Bro | Chapter 48

When Wei Zhiyuan was little, his attention was extremely focused. Anything he was not interested in, even if he saw it, he would automatically ignore.

If you took him into a shopping mall, then asked him after coming out what they sold inside, Wei Zhiyuan would usually look blank, unable to resist turning back to glance at the display window before answering. If he answered very smoothly, that meant there was probably something inside that he wanted.

Back then, Wei Qian could only use this method to judge what he liked.

Xiao Yuan was not like Xiao Bao.

When Xiao Bao was very little, the family was in especially hard circumstances, and Wei Qian was also young, so he did not know how to restrain his temper. Xiao Bao herself might not remember it very clearly, but there really was a period when she did not quite dare openly ask big brother for things or make demands. But every time she ran into something she liked, Xiao Bao would keep up a posture like her neck was about to stretch off and her eyes were about to pop out of their sockets, turning back every three steps to look at it with lingering reluctance.

It could be seen that “not daring to ask” and “not wanting” were two completely different concepts.

Wei Zhiyuan was born better than other children at restraining his own desires, so correspondingly, his temper also seemed gentler than other children’s.

But Wei Qian knew that a temperament produced through “restraint” was not one’s true nature after all. It was just like the difference between someone who “doesn’t care and doesn’t get angry” and someone who “smiles while holding it in and doesn’t lose their temper, then waits until the time and conditions are ripe to retaliate viciously.” Although the two might look very similar in their first reaction when something happened, the difference between them was like a whole Milky Way.

This child, Wei Zhiyuan, was extreme, narrow-minded, easily frustrated, and lacking in security. None of those counted for much. The fatal thing was that he was too smart. For a period of time, Wei Qian always felt that he was like a dangerous bomb, ready to explode at any moment. Later, after the issue of his sexual orientation came out, Wei Qian almost felt, whether because of his own psychology or not, that Wei Zhiyuan’s gloominess and difficulty in communication had risen to a whole new level.

Over the past two years, as Wei Zhiyuan gradually matured, the sharpness about him that made Wei Qian uneasy had gradually softened. Wei Qian even had the illusion that his personality had changed as he grew up. Only then did he realize that Wei Zhiyuan had not changed at all. It was only that, as his thoughts grew more numerous, he had sensed other people’s disapproval of certain things he said and certain attitudes he had, and had deliberately hidden them.

After Wei Zhiyuan said that sentence, Wei Qian was unable to react for quite a while. The sensation on his neck would not go away, as if Wei Zhiyuan had pressed several scorching handprints onto it, making it hotter and hotter.

Wei Qian had never been short of brains, only short of money and beatings. Of course he sensed that something was wrong, but exactly what was wrong, he instinctively refused to think about too deeply. He gave in to that instinct, and then became angry out of embarrassment, looking at Wei Zhiyuan sternly. “What do you mean by that?”

Wei Zhiyuan silently stood up straight. He already felt that he had misspoken just now.

All along, big brother had shown no intention of finding someone. But he was young and handsome, even successful and with limitless prospects. Even if he did not seem especially easy to approach at first glance, there would still be women, and even men, coming one after another to like him. Wei Zhiyuan had always had this hidden worry in his heart. His big brother was like a gem polished by time and life until it shone brilliantly. He was not the only one with eyes.

Yet a hidden worry was, after all, only a hidden worry. Who would have thought that one day San Pang would point it out to his face so suddenly, without any warning at all?

Wei Zhiyuan was still not ready.

When he held that photograph of the unfamiliar girl, there was a stream of heat in his heart, clear and unmistakable, almost like hatred. It swept out indiscriminately, attacking San Pang, that unfamiliar girl he had never even met, and even his brother.

He willingly ate so much bitterness and endured so much exhaustion. Every time he could no longer bear it, big brother was the pillar in his heart. He held tightly to this thing like a faith, gritting his teeth and forcing himself to become a better person, someone more worthy of the other party.

