his days. Everything he owned belonged to Wei Chain; even if his brother demanded his mortal life, he would offer his neck without flinching, writing it off as repayment for the salvation of his childhood.
If that's the case, what does it matter what he thinks of me?
"I am already a monster," Wei Zhi Yuan told himself in cold self-delusion. "It doesn't matter what anyone thinks."
On the surface, however, he maintained his docile, submissive posture, lowering his eyes to murmur an apology: "I was wrong. Next time, I'll make sure to use an anonymous payphone."
"Pah!" Standing firm in his shoes as the authoritative guardian, Wei Chain maintained a flawless facade of parental disapproval, yet a wave of secret satisfaction washed over him.
Deciding to give Wei Zhi Yuan a silent reward after all, he hopped upright on his one good leg and leaned his weight onto the boy's shoulder, softening his tone:
"Tell Grandma not to bother with cooking tonight. We're eating out."
Wei Zhi Yuan’s expression remained placid, revealing nothing. Yet the palm pressed against Wei Chain’s waist was drenched in icy sweat.
Throughout the final month of summer break, Wei Chain and Fatty San shadowed Old Bear across the city, sitting in on countless business negotiations.
Wei Chain quickly realized that Old Bear was far sharper than his eccentric exterior suggested. His commercial connections ran vast and deep, dabbling in every conceivable sector. Correlating this with their northwestern expedition, Wei Chain understood that although their nominal goal was sourcing herbs, Old Bear was never one to let a single goal tie his hands. As long as there was money to be made and a quick hustle in sight, he’d flip just about anything.
His frantic scurrying was not the aimless buzzing of a headless fly, but the calculated maneuvering of an operator mapping the terrain.
During slow afternoons, Wei Chain lounged in Old Bear’s pharmacy, fielding the occasional retail customer, trading neighborhood gossip, and joining Fatty San in roasting the shop owner.
Fortunately, Old Bear had a belly broad enough to sail a barge, refusing to lower himself to the level of insolent youths.
Recalling that near-fatal trek for the cookware, Fatty San couldn't resist asking, "Boss Bear, an impoverished street rat like our Chainr risking his neck for cash makes sense, but your venerable self sits on family wealth -- why throw your life on the line like that?"
Old Bear took a measured sip of tea. "For profit, naturally. A merchant is defined as one who extracts profit by shouldering calculated risk. You agree, yes? Embracing risk while making rigorous choices constitutes the foundational craft of commerce."
Wei Chain punctured the grand rhetoric instantly: "Pardon my blindness, but I certainly saw your appetite for risk -- not to mention your talent for dragging innocents onto your pirate ship. The 'rigorous choices' part was far too subtle for the naked eye."
Old Bear delivered his verdict in five sharp syllables: "Short hair, shorter wits."
Fatty San casually waved his cattail fan, his grin spreading so wide it bared his pink gums.
Wei Chain quietly resolved to chop off his scruffy, shoulder-length locks -- which were veering dangerously toward the aesthetic of a feral artist—before university registration.
"Need I remind you," Old Bear rapped his knuckles against the glass counter, "that you begged your way onto my vessel with both hands? Little Brother Wei, do not twist black into white. Furthermore, you should be dropping to your knees in gratitude -- this ship I pulled you onto is a bona fide Noah's Ark."
Straightening his posture, Old Bear launched into a full-blown economic sermon: "Let me enlighten you on what the coming decade holds. First, labor-intensive industries have zero future. Restaurants, low-end manufacturing, assembly plants -- dead ends, all of them. They will be ground to dust between cutthroat domestic competition and rising wages.
"Take you, for instance," Old Bear jabbed a stubby finger at Fatty San. "Student Fatty, that brilliant dream of yours to open a hot pot joint peddling pork bellies? Chuck it in the canal. It might keep grease in your belly, but scaling it into real wealth is a pipe dream -- and with your intellectual caliber, you'd run it into bankruptcy within three years."
Having his lifelong ambition pulverized on the spot, Fatty San stared at the merchant in dumbfounded silence.
"As for technology-intensive enterprises..." Old Bear’s gaze swept over Wei Chain, his tone turning deliberate. "Publishing, high-precision engineering, computer sciences -- they possess ten times the vitality of basic labor. Going to college is the right path; knowledge and innovation can indeed rewrite destiny. However, the spring of high-tech industries is barely peeking over the horizon. Our broader society lacks the infrastructure. Ten years from now, the ecosystem will be ripe -- not today. For the next decade, technology will stumble forward beneath the heavy shadow of state monopolies. You can secure a comfortable middle-class existence, perhaps even climb higher, but that requires patience."
Wei Chain closed his mouth, listening with absolute focus.
