When Little Xie Tangning reached the age to start kindergarten, she perfectly recreated her two older brothers’ feat of making every child in their class cry.
When Lu Qiwu and Xie Yanxun received feedback from her teacher, they found it both hilarious and helpless.
What could they do? The Lu and Xie families simply had genes that were too powerful.
On her very first day of kindergarten, Little Xie Tangning became famous in one fell swoop for making the entire class cry. She successfully became the teachers’ biggest headache.
And yet, because she was so sweet-tongued and could say every kind of sugary compliment imaginable, the teachers both adored and dreaded her.
Whenever she made a mistake, she would stare at you innocently with that unbearably adorable face of hers.
Then she would eagerly admit her fault, saying “I’m sorry” over and over, promising every other second that she would never do it again, all while putting on a pitiful expression.
No matter how furious you were, your anger would vanish instantly. There was simply no way anyone could bear to say even a single harsh word to her.
Little Xie Tangning used the acting skills she had learned from her second brother to cause every kind of trouble imaginable in kindergarten, whether it was trouble she ought to cause or not.
Before long, she had successfully become the kindergarten’s infamous little menace.
For example, one day, Little Xie Tangning somehow heard the story of Newton being hit on the head by an apple.
After passing through her little brain, the story became: If you get hit by an apple, you’ll become a genius.
For some reason, this filtered version of the story began spreading like wildfire throughout the kindergarten, and every retelling became more vivid and convincing than the last.
And so, a group of little children appeared, each holding an apple and swinging it without hesitation at their own heads.
Some of them hit themselves so hard that, afterward, they cried out that they could see stars.
And what was Little Xie Tangning, the mastermind behind it all, doing?
Of course, she was standing to the side enjoying the show.
Grinning through her teeth as she watched the children hit themselves with apples, she began sweetly praising them for having turned into geniuses.
Geniuses were what she admired most!
She coaxed several children into completely losing their heads. They even announced that they were going to become top-level geniuses and began smashing the apples against their heads with renewed enthusiasm.
Fortunately, the teacher discovered them in time and stopped this idiotic behavior.
After being caught, Little Xie Tangning put on an innocent expression.
She claimed that all she had done was tell the other children a story she had heard from her big brother.
“I didn’t do anything, Teacher~ They were the ones who wanted to become as clever as my big brother and tried to take a shortcut!”
The teacher looked at the little girl blinking her big eyes and pretending to be innocent. Although she couldn’t bear to say a single reproachful word to her, as a teacher, she still had a duty to correct such reckless pranks.
Fortunately, the children had only hit their own heads with the apples instead of hitting one another.
Otherwise, something truly serious might have happened.
After being lectured, Little Xie Tangning decided that the teacher’s words made perfect sense.
She began apologizing to the teacher and promised that, in the future, she would show some restraint whenever she played pranks—and that she would apologize to the other children as well.
Yes, that was right. She had played a little word game.
What she promised was to show restraint, not to stop playing pranks altogether.
The teacher had noticed, of course. But this was a private aristocratic kindergarten jointly funded by several close-knit prominent families in Haicheng.
The education provided there was not the same as that of an ordinary kindergarten for these young masters and young ladies born with silver—or rather, golden—spoons in their mouths.
The teachers did not try to discipline the children’s wildly imaginative ideas. They merely offered appropriate guidance.
Every child’s independence was respected.
If the other children had been fooled by Little Xie Tangning, it only proved that they lacked the ability to judge the information they received from the outside world for themselves.
That was not the outcome their parents wanted.
Still, you learned from your mistakes. Little Xie Tangning’s prank could be said to have given them a small lesson in life.
Amid this chaotic, uproarious daily routine, Little Xie Tangning successfully graduated from kindergarten and moved on to primary school.
On Little Xie Tangning’s first day of primary school, Xie Changyu, who was already in sixth grade, immediately swaggered into her classroom and made a lap around it.
He claimed it was to intimidate any blind fools who might try something and protect his little sister. In truth, he was also getting a small taste of what it felt like to be the school bully.
