Chapter 4

Chapter 4

He took me back to his home. It was a crude, dilapidated place-the kind where rain would leak through the roof the moment it started pouring.

“It’s not too late to regret your decision,” he said, feigning an air of indifference.

“I don’t regret it.” I didn’t know what he had endured growing up, but the man he became later in life never let me live like this.

“Suit yourself,” he muttered. He then cleared out a spot for me that was barely fit for sleeping.

It was just a worn-out straw mat spread directly onto the floor.

I didn’t say a word and spent the night sleeping on that mat.

The next day, under Su Qi’s “I told you so” gaze, I gave him some money for breakfast and lunch. I told him I was going out to find a job.

In this place, I was essentially an undocumented person with no legal identity. Fortunately, after a very clumsy explanation, a restaurant owner was willing to let me stay.

The pay was low and the workload was heavy, but I agreed anyway. I needed money-a lot of it.

My father had never spent a single day in school. I wanted him to see what it was like inside a classroom.

Just as he had once worked three jobs a day, rushing around until his feet barely touched the ground just to get me registered so I could attend school normally, I would do the same for him.

Perhaps the boss took pity on me, because he agreed to pay half my wages daily and the rest at the end of the month.

That evening, after the sky had turned pitch black, I headed back with my half-day’s pay tucked in my pocket.

My father was surprised to see me return.

I pulled out the leftovers the boss had packed for me and called him over to eat.

While we ate, he glanced at me several times. “Where are you working? I want to go too.”

“They don’t hire kids there.”

“Oh.” He looked disappointed.

“Do you want to go to school?” I asked. “If you want to, I’ll support you until you’re an adult.”

“I don’t want to,” he said, shaking his head.

“No, you do.” I had seen him pick up my textbooks before, carefully stroking them with a look of longing in his eyes.

No matter how hard or exhausting things got back then, he had insisted on sending me to school when I turned eight.

“But it costs a lot of money, and I might not be any good at it.”

“I can afford it. Just study hard. It doesn’t matter if you don’t do well.”

I remembered when I failed my first exam in middle school. I had cried, and he found me.

At the time, he looked quite impatient.

“It’s just a bad grade, isn’t it? What’s the big deal?”

“As long as you don’t regret it,” he said now, clearly tempted.

“I won’t.”

The next day, I went to work as usual. During my shift, I asked the boss about the nearest elementary school.

After the lunch rush, I had a ninety-minute break. I took some time off to find the school the boss had mentioned.

Luck was on my side. While I was being blocked at the school gates, I ran into one of the teachers.

The teacher brought me inside and explained the school’s situation and the fees. Under the nine-year compulsory education system, tuition was free; I only had to pay for meals and boarding.

I planned to head back and ask my father if he wanted to board at the school or commute, so I made an appointment to meet the teacher at the gate at the same time the following day.

That night, I discussed it with my father.

I didn’t say much, only asking if he wanted to live at the school.

“If I don’t live there, does it cost less?”

I nodded.

He chose to commute.

The next day, I took him to the school gates to meet the teacher. After paying two hundred yuan for his meal fees, I successfully enrolled him.

The school was a bit far from home-about a thirty-minute walk. Every morning, I pressed a few yuan into his hand for breakfast. He refused money for dinner, saying he would wait for me to come back so we could eat together.

Every night when I returned, he would be sitting by the door doing his homework while waiting for me.

I hadn’t even been working for a week when I realized I was being followed.

Business had been good that day, and a large group of customers arrived just as we were about to close. By the time they finished eating, it was an hour past my clock-out time.

Knowing my situation wasn’t easy, the boss packed some food for me as usual and gave me a little extra in wages.

Leaving the shop, I walked through the vast darkness of the night with a flashlight. A figure quietly trailed behind me. I glanced back, but I couldn’t make out his face.

I sped up, and he sped up. I slowed down, and he slowed down accordingly.
There was no one else around, and I started to panic.

Then, another beam of flashlight cut through the dark.

I saw Su Qi.

Eight-year-old Su Qi stood there, a sharp knife in his hand, staring fiercely at something behind me.

“Come here,” he told me.

I walked over, and he pulled another dagger from his coat. “Take this.”

In that moment, my heart finally settled.

The dark figure must have seen the daggers because it hesitated for a moment before turning and disappearing into the shadows.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“You’re late getting back.”

Those words overlapped with my memories.

That man had said the exact same thing once when I was half an hour late coming home.

Back then, his questioning tone had irritated me.

Now, his eight-year-old self looked solemn, like a little adult.

“Do you have any idea how dangerous it is here? There are plenty of people like that around. If something happens, no one is going to help you.”

“Business was good at the shop today, so I finished late,” I explained subconsciously.

He frowned. “Then I’ll pick you up from work from now on. Just wait for me there.”

I disagreed. “It’s dangerous for a kid like you to be out at night, too.”

He let out a cold sneer. “I grew up in this place. What kind of danger haven’t I seen?

“I’ve witnessed three murders-some died, some got caught. Things like that will keep happening. If you don’t have the strength to survive here, you have to rely on luck.

“In everyone’s eyes, women are the weakest. They have the least ability to protect themselves.”

He looked at the knife in my hand, his fierce tone faintly overlapping with the man he would become decades later.

“Keep this knife. If anyone tries to mess with you, stab them. Stab them like you mean it!”

In this moment, I suddenly began to understand the father who believed that violence solved everything.

It was because this was the environment he had survived in.

Su Qi was a man of his word. The next day, near the end of my shift, he appeared with his schoolbag on his back.

Seeing me doing the final cleanup, he didn’t say a word. He just set his bag down and started helping me.

The owner assumed he was my younger brother and praised me with a smile for having such a good sibling.

After work, he walked behind me, knife in hand.

Every time I turned my head, I could see him.

I suddenly remembered when I was in fifth grade. I had nervously and hesitantly told my father that it felt like a dark shadow was following me.

Father hadn’t said anything.

Just when I thought he didn’t believe me, I saw him at the school gates the next day after classes ended.

I walked toward him, but he told me not to follow him and to go home on my own.

As I walked home, he followed me from a short distance behind.

He did this for an entire month. After that month, he caught the person who had been following me, but he didn’t stop. He kept following me for another month.

I only found out later that he had been squeezing this in during his dinner break. Every afternoon, he would grab a steamed bun and run to the school gates, drenched in sweat. He would watch me get home safely before running back to work.

He had never told me any of this.

Xiao Su Qi said he would walk me home, and he didn’t miss a single day.

After a few days, he started waking up early, insisting on walking me to work as well, fearing something might happen to me on the way.

“You don’t need to do this. I’ll be fine.”

He walked me to work every morning before heading to school himself. The round trip took him at least an hour.

“If something happens to you, I’ll have to go back to the life I had before.” He gripped his dagger tightly, walking behind me with his schoolbag on his back.

I was left speechless.

After seeing me to the shop, he looked at me as if he had made a solemn vow.

“There’s a voice in my head telling me that you’re important. Super important. So nothing can happen to you. Nothing must ever, ever, ever happen to you.”

I froze, watching his small figure with the schoolbag grow distant.

I didn’t even realize how I had walked into the shop until the owner’s surprised voice snapped me back to reality.

“What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

I reached up and touched the cold moisture on my face.