Volume 1: Chapter 7

 Chapter VII

Wei Qian had imagined that one day, a reporter would find him and his younger siblings living like dogs in such an old tube building. Then the reporter would take a few photos and write a tear-jerking title like “Aspiring teenagers work to support their younger siblings in school, and carry a family on their young shoulders.”

Then a government agency would come to give money, and all kinds of wealthy people with too much money to spend would donate to their family. All he had to do was go on TV and take a photo with them holding up a big check.

However, TV still broadcasts reports like “poor college students,” “poor middle school students,” and “poor elementary school students” every day, but no one came to Wei Qian and his family.

Maybe there were too many poor people in those days, and going on TV also required queuing up for a lottery like buying a car later.

The end of the semester was approaching, and the weather was getting colder. It was still dark when Wei Qian went out in the morning, and he rode a second-hand bicycle out of the house under the stars. He didn’t have gloves, and when he got to school, his hands were so cold that he almost lost all feeling. He had to run upstairs with his head down, rubbing his hands quickly.

That day, when he was going upstairs, he happened to meet his head teacher, a middle-aged female teacher named Li, who was usually very good to him.

For a student like Wei Qian who studies hard, has good grades, and is low-key and doesn’t cause trouble, if he happens to look energetic and the teacher is a woman, he is basically destined to be the kind of person who is particularly favoured by the teacher in school.

Teacher Li called him: “Hey, young man, come over and help me move some things!”

Wei Qian helped her get the 20 kilograms of rice and two barrels of oil that the school had just distributed. He carried them all the way to her office.

Teacher Li asked him with a smile, “Have you had breakfast?”

Wei Qian paused and shook his head.

Teacher Li took out a piece of bread and a sausage from under the table and handed them to him, “You must have stayed up late this morning. Take them.”

Wei Qian smiled a little embarrassedly, took them and thanked her.

Teacher Li didn’t know his family situation. At that time, high school students all wore school uniforms. Except for a few who liked to be clean, the boys were all sloppy and unkempt. Their brand-name bags and bags bought from street stalls were all stuffed to the brim and their original shapes could not be seen. They asked the girls for a small potato chip bucket after eating, and poked it on the table to make a pen holder.

At that time, people were unexpectedly equal. At a glance, you couldn’t tell who was the mayor’s son and who was an orphan who had to rely on odd jobs to make ends meet. There was only a family situation survey form at the beginning of the school year, with a column for parents’ work units.

Wei Qian stared at the blank space for a long time, and finally made up the word “individual”

… Anyway, no one asked him whether it was a living individual or a dead individual.

Teacher Li stood on tiptoe and patted his shoulder, saying, “Go quickly. Today is Monday. Have you prepared your flag-raising speech? Go back and read it twice, don’t forget the words.”

It is an old tradition of the school that each class takes turns to give the flag-raising speech.

Before Wei Qian went to the podium, he couldn’t help but straighten his back—not because he was nervous, but because he was hit on the back by a stick during the melee last night. When he got up in the morning, he saw that it was bruised and painful.

Wei Qian stood on the stage without a script, and finished his speech full of dreams and main themes in a fluent and smooth manner. As usual, all the yawning students gave perfunctory and polite applause. Wei Qian smiled very lightly, then stepped back two steps and gave the microphone to the host.

Before he was about to step down, Wei Qian stood on the high podium for the last time and took a panoramic view of the campus – a row of ginkgo trees with yellow leaves about to fall off, a 400-meter standard sports field, a red brick teaching building, those young and inexperienced students in school uniforms... and a few large cherry trees in front of the teaching building.

It is said that they are a hybrid of southern cherry trees and local species. Every spring, the petals that fall down are so thick that they can cover a person’s feet. Unfortunately, he entered school in the fall and did not have time to see it.

Wei Qian seemed to want to take all of this into his eyes, then he turned around and walked down the stone steps from the podium without looking back. He returned to the classroom before everyone dispersed, quickly packed up all his things, picked up the withdrawal application he had written in advance, and walked towards the Academic Affairs Office.