Old Bear took another swallow of tea, smacking his lips with gusto. "Only capital-intensive ventures represent true, unassailable power. Two men, sitting in a room, leveraging projects worth hundreds of millions, even billions -- can you fathom that altitude? When steady rivers of liquidity flow through your fingers, the petty concept of 'scraping a wage' vanishes from your mind entirely.
"However, capital bears a brutal barrier to entry: you must possess the seed money first. Primitive capital accumulation is a bloody, agonizing grind, far harder than anything that follows. Riding aboard my ark is your shortcut through that bloody phase, understand? Tch... ignorant little brat."
Fatty San nudged Wei Chain’s ribs. "Chainr, what he's trying to say is that surviving that near-death trip with him was the equivalent of hitting the state lottery."
Wei Chain muttered, "Right. So why the hell didn't I just buy a lottery ticket instead?"
Old Bear cut his eyes toward Wei Chain, his voice softening with rare sobriety. "Still... I accept my failure. I misjudged the terrain, miscalculated the hazards. Above all, I failed Little Six. Tragically, he had virtually no surviving kin left, denying me even the chance to make restitution."
At the mention of Little Six, the counter fell into heavy silence. Fatty San, the only one spared the horror, let out a slow sigh. "Guess it just wasn't in his cards."
Old Bear sparked a cigarette, planting it filter-down in the copper ashtray, letting the thin white smoke rise toward the ceiling like a stick of funerary incense.
Fatty San and Wei Chain traded a glance, a sudden ache of familiarity striking their chests -- beneath the shade of the ancient locust tree, they had commemorated Pocky with the exact same upside-down cigarette.
Old Bear turned back to Wei Chain. "To be frank, I hesitated to bring you along at first. A boy like you..."
Wei Chain: "Didn't align with your precious worldviews."
Old Bear rolled his eyes. Having shared blood and near-death trials on the frontier, their bond went far beyond casual banter; the merchant spoke with unvarnished candor: "The first afternoon you strolled into my shop, you were calm, methodical, and didn't fumble a single ledger. I marked you as exceptional -- and you are: bold, sharp, and ruthless with opportunity. But when I handed you that envelope of five thousand yuan, you actually pocketed it without flinching?"
Wei Chain: "Oh? So you didn't actually intend to pay it?"
"That's not the point!" Old Bear sputtered. "It far exceeded what you earned -- you should have at least feigned a polite refusal!"
Wei Chain: "If I refused, would you have kept it?"
"I still would have shoved it into your hands," Old Bear admitted.
Wei Chain sneered. "Then you're out of your damn mind, Comrade Bear Beau."
Old Bear let out a weary groan. "You need to realize that at your age, vision, perspective, and networks are worth ten times the cash. Why fixate on pocket change? Currency is temporary; vision is permanent. Wealth is like water -- the tighter you clench your fist, the faster it slips through your fingers. Do you believe that?"
Poverty had always been Wei Chain’s exposed nerve. Yet with over sixty thousand yuan sitting securely in his bank account -- a princely fortune in that era -- his defensive prickliness had miraculously softened, allowing him to banter about his humble origins across the table.
Wei Chain laughed dryly. "Easy for you to pontificate when your spine doesn't ache from carrying the load! Who doesn't know how to preach philosophy? You think I don't know money is a treacherous son of a bitch? You're an heir draped in silver and gold -- don't come peddling your high-minded gospel to the gutter. If you had an aging grandmother above you, young mouths below you, and spent your youth scraping by from meal to meal, constantly pinched at every turn, you'd count every copper just like me."
Old Bear reached out, pinching Wei Chain’s cheeks and dragging his eyelids down into a comical scowl: "Roll your eyes back down! Who's pontificating without pain? Your brother here survived the era before Reform and Opening! Go home and interrogate your grandmother -- what did we have growing up? My family was so dirt-poor we couldn't ignite the stove! When I was ten, I was following my old man smuggling contraband across the maritime borders, risking execution by firing squad while you little whelps were still running barefoot through monkey country!"
It was the unvarnished truth. Neither Wei Chain nor Fatty San uttered a peep.
"Short hair, shorter wits," Old Bear grumbled with genuine exasperation. "It isn't material deprivation that breaks a man's spirit -- it's comparison. Understand? You're perpetually looking at what others hold, breeding endless panic in your gut."
Recalling the reckless, suicidal brawls Wei Chain had fought in his youth, Fatty San clapped in enthusiastic agreement: "Chainr, Brother Bear speaks the gospel truth!"
Wei Chain waved his hand dismissively. "Spouting hot air. Those seventy-year-old monks secluded in the deep mountain temples have more philosophical depth than either of you -- why don't you go compete with them in seated meditation? What's wrong with shorter wits? What's wrong with panic? I'm a stray who dragged himself out of the gutter -- what the hell else was I supposed to rely on? Selling my flesh? I despise old men like you the most: merciless toward others, endlessly forgiving toward yourselves."