There was nothing to be done about it. By then, his adolescent middle-schooler energy was already running strong.
Before starting first grade, Xie Tangning had already met Qin Shuchun, Liang Zhou, and the others, even though they had not attended the same kindergarten.
When those few troublemakers—“low mountains, foul water, and noise all meeting in one place”—were put in the same class, it was nothing short of a disaster.
A colossal disaster for the teachers!
At first, Xie Tangning was assigned to sit beside Qin Shuchun, but the two of them simply had far too much to say to each other.
They were constantly fidgeting and whispering, whether class was in session or not. In the end, even the teachers at this exceptionally open-minded private school could no longer stand it.
They had no choice but to separate the two.
Unfortunately, the teacher was still a little too short-sighted.
He actually arranged for Xie Tangning and Liang Zhou to sit together, while Qin Shuchun became deskmates with Shen Yunqiong.
As a result, not a single one of the teacher’s biggest headaches had been eliminated. If anything, the situation only grew worse.
From then on, throughout all six years of primary school, those four were never seated beside one another again.
At some point during fourth grade, Xie Tangning suddenly became obsessed with cultivating “stink water,” and she and her brother Xie Changyu hit it off perfectly.
One afternoon, the siblings each contributed their own specialty: one provided the biochemical materials—the stink water—and the other provided the physical technology—a hand-crafted launcher.
Together, they decided to create an unparalleled biochemical weapon.
Under the shade of the crabapple tree at the old residence, the siblings drew diagrams on paper while cutting and trimming a pile of plastic bottles.
“Second Brother, do you think this will work? Are you really sure your technology is reliable?”
There wasn’t the slightest doubt in Xie Tangning’s voice about her brother’s abilities. She was simply taking the question of whether it would work very seriously.
Xie Changyu’s voice was filled with absolute confidence in himself. “It’s guaranteed to work. What we should be thinking about now is where to test this ‘weapon’!”
“This stink water is pretty powerful. I don’t want to get splashed and end up smelling like a sewer!”
Xie Tangning rubbed her chin and thought seriously for a while before deciding to wreak havoc on the patch of ground Old Master Xie had recently had cleared.
Old Master Xie had recently become obsessed with gardening. He had ordered people to clear a small plot in the backyard and was planning to turn it into a little vegetable garden.
“Little Sis, hide quickly. Our experiment is about to begin!”
At that moment, Xie Tangning was lying on the ground like a little turtle, wearing a cardboard box on her back. No one knew which forgotten corner she had dragged it out of.
“I’m ready, and the camera is all set too. My wise and mighty second brother, please begin your performance!”
After calculating the launcher’s ascent and landing trajectory, Xie Changyu gave his hand-crafted launcher a kick.
The pressure inside the plastic bottle suddenly became unbalanced. With a whoosh, it began to rise into the air, tracing a perfect arc before landing precisely where they had intended.
Xie Changyu also hurriedly ducked behind Xie Tangning’s cardboard box, afraid that he might soon be splashed by the exploding stink water.
But the two of them waited for a long time, and the expected “explosion” never came.
Xie Changyu scratched his head, then decided to save himself rather than his buddy and began egging his little sister on to go investigate.
Although Xie Tangning was young, she wasn’t stupid and had no intention of obediently doing as she was told.
With no other choice—and still unwilling to believe that his handiwork could actually fail—Xie Changyu dragged Xie Tangning into a cardboard box, and the two of them crawled forward inside it.
They were only halfway there when the “biological weapon” made from foul water exploded with a bang.
Caught completely off guard, the two were splashed from head to toe with the stinking water.
The two little lunatics immediately threw up. It was simply too disgusting.
When Old Master Xie came running at the sound, his vision went black for a moment. He nearly thought his two unlucky grandchildren had fallen into a cesspit!
In the end, the two little hellions were held down and given a full medical examination, while the entire backyard of the old residence underwent an extremely thorough disinfection.
After all, no one knew how many bacteria might be lurking in that foul water.
When Lu Huaiyu heard about it later, he was immensely grateful that he had been away at university and managed to escape the disaster.