The dean of studies did not know the student’s situation, and just routinely asked the reason. Wei Qian did not want to make himself look like a poor child who dropped out of school. It was useless to say it. The school might have sympathized with him and got him a scholarship after a difficult turnover.

However, his main problem was not the scholarship. He needed more money, or more time to earn money to support his family. If it could not solve the problem, why bother to bring up his fragile self-esteem for people to see?

So, Wei Qian, who had a second-year syndrome, just explained lightly that his family was moving to another place and he could not continue to study here.

Leaving the Academic Affairs Office, he passed by the basketball court. Students with basketball sports specialties were training. A ball flew to him. He quickly reached out to catch it, blew a whistle and threw it back.

The boys in the stadium waved to him from a distance: “Thanks, buddy!”

Wei Qian smiled at him, but then his smile became dry. He did not stay and walked away quickly with his head down.

Wei Qian took his heavy schoolbag to a nearby rag collector and dumped all the books and papers out of the bag. He sold them for 1.2 yuan, and then he collected 0.8 yuan and bought a carnation with 2 yuan.

He sneaked into Teacher Li’s office while she was teaching and placed the flower on her desk. Then he left the school with his empty bag on his back.

He rode his bicycle home. Ma Zi and his wife, who were selling breakfast, had not yet closed their stall.

Ma Zi saw Wei Qian and asked in surprise: “Qi-yi-Qian’er, why did you come back? Forgot, forgot, forgot something...”

Wei Qian got off the bike, threw his empty schoolbag behind him, and calmly interrupted him: “No, Ma Zi, I don’t want to study anymore.”

Ma Zi seemed to have no idea what he meant, and repeated stupidly: “No, no, no, I don’t want to study anymore?”

Wei Qian: “Well, I dropped out of school.”

Ma Zi’s reaction was always slow, probably because there was something wrong with his brain. Wei Qian sometimes wondered if he would feel the pain after a slap in the face.

Ma Zi, who had a problem with his brain, stood there in a daze for more than half a minute. His face, which was covered with big and small bumps, turned red like a piece of burning iron carbon, and his chest rose and fell violently.

After a moment, his eyes were suddenly filled with tears. Then Ma Zi rushed over to him and pushed Wei Qian’s chest. Wei Qian stumbled and fell to the ground, the wheels still spinning.

Ma Zi opened his mouth and yelled “Ah, ah, woooo”, the more anxious he was, the more he couldn’t say anything. He was so angry that his face turned red and his neck became thick.

Finally, he couldn’t bear it anymore and cried out with a shrill voice. Although he couldn’t speak clearly, he had a good voice for howling. Wei Qian’s chest was about to burst.

Maybe in his long life, dropping out of school was not a big deal, but for a teenager who had been studying hard and expected this to change his fate, dropping out was like the shaky sky he had been trying to support, fell down.

But the sky had fallen, and Wei Qian didn’t want to cry with Ma Zi in the street. It was too ugly.

So, Wei Qian just bent down, and used the action of holding the cart to hide the sad expression on his face.

Then he raised his head and squeezed out a nonchalant and even contemptuous smile to Ma Zi: “Why are you crying? Stupid, I’m not dead yet. I dropped out of school, didn’t you guys not go to school? It’s not a big deal, what’s the big deal?”

Ma Zi cried even harder, hoarse, and lost himself.

Wei Qian finally couldn’t say anything. He stood two steps away from Ma Zi with his hands hanging down, carrying an old canvas bag, watching his stupid brother wipe his tears with his hands.

The cold and dry wind and the salty tears washed open the cracks on Ma Zi’s hands, revealing the young and bloody flesh inside. This long winter began with the howling of a little brother like a fried dough stick.

Wei Qian embarked on his career as a professional gangster. He became an unknown thug under Le Ge. He was a half-grown boy of fourteen or fifteen years old. He had just grown up, his flesh had not yet caught up with his bones, and his face was still childish. He looked after Le Ge and was taciturn every day because he had nothing to say to those grown men who talked about women every three sentences.