Fatty San scratched his round chin, finding equal merit in the argument. He instantly flipped his stance: "Brother Bear, Chainr has a point too!"
Both Wei Chain and Old Bear shot him a unified glare, thoroughly ignoring the shameless fence-sitter.
Come September, Wei Chain stepped away from the pharmacy to register for his freshman term. Following three weeks of mandatory military drills, the pale skin he had painstakingly recovered over the past month was scorched back into glossy charcoal.
Hauling his duffel bag back to the shantytown, he crossed paths with Fatty San on the stairs. Fatty San pointed a trembling finger, laughing until his belly shook:
"Step right up, folks! Brother, sing us an aria from The Guillotine Trial! With that face, you don't even need theatrical makeup -- just slap a crescent moon on your forehead and you're ready to judge the living by day and the dead by night!"
Meanwhile, Wei Zhi Yuan’s entry into junior high unveiled an even more terrifying edge. He spent a single term in the standard first-year cohort before skipping directly into the junior high’s top-tier honors track.
As if confirming Old Bear’s grim prophecy, the youth was growing sharper, colder, and dangerously "thin." When Wei Chain finally found the leisure to observe him, he noticed the boy rarely laughed or chatted; his dark eyes resembled two polished daggers concealed beneath a still lake. Only within the four walls of the flat did he maintain his tender, attentive demeanor.
During his childhood, Wei Zhi Yuan had masked himself in calculated innocence and clumsy charm -- clumsy enough that Wei Chain could easily see the seams. Now, the older brother found it impossible to read him at all.
Only during evening dinners, when the family debated trivial gossip from the television news, could Wei Chain catch faint, unintentional flashes of the boy's radical, ruthless logic.
Moreover, the boy had entirely outgrown his physical clinging. While such distance was an inevitable milestone of adolescent maturity -- a clinginess Wei Chain had once found entirely annoying -- its sudden absence left a strange, hollow void in his chest.
Yet Wei Zhi Yuan’s transformation was far more complex than simple independence.
One afternoon, Little Bao noticed that the scrap paper Wei Zhi Yuan was using for calculus drills was actually an official registration form for the school's winter long-distance marathon.
"Aren't you going?" she asked casually.
Wei Zhi Yuan shook his head. "No interest. Not signing up."
His tone was polite, yet his internal thought was brutally dismissive: Running in circles like a blindfolded mill donkey is moronic.
Since his tone sounded courteous enough, Little Bao readily picked up the thread, continuing around a mouthful of sunflower seeds: "I remember Big Brother entered that race when he was in middle school. Took second prize, I think... Or was it third? Can't remember."
The air shifted. Wei Zhi Yuan’s jaw tightened.
Two weeks later, an official certificate for First Prize in the Winter Long-Distance Marathon sat prominently on his study desk.
Having finally reached an age where her delayed emotional intelligence matched her peers, Song Lee Lee wasn't foolish enough to ask why he had suddenly entered. She merely wondered in secret: Is Second Brother trying to wage an invisible war against Big Brother?
Wei Chain’s university years unfolded with steady momentum. He selectively ignored Old Bear’s warnings about spiritual detachment while wholeheartedly embracing his doctrine that everything under heaven could be leveraged for profit. From peddling long-distance calling cards across campus dorms to brokering refurbished medical apparatus alongside Old Bear, he never rested for a single waking hour.
While other undergraduates spent their youth chasing campus romances and kicking soccer balls, Wei Chain’s extracurriculars consisted solely of selling, brokering, and liquidating.
Wei Zhi Yuan resembled a dormant volcano. Fastidiously maintaining the model-student facade to give Wei Chain peace of mind, he poured his focus entirely into academic mastery. So long as nothing provoked him, he never stepped out of line.
Of course, whether he cross the line out of sight was something Wei Chain remained entirely blind to.
Between campus boarding and cross-country logistics with Old Bear, Wei Chain was rarely home, often managing only a brief weekend visit every fortnight.
And every time he returned, sleep became an agonizing crucible for Wei Zhi Yuan.
As the boy's frame lengthened, his shoulders broadening until his height equaled -- and gradually surpassed -- that of his older brother, a certain unspeakable restlessness became impossible to smother.
The patch of forbidden shadow locked within the deepest chambers of his soul grew thicker, darker, and more pervasive with every passing season.
Wei Zhi Yuan fought against it with every ounce of his rational will. Yet with each passing day, his resistance crumbled before that fathomless, scorching thirst.
By the time Wei Chain reached his senior year of university, life appeared to have reached the pinnacle of domestic peace. The municipal government finally issued the demolition notices and launched the long-awaited urban renewal initiative to bulldoze their squalid shantytown -- and the family prepared to pack their lives and leave the gutter behind forever.