Bro | Chapter 23

Wei Qian didn’t mention this to anyone. Over the weekend, he rode his beat-up old twenty-eight bicycle, the kind where everything rattled except the bell, to the little bookstore by the high school that specialized in secondhand books, and bought two stacks of first- and second-year high school textbooks at a low price. Then he got himself some simple luggage and went to the factory to resign and settle his pay.

At four-thirty on Monday morning, Wei Qian quietly got up. The whole family was still asleep. Grandma Song had boiled eggs a little after three, and afterward, to let them soak up the flavor, she would keep them simmering over a low flame. She herself would take the opportunity to sleep a little more, and would not get up to turn off the fire until close to five.

Wei Qian did not plan to alert anyone at home. Like a thief, he counted out one hundred and fifty-yuan in small change to take with him. All the rest of the money had already been exchanged into large bills, and he gently placed it on the table, weighting it down with a teacup.

He left behind a simple note saying roughly when he would be back, but it was deliberately vague. It did not say where he was going, nor what he was going there to do.

Who knew that when he turned around after finishing all this, he would find that Wei Zhiyuan had already woken up at some point.

The little yellow weasel had silently sat up and was staring at him with wide eyes.

Wei Zhiyuan opened his mouth to speak, and Wei Qian hurriedly covered it with one hand. The boy looked up at him, not understanding. Wei Qian turned sideways and sat on the edge of the bed, pressed him back down, pulled the thin blanket over him, and whispered, “Don’t make a racket. Grandma just finished boiling the eggs, let her lie down a little longer. You too, settle down. What are you getting up this early for?”

Wei Zhiyuan glanced at his luggage and lowered his voice. “Then what are you going out to do?”

Wei Qian answered vaguely, “Oh, I’m going out to take care of something.”

Wei Zhiyuan pressed relentlessly, “To do what?”

Wei Qian lowered his eyes and swept him a glance. “You sure stick your nose into everything.”

Wei Zhiyuan suddenly flipped over and scrambled up, wrapping himself around Wei Qian’s waist and clinging to him like a little monkey. “I’m going too!”

The little brat had put on some weight and was pretty heavy. Wei Qian frowned and peeled him off himself. “Behave. How old are you already, what are you making a scene for?”

Wei Qian felt a little puzzled. This kid was usually pretty obedient and not especially annoying, so why had he suddenly become so troublesome?

Actually, Wei Zhiyuan himself didn’t know why either. Usually, as long as big brother furrowed his brow, he would immediately stand at attention and not dare make a sound. But on this day, he just felt panicked and miserable inside.

Wei Zhiyuan had not been woken by Wei Qian. He had woken up from a nightmare. The moment he opened his eyes, he forgot what he had dreamed, but his heart kept thudding unsteadily, up and down, as though one foot were always about to step into empty air. He just could not feel at ease.

It was a kind of instinctive intuition, telling him that he absolutely had to follow along.

“What am I taking you for, to fatten you up and eat you later?” Wei Qian brushed him aside impatiently. “Stop causing trouble for me, Wei Zhiyuan. Are you listening to me or not?”

Wei Zhiyuan had been trained for a long time. The moment he heard the breeder’s command, he reflexively sat up properly and nodded.

“If you’re listening, then lie down and go back to sleep.” Wei Qian gave him a light pat on the back.

After saying that, he bent down, picked up his bundle, and headed out.

After taking two steps, he stopped and turned back again.

Wei Qian knew that this trip was one with an uncertain future, with life and death impossible to predict. He could not be said to feel sorrow at parting, but a bit of reluctance did rise in his heart. Softening his voice, he coaxed Wei Zhiyuan with a few words. “Once school starts for you, your brother will be back. I’ll bring you something good to eat, all right?”

Who knew Wei Zhiyuan would refuse both soft and hard approaches. Like a loach, he twisted over, and this time threw himself at the bedside and wrapped both arms around Wei Qian’s thigh, announcing, “Don’t try to fool me the way you fool Xiao Bao, that silly girl. I’m going, no matter what!”

Wei Qian practically wanted to kick him away.