“But why won’t you wait for me?” He lowered his eyes to look at Wei Qian sitting in the chair, his heart filled with grievance and pain that could not be put into words. Wei Zhiyuan was confident that he could control every cause and effect, but the one thing he could not control was Wei Qian’s heart.

Sometimes, when people who are parents face a child who keeps acting tough, they may still think rationally for a while. But once the child avoids their eyes and shows even a little sign of backing down, the parent is instead more likely to feel their anger flare up.

Wei Zhiyuan’s silence ignited Wei Qian’s rage just like that.

“You think you’re very unconventional, is that it? You think you’re some great romantic hero, is that it?” Wei Qian rarely scolded Wei Zhiyuan in this kind of tone, but now it all burst out at once. “I think you’re asking for a beating!”

Wei Qian leaned slantwise against the chair with both arms folded across his chest. The clothes that Wei Zhiyuan had just straightened for him, exceptionally neat, paired with his exceptionally un-neat posture, gave off a certain unique quality that made one’s heart pound. When Wei Zhiyuan met his upturned gaze, the pain, struggle, and desire in his chest were all stirred together into a single mess, turning into a powder keg that would explode at the slightest spark, and the short fuse had already started to spit sparks.

His throat suddenly turned dry.

In the middle of his fury, Wei Qian had no idea at all that the precious little brother in front of him, who seemed to be obediently accepting the scolding, was silently fantasizing about him. His anxiety over the complete mess on the project side and his anxiety over Wei Zhiyuan’s dark and uncertain future got all tangled together, impossible to distinguish from each other, and the two immediately reinforced each other and swelled stronger.

He vented at Wei Zhiyuan without the slightest politeness, unloading it straight at his head and face. “What do you mean you’ll go crazy? I think you’re already crazy! Is acting like you’re going to die, going to live, going crazy, going stupid something to be proud of? Wei Zhiyuan, I only just started thinking you’d become a little sensible. Can you not slap all the words in my stomach back down before I’ve even had time to praise you, huh?”

When he got angry, his eyes were especially bright, and compared to his usual expressionless indifference, his features looked much more vivid. Wei Zhiyuan did not know whether it was because beauty was in the eye of the beholder, but he even felt that there seemed to be two clusters of fire dancing in Wei Qian’s eyes, carrying a spell, making him want to throw himself into them even if he had to turn into a pile of ashes.

The fuse was nearly burned to the end. His breathing grew heavy in a way he could not control.

“You said you like men and can’t change it, fine. As long as you’ve thought it through yourself, I’ve pinched my nose and put up with even that. Do you think my tolerance means you can just waste your life lawlessly?” Wei Qian lifted a hand, pulled out an old Xinhua Dictionary from the bookcase, and smashed it hard into Wei Zhiyuan. “Do you even know how to speak like a human being? If you don’t, go look it up in the dictionary and learn properly yourself!”

The dictionary hit Wei Zhiyuan right in the chest. Wei Qian had not measured his strength at all, and for several seconds, Wei Zhiyuan almost felt as if he could not breathe.

With a boom.

The winding sparks lit the black box he had kept suppressed in his heart. Wei Zhiyuan himself had also thought it was only a cluster of fireworks that would scatter once they finished burning. Yet he only had time to feel his vision go dark. In an instant, all his reason was gone. In the place inside him that others could not see, it burned into a sea of fire, a hundred thousand li of twisted flames flowing into every vein in his body.

In his chest was a heart like an abyss. The first time he thought he was about to lose this person, the door leading to that abyss had opened once and dragged in a human life. This was the second time.

At last, there was only one voice left by Wei Zhiyuan’s ear: He is mine! Mine!

Wei Zhiyuan suddenly reached out and grabbed the armrests on both sides of Wei Qian’s chair. Terrifying veins stood out on both his hands. It was a posture that trapped Wei Qian inside the chair.