However, he was always more ruthless than others when fighting. He seemed to have an unspeakable anger in his heart. Le Ge was very disappointed at first. After all, he had high expectations for Wei Qian. He originally wanted to send Wei Qian to college and let him study law or finance.

Le Ge thought that his business could not always be hidden from the public. If he wanted to be successful, he needed someone who could exploit legal loopholes and make false accounts to take care of the things in public. This person had to be smart and completely trustworthy. Wei Qian was the best choice.

Le Ge had originally drawn up a grand blueprint for his future, and he knew what each person was good for. However, he did not expect that Wei Qian, whom he had high hopes for, would be so useless that he dropped out of high school.

For a while, Le Ge stopped paying attention to Wei Qian because he was useless. But he did not expect that after a year of silence, this kid would become famous.

Wei Qian was a teenager after all, and his physical strength was not comparable to that of a real adult, so he did not have much advantage in doing “physical work” such as a thug.

Le Ge did not think much of him, and usually only let him work during the day. The entertainment venue under Le Ge’s name was actually a nightclub. Although it was open during the day, it was just an ordinary place to eat, and the main event was at night. If there were really troublemakers, they would usually go at night. This was the consensus of the industry.

Who would have thought that there are hooligans in every profession, and among the real hooligans, there are actually bad practitioners and people who disregard professional ethics – those people belong to another entertainment city in the city.

The boss is rich and powerful, and wants to pick Le Ge, the local snake, but he is not in the local area, so he can’t reach him, so he sent his subordinates to make arrangements. His subordinate is a rare person, who has several characteristics such as cowardice, short breath, smelly and shameless, and is rare to be useless.

This person thought carefully for a while and felt that he might not be able to beat the other party at night. He was afraid that he could get in but not get out, but he didn’t dare to disobey the boss’s order, so he went to the nightclub in broad daylight to make trouble. The other party brought a dozen strong men with strong appearance and weak inside, and came to the sparsely staffed nightclub to challenge.

Those who guarded the place during the day were either security guards hired through legitimate channels or half-grown kids like Wei Qian, who were treated as a vase by Brother Le. They could pretend, but they were not really good at it. It was obvious that the people who came to challenge the club had bad intentions, so no one dared to stop them when they broke in.

The leader sat down in the hall, clearly making trouble, yelling obscenities, molesting the girl serving the dishes, breaking bottles all over the floor, and the few diners stood up and left in fear.

The lobby manager frowned and whispered to his brothers to call Le Ge. As a result, before the brothers could leave, Wei Qian, wearing the casino uniform, walked over with a blank expression.

One of the troublemakers thought he was a security guard who came to stop them, and grabbed his collar, not taking him seriously at all: “Call your boss, smart kids, don’t come out to be cannon fodder...”

Before he could say the word “cannon fodder”, he suddenly changed his tone.

The man screamed, hurriedly let go of Wei Qian, and stepped back five or six steps in a row, with fear on his face. There was a big bloody wound on his chest, and blood spurted out like a fountain.

People then discovered that Wei Qian was holding a big machete used for chopping bones in the kitchen.

Wei Qian chopped people without mercy. He didn’t even wipe his face after the slash. He held the machete in one hand and picked up a half-broken wine bottle in the other. He didn’t say a word or anything, and rushed to fight like he was the murderer of his father.

There is a saying that “the stupid are afraid of the tyrants, and the tyrants are afraid of the desperate.” These people avoided the peak of the night flow and chose the quiet daytime to come and make trouble.

It can be seen that they were not really tyrants. So, more than a dozen people were knocked down on the spot by a desperate man. His shocking appearance and his shameless appearance made this legend.

When Le Ge heard about this and rushed over with his men, the battle was over, and they saw blood and wine on the ground.

The boy, half of his body was covered in blood, with only a white vest left on his body. He sat on the sofa, stretched out his arm and asked San Pang, who came after hearing the news, to clean the broken glass on his arm. His hand was hanging unnaturally, and it was unknown whether it was dislocated or fractured.

However, he seemed to be unaware of the pain. He said nothing, didn’t even look at it, just lowered his head, and concentrated on smoking a cigarette.