Volume 1: Chapter 8

 Chapter VIII

From dropping out of school to the one-on-many fight, Wei Qian had been living a mechanical life for a whole year. This life was like a rough sandpaper, grinding away the youthfulness in him like dead skin.

The door to the future slowly closed in front of him, and time pushed him to run around. Wei Qian thought that such a life would be painful, but later he found that once a person is in a “painful day”, he will not be so sensitive to the “pain”.

He can still find some fun and talk about it for a long time. A year passed quickly. One of them was caused by Wei Zhiyuan. Xiao Yuan is not like Xiao Bao. He will listen to whatever Wei Qian says, and generally he doesn’t need to waste words with him.

But he didn’t expect that this kid would learn to fight about going to school.

Wei Zhiyuan had never gone to school. His living environment is relatively abnormal. He knows a lot about some survival-related things, but he lacks the common sense that normal children should have.

He had no idea about school. Xiao Bao told him that going to school was just sitting in the classroom and learning to read and count. Wei Zhiyuan thought about it and felt that he had no interest in reading and counting.

The little boy stubbornly believed that going to school meant doing nothing, and he was lazy and relied on his big brother to support him. This made him afraid to go to school – even though Wei Zhiyuan had been picked up by Wei Qian that autumn.

After a whole year, he and Xiao Bao had become very close, and they even often fought and quarrelled, but he still had a fear of being abandoned at any time.

Wei Zhiyuan regarded contributing to the family as a way to alleviate this fear. Doing housework and picking up bottles to sell for change were his ways of contributing.

When he was “deprived” of the opportunity to contribute, Wei Zhiyuan subconsciously felt that this was a sign of being abandoned, so he began his fierce resistance.

Wei Qian was busy like a dog every day, and of course he would not understand the twisted thoughts of children.

He simply and roughly dragged Wei Zhiyuan and Song Xiao Bao out of the house on the morning of the first day of school, locked the door behind him regardless of Wei Zhiyuan’s struggle, and then dragged them all the way to school.

During this time, Wei Zhiyuan behaved like a cat with its fur standing up. Wei Qian carried him and his schoolbag together, his feet off the ground, hanging in the air, scratching and biting him in a dog-paddling posture, attracting the attention of passers-by from time to time.

 When he went out, he met Sanpang, who was amused as soon as he saw him: “Hey, Qian’er, what are you doing? He is struggling so hard, have you finally decided to kill them and eat their meat?”

Wei Qian slapped Wei Zhiyuan hard on the butt: “Did you hear me, you are such a disgrace, the pigs waiting to be slaughtered are more fearless than you!”

Wei Zhiyuan blushed and announced: “I won’t go to school!”

Song Xiao Bao followed him and jumped beside him, happily imitating him: “Then I won’t go to school either!”

Wei Qian was about to speak when another declaration of freedom with a crying tone suddenly exploded beside him.

A little boy was also forcibly taken to school by his father. He cried all the way and said heartbrokenly: “I don’t want to go to school!” The boy’s mother followed closely with small steps, and nagging at the side to educate the naughty child.

Wei Qian listened for a while and found that she talked about scientists, making a lot of money, and from a distance, Jing Weilai said that he would buy pork elbows in the evening, covering everything from astronomy and geography to the past five thousand years.

As the eldest brother, the boy could not agree with this cumbersome way of education. He took a simple approach and sneered, turned around and glanced at the two naughty kids with a noble and cold look, and said coldly: “Did I ask your opinions? Do you have the right to say ‘no’?

The words were so powerful that Wei Zhiyuan immediately fell silent.

Song Xiao Bao, who was just following the trend, immediately stopped making trouble.

Even the naughty child next to him, who had always been difficult to coax, sobbed and inexplicably stopped crying.

Wei Qian put Wei Zhiyuan down at the school gate, raised his chin towards the elementary school, and said in a tone of amnesty: “Go in.”

Song Xiao Bao took two steps, looked back, and found that Wei Zhiyuan was still there, and he stood there hesitantly.

Wei Qian’s patience was completely exhausted, and he looked at Xiao Yuan with a gloomy face: “You are a rebel, what do you want to do?”

Wei Zhiyuan stiffened his neck and said nothing.

Wei Qian sneered: “You can go or not, who would ask you, if you have the guts, get out.”

Wei Zhiyuan instinctively took a step back. He was not afraid of his elder brother getting angry, but he was afraid of his elder brother’s inhumane sarcasm.

