Bro | Chapter 64

“Xiao Bao said I’m already poisoned too deeply and my days are numbered. I think she’s right.

I feel awful. I really don’t want to die. I don’t know how to tell gege.

I put two-yuan and fifty cents under the pillow. Teacher said the things dead people leave behind are called inheri, inherit, inheritance, so I have an inheritance of two fifty. I wanted to buy a bottle of something to drink. I’ve never had soda in a glass bottle before. Later I didn’t buy it. I thought I should leave it for gege instead, so don’t forget to take it away.

But I still really want to drink it.

When I die, can you not throw me away? Teacher said dead people get buried underground. Can you bury me by the front door?

Although my life has been very short, pronounced zan, which means very short, it’s been very meaningful. I don’t know what meaning it has. Teacher always says a person’s life should have ‘meaning,’ so I guess mine has that too.

The person I like most is gege, the second is Xiao Bao, and that’s all.

Even though it’s very meaningful, I still don’t want to die.”

Wei Qian woke at four in the morning.

He did not know what kind of dream he had had, maybe he had dreamed of the past, but the moment he opened his eyes, he remembered that will Wei Zhiyuan had written when he was little.

Maybe it was because he had seen another will.

And that had started with Ma Chunming falling into a sewer in the middle of the night and calling for help.

At the time, Xiao Bao was not home either. Wei Qian had originally wanted to go out and take a look, but he had been coughing badly that day, and Wei Zhiyuan flatly refused to let him leave.

Whenever something like that happened, Wei Qian usually did not waste time arguing. He would put on the manner of someone long used to being the boss, making it clear through action alone: I’m the one calling the shots here. You object? Oh, sorry, I heard it as a fart.

So when Wei Zhiyuan realized reasoning was useless, he could only start making trouble and throwing himself around. The instant Wei Qian reached the door, Wei Zhiyuan darted out, blocked it with his back, then with astonishing speed and professional skill, snatched the necktie hanging on the coat rack by the door. One pull, one twist, one loop, one hook, and in no time at all, he had tied both of Wei Qian’s hands to the coat rack hooks.

The knot Wei Zhiyuan used was not any kind of high-tech dead knot. One tug and it came loose. The advantage was simply that his hands were fast and his movements were quicker. In the few seconds Wei Qian was tied up, he reached back, grabbed Wei Qian’s car keys, locked the door from outside, and ran off.

Usually, the way Wei Qian handled things at home and outside was practically split-personality. If something like this happened outside, his first reaction was always to undo the knot. At home, his first reaction was always to lose his temper and curse people out first.

With no patience at all, Wei Qian yanked hard and directly tore the tie clasp open by brute force. The coat rack immediately toppled over with a crash, and everything hanging on it scattered all over the floor.

“Fuck,” Wei Qian said.

He lowered his head, looked at it for a few seconds, and decided to leave it all there. He could not be bothered to clean it up.

But just as he was about to step over the fallen coat rack, he saw that Wei Zhiyuan’s bag, which had been hanging there, had burst open from the fall. Two notebooks had rolled out, one of them still open.

Wei Qian hesitated. He was worried there might be electronics or something in the bag that could get crushed, so he deigned to bend down and fish out the bag Wei Zhiyuan usually carried around. Only then did he realize how extremely low-tech it was. There was not even a pair of earphones in it. Just a few pens, and those two soft-cover notebooks.

The one lying open on the ground was filled with all kinds of code and notes nobody else could understand, Chinese and English mixed together. Wei Qian flipped through two pages with interest. He did not understand it, but he felt it looked impressive. Then he patted the dust off it and set it aside.

He had assumed the other one would be the same. He picked it up and gave it a light shake, but who knew what ancient relic from what century it was. It nearly fell apart from that one shake. A whole bunch of odds and ends were stuffed inside, along with loose pages, and everything fluttered down like snowfall.

Wei Qian clicked his tongue, hitched up his pant leg, and squatted down to pick them up one by one.

There were clipped academic journal articles, and some pieces of random prose Wei Zhiyuan had written himself that were hard to make heads or tails of. At the end, Wei Qian saw a napkin mixed in among them, wrinkled and crumpled and covered with writing.

The handwriting was a dark reddish yellow, like rust. Wei Qian brought it closer and looked carefully. His heart jolted when he realized it was actually dried blood.

It was a literal will.

