Liu Bingding opened his eyes and found himself dressed in bright red wedding robes, sitting in a side room with its doors tightly shut.
The room had been arranged like an ancient bridal chamber. A large "Double Happiness" character was pasted on the window, while red drapes fluttered down from the ceiling and bed canopy like blood dripping into clear water.
A line of white text appeared on the system interface in the upper left corner of his vision:
[Side Quest (Mandatory): Escape Xu Residence with "Miss Xu"]
"What Miss Xu? Don't tell me this is some elopement plot? Looking at this setup, could I have ended up in Double Happiness Town from centuries ago? This place is called Xu Residence—what does that have to do with Sister Xu?"
Liu Bingding kept talking as he cautiously rose to his feet and stepped toward the window.
"Clatter." Something fell from his sleeve. He bent down and picked it up.
It was a thick stack of folded legal petitions. Judging from the ink stains bleeding through the paper, they were densely covered in writing.
Liu Bingding unfolded the papers. Large blocks of text refreshed across the system interface like swarms of mosquitoes and flies, page after page making his eyes blur.
[This student came from a poor family and abandoned his studies for farming. During the famine years, he drifted from place to place. His sisters were seized by evildoers and trapped in Double Happiness Town...]
There was too much to read at once, so Liu Bingding swiped the text to the end. The signature read, unmistakably: [Zhang Sheng].
"What's going on? Zhang Sheng knew his sisters had been abducted, so he reported it to the county yamen?"
The voices of two people came from outside the door.