Chapter 73: The Thief
“Brother An Yi! Brother An Yi!!!”
Standing on the ridge between the fields, one of the village girls cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted to the boy working with his head down in the dirt.
Facing the black earth, An Yi lifted his head at the sound.
The girl waved at him and called out happily, “Brother An Yi, I heard the university admission letters are out. Let’s go together!”
Joy gradually appeared on An Yi’s face, and his brows and eyes curved into a smile. “Really?!”
For the first time, An Yi did not bother with the crops he had been tending. He dropped his hoe and ran off toward the school with the girl.
Educational resources in the mountain region were poor and limited. Only three students had made it into four-year universities, and An Yi was one of them.
An Yi had always been confident in his scores. After the exams, he had stayed at school for an extra two days just to estimate his own results. Once the scores came out, he chose a design major at a first-tier university. His marks were more than enough.
Because the area was remote and the mountain roads were steep, all the admission letters were delivered directly to the school. Conditions varied from household to household in the village—some didn’t even have a phone—so for convenience, the school gave the news to the village chief, who then informed everyone in the village.
The school in the mountains was just a somewhat larger three-story brick building.
After arriving, An Yi first went to see Teacher Chu.
Seeing the sweat covering his face, Teacher Chu handed him a handkerchief. Teacher Chu always washed his handkerchiefs until they were spotless white, and An Yi was too embarrassed to take it.
Teacher Chu smiled. “Why did you come running over in the middle of the day?”
Unable to suppress his joy, An Yi’s eyes were smiling too. “I heard the university admission letters arrived, so I came to pick mine up.”
That letter was something he had been counting down to day after day, waiting for like someone waiting for the stars and the moon. It was the beginning of his future life—his hope.
The mountains were vast and boundless. They were his homeland, but the mountains were not the whole world. He wanted to go out and see it.
He wanted to see what he had never seen, live the life he had never lived.
Teacher Chu said, “Actually, your admission letter came yesterday. When you didn’t come to get it, I was surprised.”
An Yi scratched his head. “I only just heard about it.”
Teacher Chu could tell he was anxious, so after a couple of words, he ended the conversation and told An Yi to go pick up the letter.
After saying goodbye to Teacher Chu, An Yi went with the girl to the classroom to collect the admission letters.
The girl found hers and beamed with joy.
“Brother An Yi, I found mine. What about yours?”
On the broken wooden desk serving as the teacher’s platform, there were only four admission letters.
An Yi carefully went through the other three, one by one, but none of them had his name on them.
This one belonged to someone in another department. This one was for someone else’s vocational college. The last one wasn’t his either.
An Yi licked his lips, and his heart tightened.
Why wasn’t his there?
He circled the desk again, wondering if it had fallen onto the floor.
But it wasn’t on the floor either.
Had he not gotten in?
Impossible. Even if he hadn’t been accepted into his preferred major, he had checked the box agreeing to reassignment. His scores were enough. There was no way there shouldn’t be one for him.
For one of the rare times in his ordinarily calm nature, An Yi became flustered. “Rongfeng, you head home first. I’m going to ask the teachers.”
When Teacher Chu and the principal heard that his admission letter was missing, they were both shocked.
Teacher Chu said, “That’s impossible. I remember there being one for An Yi.”
The principal said nothing for a moment, his expression unreadable. “You looked everywhere?”
An Yi said, “I searched the whole classroom.”
The principal said, “Then maybe there just isn’t one for you.”
Teacher Chu insisted, “I remember there being one for An Yi.”
“I didn’t see any letter for An Yi when I collected them. Maybe you remembered wrong.”
Sweat broke out across An Yi’s forehead as panic rose in him. He ran back to the classroom again, and after searching the whole school for hours, he still couldn’t find his.
The principal found him and said, “I had someone check the computer just now. Your application slipped through. When they tried to reassign you, you still didn’t get in. Your scores weren’t enough for the schools after that.”
An Yi stood there as if struck by lightning.
“That’s impossible!”
He couldn’t accept it.
The hope that had kept him alive every single day in the mountains was shattered just like that.
The principal said a few perfunctory words of comfort and left.
Back home, An Yi stood looking at his patch of farmland, bitterness filling his chest.
Soon, word spread through the village as well—An Yi hadn’t gotten in.
After that, An Yi fell into despair for a long time. He shut himself inside the house for half a month. Finally, An Bingsheng could no longer stand it and shoved open the door to his little room.