His heartbeat was like a booming war drum. His pupils dilated violently. Fine sweat seeped out along his temples and into his palms. He stared fixedly at the face, the eyes, the body, and everything of the person he desired.

Wei Zhiyuan himself did not know what he was going to do.

Right at that moment, the outer door suddenly gave a heavy bang. Song Xiaobao’s schoolbag, which weighed several jin, had probably slipped off her body and crashed against the door. Then came the sounds of her fumbling out her keys to open it, a string of cold metal keys clattering noisily and shattering the atmosphere between the two that was just about to suffocate them.

Wei Zhiyuan viciously bit the tip of his own tongue. His mouth filled with the taste of blood, and the hands braced on the chair armrests had gone numb.

Xiao Bao’s loud voice sounded from outside. “Dage! I saw your shoes. When did you get back?”

Wei Zhiyuan slowly released his hands. Only then did he feel that his brain was a little deprived of oxygen, and there was a faint pain in his chest. His face paled, and he reached up to press the place where the dictionary had hit him.

Wei Qian stood up and went out. Wei Zhiyuan leaned against his desk and listened to the sounds of conversation in the living room.

Wei Qian: “I just got here not long ago. Have you eaten yet?”

Xiao Bao complained and acted spoiled all at once as she said, “I’m not eating. The teacher won’t let me. The exam’s coming up, and she still wants me to lose weight. I’m starving to death.”

Wei Qian: “If you slim down any more there won’t be anything left of you. Is your teacher crazy? How can you keep not eating? You still have classes every day, can your body take it?”

Xiao Bao gave a “hehe” laugh. The large amount of physical movement from studying dance had pulled out her figure. With her thin arms and thin legs, she looked long-limbed, light, and graceful in a way that could not be described. Only this voice of hers, and this way of laughing, still turned her right back into a silly girl with no image at all. “I can handle it. If I can pass the professional exam, then it’s enough if my cultural classes are passable. Seriously, Ge, doing math homework is way more painful than running on an empty stomach.”

After saying that, she threw down her schoolbag and charged full of vigor toward Grandma Song’s room, howling, “Grandma! I, Hu Hansan, am back again!”

Wei Qian: “Stop bouncing around. Be careful or the people downstairs will come up looking for you.”

Through her actions, Song Xiaobao fully explained what it meant for a foolish kid to have endless joy. In a crisp voice she said, “Let them come, let them come. I’ll dance cha-cha for them, hahahahaha!”

The moment she came back alone, the noise level in the whole house immediately rose by powers and exponents. Everywhere there was her wa-la-wa-la talking and laughing, from this person or that person taking a huge spill today, to which teacher had shaved off their eyebrows and forgotten to draw them back on. No one knew where she got so many feelings and jokes from.

Wei Qian only felt as though five hundred big ducks had just marched past him in formation.

He rubbed his temples and slowly let out a breath of pent-up gloom.

Wei Zhiyuan heard the door sound and turned his head to look. Wei Qian had walked back in.

Wei Qian closed the door behind him, looked at Wei Zhiyuan with a complicated expression, and in the end still sighed. “Where did it hit just now? Come here, let me take a look.”

A large patch on Wei Zhiyuan’s chest had already been bruised blue, with a little pooled blood showing faintly in the middle. It looked rather frightening.

Wei Qian dug out some ointment for bruises and sprains, bent down, and applied the medicine for him. Wei Zhiyuan, who had already calmed down, suffered through a torment that was both painful and pleasurable.

After putting the medicine on, Wei Qian tossed the ointment box into his arms and said in a low voice, “You pissed me off to death. Get lost and go back to reflect on yourself.”

Wei Zhiyuan knew then that the matter was considered over.

For quite a long stretch of days afterward, Wei Qian had no time to spare for anything else. He neither found time to get to know the girl San Pang had introduced, nor did he have time to worry about Wei Zhiyuan’s personality growing more and more crooked, and his sexual orientation that could no longer be straightened out.

The pre-sale repayment period for the C City project began.

