Big Brother / Da Ge / The Unknown

Chapter 8

From dropping out to that fight where he was outnumbered, Wei Qian had been living a mechanical and repetitive life for a year, a life that felt like coarse sandpaper grinding away the youthful recklessness from his skin like dead cells.

The doors to his future were slowly closing in front of him, time pushed him to run tirelessly. Wei Qian initially thought such days would be filled with pain, but later he realized that once a person is in the midst of "painful days," their sensitivity to "pain" diminishes. He still managed to find joy and talked about it with relish for a long time, making the year pass quickly.

One of those incidents was caused by Wei Zhiyuan.

Zhiyuan was not like Xiaobao; Wei Qian didn’t have to say much for him to listen, usually not needing to waste words. But unexpectedly, when it came to going to school, this kid actually learned to resist.

Wei Zhiyuan absolutely refused to go to school. His living environment was somewhat abnormal, knowing excessively about things related to survival, yet astonishingly lacking the common knowledge a normal child should have. He had no concept of school; Xiaobao told him, going to school meant sitting in a classroom to learn reading and arithmetic. Wei Zhiyuan thought about it and decided he had no interest in reading and arithmetic either.

The little boy stubbornly believed that going to school meant doing nothing, living a life of ease and laziness, dependent on his elder brother.

This made him fearful of going to school—even though that autumn, Wei Zhiyuan had been picked up by Wei Qian for a full year, had blended well with Xiaobao to the point of being very close, and even frequently fought and wrestled together, he still harbored a fear of being abandoned at any moment.

Wei Zhiyuan saw contributing to the household as a way to alleviate this fear, doing chores and collecting bottles to sell for change were his ways of contributing. When he was "deprived" of the opportunity to contribute, Wei Zhiyuan subconsciously felt it was a precursor to being abandoned, leading to his fierce resistance.

Wei Qian was as busy as a dog every day, of course, he wouldn't notice the twisted little minds of young children. On the morning of the school's opening day, he simply and crudely dragged Wei Zhiyuan and Song Xiaobao out of the house, ignoring Zhiyuan's flailing and attempts to lock the door from the inside, then dragged and pulled them all the way to school.

During this, Wei Zhiyuan behaved like a cat with its fur standing on end, held aloft by Wei Qian along with his backpack, feet dangling in the air, flailing and biting in a desperate attempt to escape, occasionally attracting the attention of passersby.

They bumped into San Pang on the way, who couldn't help but laugh upon seeing them: "Yo, Qian'er, what's this about? He's struggling so hard, have you finally decided to butcher them for meat?"

Wei Qian slapped Wei Zhiyuan hard on the butt: "Hear that, you disgraceful thing? Even pigs led to slaughter have more dignity than you!"

Wei Zhiyuan, red-faced and neck bulging, declared: "I'm not going to school!"

Song Xiaobao, stirring up trouble and hopping around beside them, happily parroted: "Then I'm not going to school either!"

Just as Wei Qian was about to speak, another cry for freedom erupted nearby, another little boy being forcibly dragged to school by his dad, crying his heart out along the way, despairingly saying, "I don't want to go to school!"

The boy's mom followed closely, chattering away at her son, trying to educate him from the perspective of becoming a scientist to earning big money, from future prospects to buying him braised pork knuckles in the evening, covering everything from astronomy to the history of the past five thousand years.