Wei Zhiyuan knew how to read faces. He could tell Wei Qian’s patience had run out and that he was about to lose his temper, so he quickly and cleverly added, “If you don’t take me, I’ll yell. I’ll wake them all up!”

He had even learned how to threaten and bargain. He had accurately seen that Wei Qian had chosen to leave at this hour precisely because he was afraid of waking that old woman and that little woman and having to listen to their nagging.

Unfortunately, when it came to refusing both soft and hard tactics, Wei Zhiyuan had learned from Wei Qian himself, so how could big brother be someone so easy to get a hold on?

Wei Qian bent down and easily pried the child’s hands off him. With a cold laugh, he said, enunciating each word, “Yell if you want.”

Wei Zhiyuan: “…”

Wei Qian lifted his brows and shot him a glance, flung his luggage over his shoulder, and strode off.

Wei Zhiyuan sat there on the bed in a daze for a moment. Then the little brat made a snap decision, hastily pulled on his clothes, rushed to the toilet, and spent a minute washing himself clean. He did not even put on socks, just ran out in slippers after him.

There were no buses yet in the early morning. Fortunately, the place where Wei Qian and the others lived was not far from the train station, so Wei Qian decided to stroll over.

Who knew that just after he walked out of the little alley, he heard a burst of disorderly footsteps behind him. Wei Qian turned around and was so furious his liver fire almost shot out through his nose. He glared viciously at Wei Zhiyuan, who had a tuft of hair sticking up on his head. “What are you following me for? Go back!”

Wei Zhiyuan was like a puppy caught doing something bad by its owner. He froze where he stood, head lowered, hands behind his back, staring at the tips of his shoes, pretending, badly, to be something that did not exist.

Wei Qian gave a snort and kept walking forward.

…Then the pattering footsteps behind him started up again.

The moment Wei Qian turned his head, Wei Zhiyuan would stop with an innocent expression. When he walked forward, the child walked forward too, always keeping a distance of a little over twenty meters from him.

Wei Qian made it as if to turn back and catch him. Wei Zhiyuan reacted quickly too, spinning around and running at once.

He ran faster than a rabbit, looking back as he ran to see whether big brother was catching up.

When Wei Zhiyuan swiftly rushed past a bend in one of the little alleys, he turned his head and saw that big brother was no longer chasing him. Wei Zhiyuan cautiously walked back two steps and peeked around the corner. Big brother was gone!

Big brother had definitely taken another route while he was running ahead and shaken him off.

Wei Qian had always been cautious and had never mentioned where he was going, so Wei Zhiyuan did not know either.

The boy furrowed his brow and, using the limited clues he had, thought it over carefully on the spot. He remembered Wei Qian saying, “When school starts, your brother will be back.” Big brother seemed to be leaving for more than a month, so it had to be somewhere very far away. That meant he was either going to the train station or the long-distance bus station.

It was not yet five o’clock, and the sky was still dark. Xiao Yuan also knew that ordinary long-distance buses usually did not start their first run until after six in the morning. Relying on his rich experience as a drifter, Wei Zhiyuan judged that the place big brother was most likely headed for was the train station.

He decided to go try his luck, so he ran in the direction of the train station.

The train station becoming more and more modern and the management becoming stricter and stricter was something that happened many years later. Back then, almost no one was monitoring the station entrance, and tickets were certainly not under a real-name system, so every night, some migrant workers who could not find work for the time being would sleep on the floor in the train station to save on lodging.

Inside, there were all kinds of people from every walk of life.

Wei Zhiyuan mixed into the crowd of overnight sleepers and hid in a little corner, his eyes fixed tightly on the direction of the station entrance, not daring to blink even once. On the way there, he had taken out the kind of strength he used for a sports meet sprint and run until his chest hurt. But hurrying and rushing all that way had finally paid off. After squatting there on watch for five minutes, he saw Wei Qian enter the station.

The instant he saw big brother, Wei Zhiyuan wanted to jump up and pounce on him, but he held back.

Wei Zhiyuan calculated that if big brother discovered him now, he would definitely be sent back immediately, or else shaken off again. He was unwilling to let all his effort come to nothing, so he stuck close to the dimly lit wall and quietly followed after Wei Qian.