The blind confidence that President Zhang had no one knew where he got from was finally extinguished by the bleak internal sales control report, and Wei Qian’s premonition had come true.

A project company generally had its own sales team. How to sell, how much had been sold, these were all things handled by the project director, who simply submitted reports to both shareholders. But this time, the legal representatives of the two major shareholders, Lao Xiong and President Zhang, personally went over to sit in command of the sales team.

First came the overwhelming flood of advertisements, yet it was useless. The permanent resident population of C City simply was not that large. It could not absorb a project of this scale at all. And the vacation and recuperation villas themselves were aimed at out-of-town tourists coming there to travel, but there were far too many similar products. Competitors were everywhere. There were all kinds, things like “a private estate inside a forest park” and “a hidden retreat among mountain residences and pavilions.” With so many categories and so much variety, the recuperation concept President Zhang proposed, which looked exactly like some sort of “hospice home for the elderly,” simply had no competitive edge at all.

Every company was competing in flamboyance. Every one had its own selling point. But once there were too many selling points, it became dazzling instead. The local villa market had already clearly become a buyer’s market. [Note]

Which made sense too. Going on a trip somewhere, seeing the place was nice, and then just buying a house there, how many such show-offs could there really be in all of China?

And each of these show-offs had their own family and business. Of course they could not live there permanently. Getting a hotel apartment with divided property rights and coming to grace it once or twice a year was already very much a case of “stupid people with lots of money and quick decisions.” How many people would spend an enormous amount of money to buy a villa that stood far away from everyone else, in a place where getting in and out was inconvenient?

The money issue was still a small matter. Wasn’t it also troublesome to find someone to look after it?

Later, Lao Xiong and the others also tried carrying out “discounted internal sales” among their respective old client groups, and it still ended in failure.

At that point, the drawbacks of the rough way they had operated in the past, picking up projects and doing them without distinction, without any brand character, and without even fixed products, had become prominent. The customer group for this sort of ultra-high-end project had developed an obvious gap from the urban residential communities and even the small-scale commercial real estate they had developed before.

Put simply, there were hardly any people among their old customers who could afford it. Forget buying it, they could not even be bothered to pay attention to it.

For a period in the middle, they almost gave up on the effort to “sell it off” and wanted to turn to “leasing,” renting it to certain travel agencies or hotel operators and converting it into a villa-style vacation hotel.

This proposal was unanimously approved by both shareholders. However, quite apart from the capital pressure brought by renting only and not selling, even the entire villa district as a whole could not be rented out.

Only a few hotel management companies had shown interest, but what they proposed was neither buying nor renting. They would merely manage it on the company’s behalf. Not only would they have to bear the management costs, but every year, the profit and loss risk of this villa-style vacation hotel would also have to be borne by themselves.

At this point, it seemed as if they had reached a dead end.

Yet this was not the most frightening part.

One had to know that, even if land had still been cheap back then, the whole project still cost several hundred million yuan from start to finish, and most of that money had been borrowed.

“Leverage” [Note] was a double-edged sword in capital-intensive industries. It could ride the wind and break the waves, and it could also bite back. And the loans had been arranged according to that year’s spending and repayment plan. Now that there were no sales proceeds coming back in, where were they supposed to get money to repay them?

And the loan contracts really had not set things in stone. They stipulated that, under certain circumstances, repayment could be delayed for one year. But all of those conditions were built on the premise that the project was performing well, and that delaying repayment could bring expected, greater returns. They did not satisfy a single one of those conditions.

Winter was drawing near, which also meant the repayment deadline was pressing close at hand.

Day by day it grew colder, and the debt of over a hundred million was like the Sword of Damocles hanging above their heads, swaying more precariously with every passing day.

And only two villas had been sold, one of them bought by Lao Xiong himself.

