Shen Yi hesitated for two seconds. Seeing that Qin Ruolan truly wanted to hear more, she began considering whether she should reveal a few more details about the family.
But Shen Shu had already reached the limit of his patience.
He had lived for so many years and dealt with every kind of situation imaginable, yet this little girl who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere was making his temples throb.
He couldn’t help wondering where she had learned so much.
What was even more infuriating was that she was tearing down his authority at every turn.
The man sat on the sofa without saying a word. He reached into the drawer beneath it and pulled out a gun. Raising his wrist, he pointed the dark muzzle straight at her.
Shen Shu’s expression was cold and severe, giving no hint of a guilty conscience. But Shen Yi knew him well enough to understand that this was a sign he had been pushed past his psychological limit and had finally lost his composure.
“Do you really believe all the nonsense she’s spouting?” he asked Qin Ruolan, though the gun remained unwaveringly aimed at Shen Yi.
Qin Ruolan leaned against the armrest of the sofa, still holding her cup of tea. Steam rose slowly before her face, then dispersed into the air.
“You didn’t deny any of it just now.”
Not denying something was tantamount to admitting it.
Shen Shu said, “I only wanted to hear what excuses she was going to make up to fool us.”
Qin Ruolan let out a soft, amused hum. “So everything she said was true?”
Her eyes and brows were sharp. “You didn’t contradict a single word.”
The gun in Shen Shu’s hand remained trained on Shen Yi. He tried to change the subject, lowering his voice as he asked, “How exactly did you find out about all this?”
Faced with the threat of a firearm, Shen Yi immediately raised her hands and clasped them together, her attitude toward admitting fault extremely sincere.
“You’re the one who told me all of it.”
“You mean to say…” Shen Shu’s brows lifted slightly, as though he were trying to use the expression to conceal the fact that he still didn’t know how to categorize his current feelings. “We know each other?”
Shen Yi said, “Obviously.”
Shen Sigui was still completely outside the situation.
He looked at his parents, whose atmosphere had grown faintly hostile, then at Shen Yi, who was being held at gunpoint. He couldn’t help feeling a little worried for her. Quietly, he pulled out his phone and snapped a photo, then sent three words to Shen Sixing:
Your daughter!!
Come quickly!!
He added two exclamation marks to emphasize the urgency of the situation.
After sending the message, he silently slipped his phone back into his pocket, then raised his head to continue watching the bizarre standoff in the middle of the living room.
A strangely familiar smile curved Qin Ruolan’s lips.
Whenever Qin Ruolan was about to do something major, she wore that exact expression: faintly amused, with an air of complete nonchalance.
Shen Shu’s heart gave a little jolt.
He had suffered too many losses at Qin Ruolan’s hands.
As for her bizarre assortment of martial-arts moves, he feared that before he could even finish striking a pose, she would already have smashed him into the ground.
Still, Qin Ruolan usually made sure he hurt badly—but not for too long.
“Everything you know was told to you by me?” he asked.
Even though Shen Shu was unwilling to admit it, he could hear that when Shen Yi had imitated him while recounting those events, many of her habitual sentence structures, word choices, and turns of phrase had been remarkably similar to his own.
He tried to find a flaw in her story. Yet after replaying it all in his mind, he discovered that there was not a single mistake he could point out.
Qin Ruolan already believed most of what the child had said. In particular, when Shen Yi imitated Shen Shu’s sarcastic tone, her lifelike intonation, pauses, and rhythm were impossible to achieve without years of close familiarity.
Her gaze moved from Shen Shu’s face to Shen Yi’s, as though she were comparing something amusing.
“Shen Shu, since you think she’s talking nonsense, why did you pull out a gun?”
Shen Shu fell silent again. Clearly unwilling to answer Qin Ruolan directly, he raised his eyes and beckoned Shen Yi over with a brief motion of his hand.
“Come here. I want to ask you something.”
Shen Yi hadn’t really wanted to go near him.
Shen Shu hadn’t lowered the gun even slightly. If he didn’t like her answer, she might be meeting God in the next second.
While the girl weighed her options and hesitated, Shen Shu raised the hand holding the gun and pointed the muzzle vaguely toward her forehead. The gesture was enough to make it clear: If you don’t come over, I’ll find another way to bring you here.
Shen Yi immediately walked forward several steps until she stood in front of him. Then she looked up and smiled.
“What did you want to ask me, Grandpa?”
From his seat in the corner, Shen Sigui pulled out his phone again.
Keeping a safe but not-too-distant position, he took a picture of the scene.
Shen Yi stood before Shen Shu with her head tilted back, while the gun in Shen Shu’s hand was aimed at her forehead.
From Shen Sigui’s angle, the distance between the muzzle and Shen Yi’s forehead looked extremely small.
Small enough to make anyone who saw the picture uneasy.
A reply immediately popped up in the chat.
Wen Ya: Where do you live?
Judging from how quickly she had replied, Wen Ya must have been rather anxious.
Shen Sigui immediately sent her the family’s address, then added, “Actually, when our family isn’t being dangerous, we’re occasionally safe too. My dad’s just trying to scare her for fun. Don’t panic, stay calm, Miss?”
Wen Ya’s reply arrived almost instantly:
I’m perfectly calm right now.
A smiling emoji followed, along with a bloodstained kitchen knife.
Shen Sigui stared at those seven words and the knife emoji, unable to stop himself from shivering.
He didn’t know why.
He had a feeling his home was going to become especially lively today.
Shen Sigui couldn’t shake the feeling that he had just given his address to someone extraordinary.
After thinking it over, he decided that his family’s address wasn’t exactly a secret. There shouldn’t be any problem with giving it to Wen Ya.
Out of goodwill, he sent her another message warning her:
We have a lot of armed guards around here, and it’s very dangerous. Be careful. You can ask my brother to come and escort you inside.
Wen Ya had probably already begun gathering her things.
For a long while afterward, she didn’t reply again.
…
Meanwhile, in the Shen family’s reception room, the atmosphere had fully taken on the air of a family tribunal.
Shen Shu slammed the gun down on the table. The metal striking the wood produced a muffled thud, making Shen Sigui shrink back against his chair.
Shen Shu didn’t even glance at his son. His eyes remained fixed on Shen Yi as he spoke in a low voice.
“That pile of nonsense you just spouted was, unfortunately, fairly accurate and credible.”
He forced the words out through clenched teeth.
Under the weight of his oppressive tone, Shen Yi remained completely unfazed.
“Nonsense? I also know that you especially dislike Grandma’s personality. You think she’s always willing to pay for things that are flashy but impractical. Oh, right—my third brother has also loved paying for beautiful things ever since he was little.”
“That’s why, whenever you lecture Third Brother, your favorite phrase is: ‘You’re exactly like your grandmother.’”
“And Grandma thinks you’re an ancient relic unearthed from the Qing dynasty. You may be a competent businessman, but you’ll never be a competent husband. The two of you have never been on the same wavelength.”
The little girl rattled off the entire speech, then crossed her hands in front of her and made an X.
She looked so solemn that she resembled a traffic officer directing cars to change lanes.
“So,” Shen Yi concluded with absolute certainty, “the fact that you two eventually got divorced was completely inevitable.”
“…?!”