Judging from the date signed at the bottom, it was from the second year after he had left home and gone abroad.

Wei Zhiyuan had grown from eight years old to his twenties, from the little monkey who had raised havoc like the Monkey King and refused to go to school into the polished, respectable, highly educated returnee he was now, but his style of writing wills had remained almost exactly the same. It was always a three-part structure.

First, he explained what had happened to him. He had encountered danger during an outdoor mountain climb. Their supplies were nearly gone, and they had lost contact with the outside world. He was with a few equally unlucky companions, trying every possible way to save themselves in extremely harsh conditions. He was writing this will in case he died and nobody buried him.

The second part explained his inheritance, how his accounts, technical shares, and so on should be handled.

And finally, as always, he summed up his own life.

Only this time, unlike when he had been too young to know what the two words “meaning” even meant and yet had still shamelessly declared his life short but meaningful, Wei Qian saw that he had used some extremely fine object to guide the path of the blood. Different from the first two sections, the language in this section switched to Chinese.

“From birth to death, I have been nothing but one sharp, inverted obsession after another. Looking back, there has been nothing else. I understand what Xiong-ge said.”

“It is only that if it ends here, without seeing you one last time, that will still be an enormous regret.”

Below that was a string of Wei Qian’s name, written again and again. The fragile paper had been scratched through several times, and the blood had smeared into a clotted blur.

Wei Qian carefully reached out and touched the surface of the old paper. In that rough, rasping texture, there seemed to still be some crimson longing and pain from the far side of another time and place.

How had his precious little brother, hungry and freezing and nearly desperate, written his name in blood on a napkin?

Those few lines of blood writing were like a wedge hammered mercilessly into Wei Qian’s heart, leaving behind marks that could never be erased.

Later, even though it was wrong, Wei Qian still could not help sitting down and opening that notebook stuffed full of all sorts of things. Only then did he realize it was actually a diary, one Wei Zhiyuan had bought at the airport when he left the country. He had not written in it every day. Sometimes there would be gaps of ten days or half a month. And yet, after all that time, there were only a few pages left at the end.

And the last entry had been written after he returned to the country, ran into Wei Qian, and then transferred over to go see Xiao Bao.

All the struggle and salvation, the extreme toughness and the extreme fragility, had all melted into those lines of writing.

Because of that, Wei Qian propped the coat rack back up and restored everything to the way it had been. And when Wei Zhiyuan came home ready to take a beating, Wei Qian acted as though nothing at all had happened and did not mention a single word about someone daring to tie him up in rebellion against his elder.

In the winter pre-dawn hours, there was still no sign at all of daybreak, and at some point even the wind had stopped. The whole world around them was incomparably still.

All Wei Qian could hear was Wei Zhiyuan’s steady breathing beside his ear.

Wei Qian wanted to move a little, but Wei Zhiyuan was clinging to him from hands to feet, the posture practically that of old Grandet sprawled over a pile of gold coins, forcing Wei Qian into a tiny cramped space and making him rather uncomfortable.

He did not want to wake him, so he tried shifting slightly, only to trigger an unconscious rebound from sleeping Wei Zhiyuan. The arms wrapped around him tightened even more, squeezing Wei Qian until he almost could not breathe.

This brat’s words were prettier than songs. He had practically packaged himself as some long-suffering, selfless tragic romantic, and Wei Qian had almost believed him.

But this one unconscious movement in his sleep completely gave Wei Zhiyuan away.

“You little bastard.”

In the end, Wei Qian could only pull one hand free and with difficulty pry him off.

Wei Zhiyuan was finally disturbed awake. In a drowsy haze he asked, “Mm? Ge?”

Wei Qian rubbed his head. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

After that, he got up, went to the bathroom, and then walked alone onto the big balcony connected to the living room.

The balcony had originally been a complete mess, with only enough room for one person to sit and the rest piled with random junk. Later, Wei Zhiyuan had turned it into a small study. He had bought a soft little sofa and a wicker tea table, laid a clean carpet underneath, so if you wanted, you could sit on the floor too. On one side stood tall bookshelves. On the other side hung an oil painting and a whole row of little storage cubbies.

There were cigarettes and a lighter under the tea table. Wei Qian pulled one out and was just about to light it when, for some reason, he hesitated and put it back again.

Ice flowers crusted the window frames, and even the headlights of the occasional passing car could not reach a floor this high.