Wei Qian was too lazy to indulge his bad habits, so he turned around and left.

Wei Zhiyuan felt very aggrieved. He had been trying to get closer to this person and do more for him, but it seemed that no matter what he did, he was not grateful. His Da Ge was like a person he could never please. He always turned away and smiled.

Wei Zhiyuan suddenly rushed over and bit Wei Qian’s wrist. Wei Qian instinctively retracted his hand and broke his wrist. The boy’s abrupt and hard wrist bone hit the boy’s front teeth.

Wei Zhiyuan suddenly relaxed. When Wei Qian looked down, he saw that the child had spit out the first baby tooth that had fallen out.

Wei Zhiyuan’s expression at that time was simply stunned.

No one had ever told him about tooth replacement. He could understand if a tooth was knocked out, but he could not understand if it fell out by himself.

Will it fall out for no reason? Wei Zhiyuan stood there shivering, staring blankly at his fallen front teeth, with a look of shock and fear on his face, like those people in TV dramas who just heard that they had a terminal illness.

Wei Qian was successfully entertained by his weird expression, and his gloomy face almost couldn’t be tightened.

He turned around and walked away with a smile, even forgetting to care about the dog biting him.

Wei Zhiyuan was upset, but there was also someone who wanted to make the world chaotic.

Song Xiao Bao, a comrade who was not good at doing things but was more likely to cause trouble, saw it and shouted in surprise: “Oh, your tooth fell out, you must have been poisoned, and you don’t have much time left!”

Wei Qian spent five yuan to buy an old TV that someone else threw away and repaired it at home. Song Xiao Bao was watching martial arts movies these days and learned a lot of nonsense lines. The speaker may not mean it, but the listener may take it seriously.

Wei Zhiyuan turned pale after hearing her words. He instinctively looked up to find Wei Qian, but found that he was gone.

For a moment, a huge sense of desolation surged into Wei Zhiyuan’s heart.

He was dragged into school by Song Xiao Bao in a daze, thinking blankly: “I am going to die.”

Wei Zhiyuan no longer struggled with Wei Qian about going to school – he was going to die, and all struggles were meaningless.

During that period, Wei Zhiyuan often sat up in the dark in his dreams at midnight, feeling his other teeth moving more and more, and felt that he was about to die.

He suffered from the torture and pain of life and death in his heart, and looked at Wei Qian’s peaceful sleeping face almost greedily, as if he wanted to imprint his elder brother in his mind and take him to the next world.

A month later, Wei Zhiyuan lost three teeth and began to speak with a lisp. He stopped talking and pretended to be silent and waiting to die.

During this period, while other children had not yet mastered Chinese Pinyin, Wei Zhiyuan had already learned the common Chinese characters at the back of the textbook with his extraordinary learning ability and extraordinary motivation. His motivation was to leave a suicide note before he died.

During his free time and play time, he worked hard to learn Chinese characters in the old dictionary lent by the teacher. Therefore, Wei Zhiyuan was focused and thought that a dying person did not need to make friends with classmates, so he was indifferent to everyone and naturally did not notice that there were groups of people in the class who spoke with gap teeth like him.

Finally, when the midterm exam was approaching, Wei Zhiyuan recognized hundreds of Chinese characters with the perseverance of “a dying person” and got full marks in Chinese.

He was “indifferent to praise or criticism” and did not care about the teacher’s praise at all. He finished his masterpiece – a suicide note – before all his teeth fell out.

It happened that Ma Zi and San Pang were having dinner at Wei Qian’s house that day, and Wei Zhiyuan solemnly handed the suicide note to Wei Qian.

San Pang asked incoherently: “Hey, little brother, you’ve only been in school for two months and you’ve already written a love letter to your big brother?”

Wei Qian took it with chopsticks in his mouth, opened it in a few seconds, and began to read it with interest.

Wei Zhiyuan glanced at him and lowered his head in grief: “It’s a suicide note.”

Sanpang didn’t hear clearly: “What is it?”

Wei Zhiyuan said calmly like a soldier who was about to sacrifice: “It’s a suicide note, I’m going to die soon.”

Everyone looked at him with a weird look. After a while, Ma Zi asked: “You...you, how do you judge that you are going to die soon?”

Wei Zhiyuan felt that his throat was blocked, which made his voice sound weak: “I lost several teeth, and several of them are also loose.”

