...
"This really isn't stolen goods."
He was still explaining to her in a light, breezy tone, "It's not an antique either, just a nice little ornament, so it's perfectly fine for you to accept it."
Actually, this didn't quite look like his younger brother's taste.
It was too girly.
He had picked a lock to get this.
It was carved into a delicate little bracelet and a safety knot pendant, clearly sized for a child to wear.
Out of the goodness of his heart, he hadn't taken the whole set.
Instead, he just picked a pretty pendant.
Be grateful to him, silly little brother.
For once, Shen Yi showed a rare moment of kindness: "If you're really poor, you can take this and exchange it for money. I actually don't need a lot of money."
She was rich.
One of Shen Wenta's supplementary credit cards was in her hands.
The limit was so high that she hadn't even bothered to count the zeros at the end.
Let alone her meager living expenses, even if she had a sudden whim to buy a private jet or an island, it would be more than enough.
"I don't need it either," Shen Ruxu smiled, his eyes curving. "My family is actually quite well-off. Even if I had no money, it would be very easy for me to get some on short notice."
Quite well-off?
"Then why don't you be a good person?" She was a bit puzzled.
Shen Yi had always thought that criminals only did what they did because they were driven into a corner.
"I'm just inheriting my father's business. A normal person's life is very boring to me."
As he spoke, he habitually reached out and rubbed her hair into a messy nest.
Hearing this, Shen Yi looked at him a couple of times with a very strange expression.
So it was a family business.
That sounded even more sinister.
And that excuse about finding life boring...
Shen Xun would say things like that too.
Occasionally, he would even despise his classmates' intelligence.
Shen Yi thought absentmindedly.
She felt that when her fourth brother grew up a bit, he probably wouldn't like a conventional, rule-abiding life either.
In a rare display of thoughtfulness, Shen Ruxu helped her put it on.
"This really is very pretty." Snapping back to reality, the girl tapped her toes. "How did you buy it?"
"Ah, I didn't buy it. I picked a lock to get it."
Ignoring the little girl's stunned gaze, Shen Ruxu took out a piece of iron wire from his pocket. With a gentle snap, he bent the soft metal into a circle and said carelessly, "I know how to pick locks, though most locks in society nowadays are electronic. However—"
He knew his younger brother too well.
Compared to electronic locks, he preferred those flashy, impractical display cabinets that required a physical key.
For no other reason.
Shen Wenta would always pay for pretty things.
He didn't finish his sentence, but the mockery in his tone was obvious. He casually stuffed the wire ring into her hand. "Want to learn how to pick locks? I can teach you."
Shen Yi looked down at the crooked metal ring in her hand, fell silent for two seconds, and gave an honest assessment: "You're giving me useless garbage again."
"How is this garbage?" Shen Ruxu protested in dissatisfaction. "I can also bend it into the shape of a little bunny for you. Do you like bunnies?"
"...No need, thank you."
Rejected again.
"I have some things to deal with recently, so I won't come looking for you anymore."
Shen Ruxu felt that he was actually quite attentive to her. He bent down to meet her eyes, his tone carrying a somewhat serious warning. "Be good at school and don't run around."
"No matter what you see or hear, just play dumb."
"After all, you are a very smart little kid."
He smiled. "You've always been quite good at playing dumb, right?"
Shen Ruxu might genuinely be bad at remembering faces.
But he wasn't completely brainless either.
Having dealt with all kinds of people, he could quickly figure out the personality of everyone he met.
Shen Yi was the most amusing child he had ever met.
When faced with someone who made her feel threatened, this girl's first reaction surprisingly wasn't to stay away.
Instead, she would act as if nothing was wrong and try to get along peacefully first.
She neither avoided them like the plague nor showed panic. She subconsciously ignored all the irrationalities and conversed with them normally.
After getting familiar for a while, she would further test the waters by throwing out some topics, easily closing the distance between them.
After this whole process.
It was hard for anyone to dislike her.
Shen Ruxu believed that a smart child would always know how to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages.
His warning ended there.
Shen Yi looked in the direction he left, quickly trying to understand the meaning behind his words.