“Have you lost your mind? You haven’t gone out in half a month. What, are you growing mushrooms in here?! So what if you didn’t get in? There’s always next year. Look at you, useless and spineless. How did I end up with a brat like you?”
An Yi lay on the earthen kang bed and ignored him.
An Bingsheng went over and yanked him up. “Come on. The Sun family’s boy is getting married today. We’re going to the banquet.”
An Yi shook him off. “I’m not going.”
“You’re not going? I already gave them money in advance, and you’re not going? Get moving. Don’t make me start cursing.”
Still cursing under his breath, An Bingsheng dragged An Yi up and hauled him to the Sun family’s place.
The Sun house was bustling with excitement. They said the Sun family’s son had even bought firecrackers. Seated there, An Yi watched the festive atmosphere all around him while the endless crackling exploded in his ears.
Most of the village had come. The village chief’s family was all smiles too.
They said Li Shouquan had gotten into university—a proper undergraduate program—and in a few days they would be holding a celebration banquet for his admission.
Li Shouquan sat off to one side drinking with a few others, his face full of smug delight.
But once the alcohol got into his head, all kinds of things started spilling out.
He looked around at the others with a mysterious air, his tone full of boastfulness. “Do you know how I got into university?”
“By studying hard, I guess.”
“The Li family’s boy really made something of himself.”
Li Shouquan shook his head smugly. “My uncle’s the principal. The day the admission letters arrived, he contacted my dad and told me to come pick one—whichever one I wanted. Hahahaha, aren’t you jealous?”
The expressions of the others stiffened.
Drunk and slurring, Li Shouquan went on, “Guess whose I took?”
“It was An—aaah!!!”
Before he could finish the name, a punch knocked him clean out of his plastic chair and onto his back on the ground. Clutching his face, he wailed like a ghost. His jaw had dislocated, and he couldn’t even close his mouth.
An Yi could hardly believe what he had just heard. Before anyone else had even reacted, he had already clenched his fists and thrown himself on top of Li Shouquan, raining punch after punch onto his face.
“You stole it? You stole my admission letter?!”
“What right did you have to steal my admission letter? What right did you have to steal my things?!”
“Give it back! Give me back my admission letter!!!”
His eyes bloodshot, An Yi had gone mad, grappling with Li Shouquan like a lunatic. No one could pull him off.
When An Bingsheng saw it, he stopped drinking at once. Once the crowd finally managed to separate them, he hurried over and dragged An Yi behind him.
“You little bastard, Li boy! Instead of learning anything good, you went and learned how to steal—stealing my kid’s university admission!”
The village chief came over too and stepped forward to calm down An Yi and his father, saying they should talk it out properly. He claimed he had known nothing about it, that it had been Li Shouquan’s uncle’s doing, and that he would definitely give them an explanation.
But when An Yi later went to demand his admission letter back, the village chief completely changed his tune. He had someone beat An Yi up.
An Bingsheng might not have been a good father, but there was no way he was just going to stand by and watch his son get beaten, so he immediately demanded justice for An Yi. Yet in the face of power, justice was worth less than nothing.
There was only a little over a week left before university started. The village chief handed out quite a few favors to the villagers and had them keep an eye on An Yi so he could not ruin anything.
He also had Li Shouquan leave early for the county seat.
When An Yi found out, he rushed out to intercept him.
The men got into a fight at the village entrance. An Yi was the one taking the beating, but he still clung to Li Shouquan like his life depended on it. In the struggle, he bit down on Li Shouquan’s ear and tore off a piece of flesh.
Li Shouquan roared, “An Yi, are you fucking insane?!”
Looking at An Yi, who seemed completely deranged, he shouted, “My dad already said he’ll give you ten thousand yuan after this! Ten thousand! That’s enough for you to live on for ages!”
Gritting his teeth, An Yi glared at him. “I only want my university place. It was mine. My things. What right did you have to take them?”
There was no way Li Shouquan was going to give that place back. “An Yi, this is your fate.”
An Yi fought with all his might, but they pinned him down to the ground. The tiny stones on the road scraped at his face.
With one glance, he saw his field.
Just days ago, he had still been sowing seeds there.
“An Yi, wouldn’t it be better to accept your fate? You just had to insist on getting an answer.”
And after that, Li Shouquan left with his university place.
An Yi started drinking the baijiu An Bingsheng used to drink. He had always hated it when An Bingsheng drank, because once drunk, he would fly into drunken rages.