Sanpang’s face, which was full of fat, twitched for a moment, and he asked cautiously: “Then you... don’t feel that there are new teeth growing out of the place where the teeth fell out?”

Wei Zhiyuan finally couldn’t help sobbing: “Isn’t that a last gasp?”

Everyone was silent for two seconds, and then Sanpang and Wei Qian looked at each other and burst into laughter at the same time.

Only Ma Zi was kind enough to suppress his laughter: “Bi-ye, don’t laugh, you... don’t laugh at him, he, he is still young...”

Wei Qian was choked by his own saliva and rolled onto the sofa, coughing constantly, laughing and coughing, tears came out. Da Ge always behaved at home, with a serious parent style, and he had never laughed so unscrupulously in front of them.

Wei Zhiyuan was almost stunned, and for a moment he even forgot about “parting life and death”. He didn’t expect that the eldest brother who turned a blind eye to his flattery would be so amused by a ridiculous suicide note.

So later, for some reason, Wei Zhiyuan secretly hid the “suicide note”.

When Wei Qian became famous in Le Ge’s nightclub, Xiao Bao and Xiao Yuan had already been promoted to the second grade safely.

It is said that many people were stunned by Wei Qian on the spot that day, and Hu Siye, a big boss from the south who happened to be in the local area at the time, was quite impressed with him and secretly asked someone to pass him a business card in an attempt to poach him.

Unfortunately, Wei Qian had a family to support and could not leave, so he had to refuse Hu Siye’s kindness. From then on, “Xiao Wei” became “Xiao Wei Ge”.

Wei Qian’s arm was indeed broken, and he went to the hospital to fix it. Le Ge’s attitude towards him changed 360 degrees again. He drove him home very attentively and called Ma Zi to take good care of him. He did not need to come to work in the near future, but his salary would be paid.

In order to support the family, Ma Zi also worked for Le Ge. Ma Zi was responsible for cleaning the nightclub every morning. He cleaned diligently, but unfortunately he didn’t have much success. If it weren’t for Wei Qian, Brother Le might not remember him.

On the contrary, San Pang, as he grew older, he began to gradually distance himself from Le Ge and his gang. Even if he still had some ties, he only remembered the brotherhood and occasionally helped out when he had something to do. He seemed to be more passionate about the family craft of slaughtering pigs and selling meat.

When Wei Qian dragged a broken arm back home to rest, the two kids came back from school.

Wei Zhiyuan rushed over without even putting down his bag: “Ge!”

Ma Zi hurriedly stopped him: “But, but... you can’t rush him, his... his arm...”

Wei Zhiyuan frowned: “What’s wrong with his arm?”

Wei Qian, holding a cigarette in his mouth, said vaguely: “A dog bit it.”

Song Xiao Bao said heartlessly: “Why is it wrapped like a zongzi after a dog bite?”

Wei Zhiyuan’s face was tense, and he wanted to ask more questions, but Wei Qian obviously didn’t want to talk anymore.

He put on a serious expression: “Do your homework, what are you talking about? Don’t meddle in adults’ affairs.”

Just like that, he sent the two children away without saying anything.

Ma Zi looked at the reluctant Wei Zhiyuan, rubbed his hands again, turned to Wei Qian and said: “Tonight, Si-third brother will cook for you, I, I still have to go-go...”

Although Le Ge generously gave him a day off, Ma Zi didn’t dare to take it seriously.

Ma Zi looked at Wei Qian a little embarrassed, and tried to explain to him stammering. Ma Zi was such a simple-minded person that he would not cheat or play tricks. Wei Qian had known him since the first day.

He waved his hand and said, “Okay, I know, go ahead, you!”

Ma Zi said with difficulty, “Don’t touch the water with the pen, be careful...”

Wei Qian: “Okay, please be kind and say less. You can save energy and I can live two more years.”

Ma Zi left, San Pang was cooking in the kitchen, and Wei Qian was bored, so he picked up a book of extracurricular reading materials for Xiao Bao and started reading. The reading materials were issued by the school for second-grade children. They were usually inspirational stories about heroes.

After reading, they were asked to write a reading report, and sometimes parents would supervise and sign the homework. Wei Qian read a few of them and suddenly felt that it was quite stupid.

In the stories, the people either sacrificed their lives for the motherland at a young age, or were physically disabled but determined, overcoming all difficulties and still studying hard and making progress every day.

It seemed that everyone’s difficulties were greater than his, but they could still become role models.