However, before she could sort anything out.
She was severely startled by her suddenly appearing brother. She looked up and saw her brother standing in front of her with an expression as cold as ice.
The young man's tone contained the calm before a storm. "Where's the Blondie?"
Shen Yi: "..."
"...What Blondie?" She didn't think of Shen Ruxu, after all, that guy had black hair.
"Are you sick? Your face is a bit red."
In her impression, he actually got sick quite often.
Even though he was so many years older than her, he wasn't as robust as she was.
Shen Wenta had very pale skin, an almost sickly, unhealthy white, so any slight emotional fluctuation would be especially obvious.
At this moment, the abnormal redness on his face wasn't because of a fever.
But because of... anger.
"You've been getting very close to a man recently, haven't you?" He put his hands in his pockets and paced back and forth, his desire to kill reaching its peak at this moment.
Shen Yi: "Oh. Are you talking about that homeless guy?"
She finally understood why he had come.
"We aren't that close, he just often comes to find me for meals."
Like a reincarnated starving ghost, he mooched off her lunch every day, rain or shine.
In the beginning, it wasn't that Shen Yi hadn't thought about reporting this glutton.
But Hejing's supposedly impenetrable security system was like thin air to someone like Shen Ruxu.
The surveillance cameras couldn't catch him, and the security guards couldn't stop him. He was practically a ghost.
"Actually, he's quite generous," Shen Yi tried to use positive information to dilute her third brother's murderous aura. "He gave me a gift."
The gift here referred to the jade pendant.
However, the pendant was around her neck.
At this moment, Shen Yi only had that piece of wire bent into a ring in her hand.
The girl subconsciously raised her hand to show it, then realized it was wrong and quickly put it down. "Not this one..."
But Shen Wenta didn't listen to her explanation at all. He stared coldly at the wire ring in her hand and mocked, "Are you crazy?"
"Do you like him because he's poor, or because he gives you this piece of trash that even a dog wouldn't want?"
"He's not poor," Shen Yi subconsciously corrected him.
"And he didn't give me trash."
After saying that, Shen Yi suddenly felt that this conversation seemed to be getting worse the more she tried to explain.
Shen Wenta could barely breathe smoothly.
He never expected that Shen Yi would actually make excuses for that person.
Shen Yi never spoke up for strangers; she rarely even had any positive evaluations or feedback for herself.
Yet for a man she hadn't known for long, for every sentence he said, Shen Yi rebutted him with another.
This kind of development, in his eyes, was no different from Shen Yi suddenly bringing home a penniless bum and then telling him in a sickeningly sweet, soft voice:
"Oh, brother~ He's not a poor boy at all~"
"He said that as long as he eats my food, he will treat me well in the future~"
He could even imagine Shen Yi getting married in the future, holding that ridiculous wire ring up to his face with sparkling eyes and saying:
"Oh, Brother, look! This wire ring is our engagement ring!"
Shen Wenta felt like he was going to die.
It was not a rhetorical exaggeration.
It was a literal physiological reaction.
He was trembling all over, tightly gripping the gun in his jacket pocket. The sharp friction against the metal edge made his rationality teeter on the brink of collapse.
Shen Yi reacted quickly and hurriedly hugged him. "Wait, wait, wait. Don't get mad just yet. He really did give me a gift. That wire ring was just something he casually tossed to me to play with earlier."
She immediately pulled out a pendant to show him.
"Look at this jade necklace. It must be worth a lot of money, right?"
"Plus, he told me his family is very wealthy. He said he is taking over the family business, inheriting his father's profession."
Shen Wenta stared coldly at the incredibly familiar necklace, strangely discovering that when a person is faced with a situation of such extreme absurdity and extreme anger, even the most intense emotions will rapidly cool down.
"Is it pretty, Brother?"
There is no girl who does not like pretty things.
Shen Yi was no exception.
Her first reaction upon receiving the gift was to show it to her brother, attempting to pacify his fury.
"..."
However.
Shen Wenta did not answer.
Seeing him remain completely silent, Shen Yi asked in confusion, "Why did you suddenly stop talking again?"
Was this question really that hard to answer?
