  Lithium has confused scientists for decades at almost each scale of the
universe. Lithium-rich giants are peculiar stars with lithium abundances over
model prediction. A large fraction of lithium-rich low-mass evolved stars are
traditionally supposed to be red giant branch (RGB) stars. Recent studies,
however, report that red clump (RC) stars are more frequent than RGB. Here, we
present a uniquely large systematic study combining the direct asteroseismic
analysis with the spectroscopy on the lithium-rich stars. The majority of
lithium-rich stars are confirmed to be RCs, whereas RGBs are minor. We reveal
that the distribution of lithium-rich RGBs steeply decline with the increasing
lithium abundance, showing an upper limit around 2.6 dex, whereas the Li
abundances of RCs extend to much higher values. We also find that the
distributions of mass and nitrogen abundance are notably different between RC
and RGB stars. These findings indicate that there is still unknown process that
significantly affects surface chemical composition in low-mass stellar
evolution.
