"Shh!" Qing Chen said to Li Tongyun.
The little girl looked up at the living room ceiling in terror, slowly curling up into the sofa.
No matter how mature she was for her age, she had rarely encountered something like this.
The shadow cast by the two thugs who had broken into their home last time had yet to fully fade, and now more thugs had come.
Li Tongyun instinctively reached for the remote beside her to turn off the television, but Qing Chen stopped her.
Autumn nights fell quickly, so they had turned on the lights early.
The thugs must have noticed that. Pretending no one was home would only spell trouble.
Qing Chen patted the back of the little girl's hand and silently mouthed, "Don't be afraid. I'm here."
Li Tongyun wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes and nodded.
Everything in the house seemed to be continuing normally, unchanged.
Qing Chen turned and went into the kitchen, signaling Jiang Xue to continue cooking.
He wrote on a piece of paper for Jiang Xue to read: "The thugs are already upstairs. From now on, all of us have to act just like before, like everything is normal. Don't panic yet. They won't expect you to be downstairs."
The building had four floors and eight households. The thugs couldn't possibly be crazy enough to search the entire building.
After Jiang Xue patiently finished stir-frying the dish and carried it into the living room, she forced down her fear and wrote on the paper: "What do we do now?"
Just as she finished writing, the sound of shattering glass came from upstairs again. Heavy footsteps even passed directly over the heads of the three of them.
Qing Chen's heart sank. That was the weight of mechanical prosthetics.
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