Wei Qian stretched out his legs and sat on the little sofa, staring blankly out through the hazy indistinct window for a while. The unlit cigarette turned over and over between his fingertips in a repetitive loop. Every now and then he raised it beneath his nose and smelled the tobacco, and counted that as satisfying the craving.

It was as if his pupils were covered by a layer of clear glass. His gaze passed calmly through it all, tranquil and utterly undisturbed, like the autumn moon reflected on a still lake.

The outline displayed there in the darkness was almost beautiful.

Wei Qian rarely had time like this to sit idly and drift. No one could tell what he was thinking. He seemed to have become a realistic and handsome statue, waiting for the rising sun.

What could I possibly give him? In the dead of night, that thought suddenly flashed through Wei Qian’s mind.

A will was easy to write, because in the end, a person discovered that there were only a few things worth writing. Where you came from, where you stopped. What you had left, what wishes still remained. And the path of your life. Most people’s path, really, could be run through from start to finish with a single sentence.

Life and death, in the end, turned out to be no more than that.

If I found out that my own time was running short, what else could I leave him? Wei Qian thought.

His body felt extremely tired. The muscles in his waist still carried a faint, awkward soreness. But he was completely sleepless. He even wanted to sit here until dawn. It felt as though there had been a river channel clogged up inside him for many years, and now suddenly it had broken open. He wanted to follow that thin stream of water and see where it would eventually flow.

But in the end, Wei Qian did not get his wish, because before long Wei Zhiyuan came looking for him.

The young man rubbed his eyes, bent down, and reached both hands around from behind the sofa, crossing them over Wei Qian’s chest. He rested his chin on Wei Qian’s shoulder, rubbed against him with endless attachment, yawned, and asked, “Why’d you get up? Feeling bad?”

Wei Qian said, “Couldn’t sleep. Got up to walk around.”

Wei Zhiyuan’s eyelids were practically falling shut. He forced them open with a few hard blinks, took Wei Qian’s hand, and said, “Your hands are all cold. Dawn’s almost here. Come back and lie down for a little while, okay?”

Wei Qian’s broken-off train of thought would no longer reconnect. He stood up following the pull of Wei Zhiyuan’s hand, and Wei Zhiyuan immediately stuck himself to him again and said in a spoiled tone, “Ge, don’t go to work tomorrow, okay?”

Wei Qian rolled his eyes at him. “If I don’t go to work, where’s the money supposed to come from? Sell my body? Selling your body is physical labor. Long term, I really can’t handle it.”

Wei Zhiyuan gave a little “heh-heh” laugh. It all still felt unreal to him, like a dream where happiness had arrived too fast.

He had even started fearing daybreak, afraid that this was just another illusion he himself had made up to toy with himself.

The next day, after the morning meeting ended, Wei Qian suddenly said to Wei Zhiyuan, “I had admin book your flight. The investment money should be in place soon. Make a trip over there. Somebody has to handle the handoff.”

He had only just gotten what he wanted, and now he was being sent away. Wei Zhiyuan almost suspected it was on purpose. But business was business, and besides, it was not an investment meant for him alone. However little heart he had for work right now, he could only complain sourly to himself a few times and go back to pack his things.

On the night before Wei Zhiyuan was due to leave, San Pang came first.

Wearing a grim expression, San Pang brought news. “All of Wang Dongliang’s assets have been frozen, and all the relevant people have been taken under control, but there’s always a fish that slips through the net. That especially troublemaking brother-in-law of his is gone. He’s being secretly wanted now. We suspect he may come after you for revenge.”

Wei Qian tossed a piece of smoking-cessation gum into his mouth and said carelessly, “Let him come. Warm welcome.”

San Pang stared at the quitting-smoking gum in shock. “You’re quitting smoking? Did you take the wrong meds?”

Wei Qian waved a hand. “The body is the capital of revolution. You nouveau riche don’t have the ideological level for this, so quit the bullshit and get out.”

Just as he finished saying that, Wei Zhiyuan smilingly pulled open the door and said to San Pang, “San-ge, I’ll walk you out.”

San Pang: “…”

This bastard really did know how to hit exactly where he was pointed.

San Pang had assumed Wei Zhiyuan was the one forcing Wei Qian to quit smoking, so on his way out he gave the young man standing by the door a rather surprised glance, wondering if this kid could really have that much influence over Wei Qian.