There was only one train to Guangdong each day, so even at five-thirty in the morning, the waiting hall was packed with people.

Wei Zhiyuan was not afraid of crowds. The more people there were, the easier it would be for him to slip onto the train. He had experience with this sort of thing.

He saw big brother casually find a corner to sit down, pull an old book from his bag, and begin reading quietly in the noisy waiting hall.

While keeping an eye on him, Wei Zhiyuan also searched for a suitable opportunity, an opportunity to sneak onto the train.

In the end, he found an out-of-town husband and wife carrying great bags and small bags of luggage. Who knew how many children the two of them had had, they had nearly enough to make up a soccer team, utterly disregarding family planning and producing them like an assembly line.

The older kids and younger kids were all running around everywhere. The man sat stiffly at one side, nervously checking the tickets in his hand over and over again.

When it was time for ticket inspection to enter the platform, Wei Zhiyuan secretly followed behind the couple and mixed in among the whole pile of children.

There were too many people going through inspection. The attendant simply had no time to count heads, so with one punch of the ticket punch against the thick stack of tickets in the man’s hand, they let the whole group through.

Without any real danger, Wei Zhiyuan got onto the platform. Then he quietly slipped away from the crowd of children, tailed Wei Qian, and walked to the carriage Wei Qian was in.

A huge mass of boarding passengers was jammed at the door of the carriage. No one was lining up. Everyone was shoving and jostling, and the attendant guarding the door had no choice but to shout at the top of his lungs, “Don’t push,” while frantically taking tickets from the passengers’ hands and checking them.

At the instant the attendant lowered his head to look at a ticket, Wei Zhiyuan, this professional fare dodger, had already shot into the carriage like a loach. First he rose onto his tiptoes to take a look and make sure big brother really was in this carriage. Then, fully satisfied, he temporarily shrank himself into the little compartment with the washbasin, mission accomplished.

The train was severely overcrowded. The aisle and even the toilets were crammed full of people. Aside from that little cart selling “peanuts, melon seeds, and eight-treasure porridge,” a vehicle that had possessed miraculous skills since time immemorial, not even a fly could get through. More than thirty hours in a hard-seat carriage was not something a person with ordinary physical stamina could endure.

Because there were too many standing passengers, many people had no choice but to squeeze into the toilets, so the two toilets at the end of the carriage had been artificially divided into male and female. If men wanted to use the toilet, they would squeeze into the one full of men to take care of it. If women wanted to go, they would squeeze into the one full of women.

Once you got inside, not only would people watch while you pulled down your pants to relieve yourself, you would not be able to come back out either without expending the strength of nine oxen and two tigers.

One long-distance passenger saw that Wei Zhiyuan, a lone little boy, looked rather pitiful, so he gave him a foldable little portable stool. Wei Zhiyuan curled up beside the washbasin, leaning against the filthy wall, sat down on the little stool, and started dozing.

At first, he could still bear it. After a while, he began to feel hungry and cold.

Wei Zhiyuan had already started shooting up, and lately he got hungry especially easily. From morning to night, not a drop of water had passed his lips. He felt as though his chest and back had nearly stuck together, as though he had been starved into a sheet of paper, so he could only close his eyes and use sleep as an escape.

He felt as though he had only slept groggily for a little while when someone roughly shook him awake.

The moment Xiao Yuan opened his eyes, his whole body jolted. He saw big brother, furious beyond measure.

Wei Qian had finally fought his way out of the toilet and then crossed “thousands of mountains and rivers,” planning to wash his face at the washbasin opposite. Who knew that the moment he lowered his head, he would see that familiar little bastard. Wei Qian stood there frozen for a full half minute, thinking he must have seen wrong.

Only after properly splashing his face with cold water and waking himself up a little did Wei Qian bend down and look carefully. What the hell, it really was Wei Zhiyuan, that little turtle bastard!

He had used a little trick to shake off the child, thinking that once the little thing had no way left, he would go back on his own. He had not expected him to be so extraordinarily capable. Not only had he found the train station, he had even managed to sneak onto the train.

Wei Qian looked over the dark bluish circles beneath Wei Zhiyuan’s eyes and thought to himself that this brat was incredible, maybe he was about to turn into a demon.