But now, this was the only way An Yi could numb himself.
The whole village said An Yi had gone mad because of what happened. They said he sat around muttering who-knew-what all day, not even farming anymore, just staying shut up in the house.
A year later, An Bingsheng also fell ill.
Long-term drinking had ruined his stomach.
Only then did An Yi finally come back to himself and begin planting the fields again while taking care of him.
Facts could not be changed. The only way out was to rely on himself.
An Bingsheng’s condition worsened day by day.
One night, after An Yi had taken care of him and was about to return to his little room, An Bingsheng spoke.
“Put the firewood stick beside the kang.”
An Yi didn’t know what he wanted it for.
An Bingsheng only said he needed it to beat rats at night.
So An Yi put it there.
The next day, when he went to check on him, An Bingsheng was already dead on the kang.
Most of An Yi’s memories of him were of being beaten, cursed, and berated by him after he got drunk. He had not been a good father. But even so, An Yi still cried for him.
He used every bit of money in the house, sold off half their land, and buried An Bingsheng.
And on the very same day An Bingsheng died, both the village chief and his wife were taken to the hospital.
The chief didn’t survive. His wife had her stomach pumped and lived, but it left her with lasting health problems. They said she couldn’t even eat properly anymore and barely dared eat at all.
They had been taken away at noon.
People said they had been poisoned—rat poison had been put into the water vat.
An Yi rushed over and pulled open the little wooden cabinet in the house. Sure enough, the rat poison that had once been there was gone.
Afterward, someone claimed they had seen An Bingsheng sneak into the village chief’s house in the middle of the night, trembling all the way.
An Bingsheng died, but he dragged the village chief’s family down with him.
The local police came afterward.
An Bingsheng was dead, and there was no evidence left behind.
An Yi, meanwhile, was neither the killer nor someone who had known about it beforehand. He was faced with demands for compensation, but legally, he bore no responsibility.
There wasn’t much money left in the house. When the village chief’s family came to demand repayment, all they could do was carry away whatever they could use from An Yi’s house—but most of it was just broken junk.
In the end, An Yi handed over the rest of the family land as compensation.
After that, no one in the village dared bully An Yi ever again.
They were all afraid that one day, if something in him snapped, he might poison them too.
It took An Yi an entire year to slowly comfort himself.
After that, he started working for other families to save money. He was an adult by then. Even if he just went out to do labor work, someone would hire him.
He needed to earn money and leave that place.
Then, less than half a year later, he was brought back to the An family.
He never told anyone about his past. He only ever said he had lived all right.
He did not want to remember it.
Later, he brought his adoptive parents’ ashes back and laid them to rest in a beautiful cemetery.
Teacher Chu had passed away before he went back, and there was nothing left there tying him down anymore.
An Yi never wanted to see or think about those mountains again.
He resisted everything tied to his eighteenth year in the mountains. Whenever he remembered it, he would start dry-heaving, spike a fever, and suffer stress reactions.
That had been the darkest time of his life.
He never wanted to think about it again.
Since coming to the city, everything had slowly been getting better under his own efforts. His life had improved more and more.
And yet—just as he had finally begun to live again—
those mountains appeared before him once more.
The suffocation, the nausea, the pressure all came flooding back, crushing his nerves.
That thief had appeared again.
After stealing one life from him, he had now returned to try and steal a second one.
After coming to the city, An Yi had never gone looking for Li Shouquan. Every time he remembered what had happened, he would think of the village chief’s death and the lasting illness the chief’s wife was left with.
He told himself those were Li Shouquan’s punishment.
He comforted himself with that over and over, though something in him always remained tightly suppressed.
He had once thought about just letting it go—not letting Li Shouquan go, but letting himself go free.
But now An Yi understood there was no such thing as truly “letting it go.” It only meant he hadn’t been forced to face it again with his own eyes.
Now that he was seeing him again, all that self-soothing vanished.
He wanted nothing more than to tear him apart alive.
At that moment, Li Shouquan was introducing himself to the reporters. “My name is An Yi.”
And then he saw him—
An Yi, standing outside the crowd, staring at him coldly.
Li Shouquan’s eyes widened.
An Yi’s eyes were blood-red as he ground out through clenched teeth, “Your name is An Yi?”
The place was noisy, but Li Shouquan could only hear his voice.
“Aren’t you called Li Shouquan?”