San Pang could not say whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. He only felt a strangely complicated sort of mood and left in low spirits.

And maybe San Pang really did have a crow’s mouth, because not long after he left, Wei Qian got a phone call.

In a certain cringing, submissive sort of voice, the caller asked, “Hello, you… are you called Wei Qian?”

At first Wei Qian thought it was someone selling something, and before forcibly hanging up, could not help stabbing the person with a remark. “You bought private citizen information at a discount, did you? Can’t even tell who’s who. With that level of professional quality, what kind of crap are you even planning to sell?”

He finished and was about to hang up, but the other party suddenly shouted, “Don’t, don’t hang up!”

The man on the phone seemed overexcited, his breathing obviously rough. Suddenly he asked, “Wei what? What was your mother’s surname?”

That bizarre question made Wei Qian freeze for a moment. Then he immediately realized who the caller was and hung up without hesitation.

A while later, that same number sent a text message.

“I know you don’t want to acknowledge me, but after all, my blood runs in you. At least meet me once, okay?”

A time and address were attached below.

Wei Qian stared at the text for a while. Then he thought about it and replied, “Sure.”

As soon as he sent that reply, he decisively called an acquaintance in the police, gave him the time, place, meeting arrangement, and contact number, and at the end, added in a smokingly underhanded tone, “I’m guessing this bunch is definitely a gang. I figure every one of them has a record or a prior offense. When you arrest them, make sure you take a good look. Best if you scoop them all up in one net and leave not a single one behind.”

The acquaintance agreed at once. “No problem. These repeat offenders with priors are the most hateful. Once they’re caught, we’ll definitely push for severe punishment.”

Wei Qian let out a cold laugh. “Couldn’t be better.”

Because of this, Wei Zhiyuan first flatly refused to leave. In the end, Wei Qian unceremoniously dumped both him and his luggage at the airport and drove off in one go.

No one expected that the moment he left, something would happen.

The police had plenty of leads, and at year-end, when everyone needed work summaries and performance reviews, enthusiasm for work was especially high. It did not take much effort before they caught the whole lot.

Including the possibly real, possibly fake “Ji Xuewen,” they got hold of seven or eight people total. The police swept them up all in one go. At the scene they found ether, ropes, sticks, and a whole pile of controlled knives. You did not even need to think about it to know what the bastards had been planning.

San Pang went to the station to take a look and then called Wei Qian. “I saw that Ji Xuewen. Bald old man. He’s still carrying on and insisting he wants to see you. I swept him with my X-ray vision and concluded there’s no possible way the two of you are blood related.”

Wei Qian was on his way to meet a business partner and was riding down the elevator with Xiao Fei. “Bullshit.”

San Pang said, “But you’re really not going to come take a look? What if he really is…”

Wei Qian said with complete cold-blooded indifference, “So what if he is or he isn’t? Blood ties don’t mean shit.”

“Alright, alright. Don’t mean shit, then don’t mean shit.” San Pang got choked back with that one line. The least human part of Wei Qian was that he felt no curiosity at all about things that normal people would be curious about.

Then again… there was nothing wrong with that.

“It’s just that there’s one more thing that doesn’t feel too good,” San Pang said. “I looked over the ones they caught, and it doesn’t seem like Wang Dongliang’s brother-in-law is among them.”

Wei Qian raised a brow. “What does the guy look like?”

Just then, the elevator doors opened halfway down, and a short man with a buzz cut walked in.

Whether it was his air or his eyes, he did not look like someone who worked in this office building. His clothes were decent enough, though, probably why security had let him in.

Wei Qian could not help giving him an extra glance. Right then, San Pang said, “Not tall, pretty dark, buzz cut, kind of one eye slants a little… wait a second, I’ll send you his photo, you…”

Wei Qian’s pupils suddenly contracted.

In that lightning-flash instant, he grabbed Xiao Fei’s narrow shoulders and yanked her violently backward.

Xiao Fei had been flipping through the meeting materials and was wearing twelve-centimeter stiletto heels. Caught completely off guard, she only had time for a small scream before Wei Qian practically threw her backward with both feet leaving the ground. There was a crack as one heel snapped clean off, and she stumbled in a panic against the elevator wall.

In the bright elevator walls, a blinding flash of knife-light reflected back at her.

She saw the buzz-cut man pull out a gleaming dagger from nowhere and drive it straight at Wei Qian.

“Ah!”