At the beginning of December, Lao Xiong came back. People at headquarters almost failed to recognize him. That fat-headed fish from years ago, with eyes narrowed into slits, looked like he had gone for liposuction. He had lost so much weight that the shape and contours of his face had come out, and his loose skin made him seem to have aged ten years all at once.

At the entire headquarters, only Wei Qian and San Pang were holding down the fort. Every day the two of them were running around as if worn out from rushing everywhere, visiting creditors and struggling to carve out some room for a turnaround in this matter.

Wei Qian knocked on Lao Xiong’s office door, the space between his brows almost twisted into a deep trench. “Xiong…”

Lao Xiong raised a hand to cut him off.

Avoiding Wei Qian’s eyes, he said in a somewhat weak voice, “Pour me a cup of water first.”

Wei Qian took a deep breath, silently poured a cup of cold water, set it in front of him with a bang, then sat directly on Lao Xiong’s desk and said in a bad temper, “Drink. Choke to death on it.”

Lao Xiong gave no response at all. In one breath he drank the whole cup clean, then wiped his mouth. “Gather everyone. We’re having an emergency meeting.”

Wei Qian went out in a fury.

Ten minutes later, everyone at headquarters, including management and ordinary staff, had gathered in the conference room. Lao Xiong dropped heavily into the executive director’s seat, which had sat empty for more than half a year, silent as a great bell that had gone mute, only staring blankly at his own hands.

The conference room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Everyone was waiting for this leader, both spiritual and practical, to give an account of the current predicament.

Several agonizing minutes passed before Lao Xiong finally opened his mouth. “This entire project was pushed through by me, against everyone’s objections. The situation now was also caused by me with my own hands. I personally bear full responsibility.”

Wei Qian felt that something about this rhythm was not quite right. He had just opened his mouth to speak when Lao Xiong, as if sensing something, lifted his head first and snatched the lead. “President Wei, if you have any opinions, say them later. Wait until I finish announcing this decision first.”

Wei Qian leaned back against the chair, spun the pen in his hand once, exchanged a look with San Pang, and thought to himself that this was probably about to go bad.

Sure enough, Lao Xiong continued, “Now, regarding this matter, I propose two solutions. I ask everyone, and the relevant decision-makers, to hear them out and make a decision.”

He took a deep breath and stood up.

“First, from this moment on, I will bear all responsibility. I will buy your shares at a reasonable price. If the company ultimately goes bankrupt, then those with limited liability can walk away patting their backsides, and if those with unlimited liability are forced to bear joint liability, I will give all of you an agreement, and you may all seek recovery from me personally. Within ten working days, those who want to resign may begin resigning.”

As soon as Lao Xiong finished speaking, whispers started all through the room.

San Pang finally could not hold back either and spoke up. “Alright, alright, quiet down, everyone. Xiong-ge, what kind of rotten idea is this? Before we’ve even gone bankrupt, you want to cut off our road back first? Do other people have no responsibility? I think I’m responsible. If all of us had really been dead set against it back then, could your project proposal have been pushed through?”

Lao Xiong gave a bleak smile and said softly, “You were all tied onto the ship by me.”

Wei Qian said, “Enough, stop talking nonsense. Say something useful, something about before bankruptcy.”

Lao Xiong gave him a deep look, then lifted the executive director’s nameplate from his desk. “The second plan is that I step down and hand over the position. From this moment on, I will not have any say in the company’s decisions. I will be responsible only for bearing the final responsibility. President Wei will take over my place as this executive director.”

All eyes focused on Wei Qian. The corner of Wei Qian’s eye began twitching.

Lao Xiong quietly turned toward him. “President Wei, now you can express your opinion.”

Author’s Note:

[Note] Buyer’s market: Simply put, there are fewer buyers and more sellers, supply exceeds demand, and the market is led by the buyers.

Leverage: Financial leverage lets a very small amount of capital move a very large project. Simply put, it means borrowing a lot of money. If the project makes a profit, a very small amount of capital can obtain extremely large returns, but losses work the same way. Leverage multiplies the investor’s gains and losses.