The fat man was overjoyed and respectfully knocked his forehead against the floor before Xu Qinglian. "Your Honor, righteous as the blue heavens! My name is Jia Dewang. I live in South Gate Village at Ten-Mile Slope, with an eighty-year-old mother to support and two swaddled children crying to be fed."
Xu Qinglian raised his courtroom block and brought it down again with a crack! "Insolent troublemaker! You dare deceive this official? You look no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight. How could your mother be eighty? And how could both your children still be in swaddling clothes? Do you really think I'm so easily fooled?" A woman giving birth in her fifties was certainly rare.
Jia Dewang cried out miserably, "Your Honor, I've been wronged! Every word I said is true. My mother conceived and gave birth to me at fifty-three. I had seven older brothers and sisters, but sadly, they all died young. My children are dragon-and-phoenix twins, so they're both still in swaddling clothes. My family has fallen on hard times, and we struggle to get by. My life is truly bitter!" His explanation was reasonable enough.
Xu Qinglian snorted. "A fellow like you dares claim to have fathered dragon-and-phoenix twins? Guards, drag him out and give him twenty strokes!" Even ordinary folk who had boy-and-girl twins dared not say so in public. Who would casually presume to use the words "dragon" and "phoenix"? Jia Dewang had unwittingly violated a taboo, so a beating was what he deserved.
A pack of bailiffs rushed forward like wolves and tigers, shoved Jia Dewang to the ground, and dragged him out by both legs. The poor fellow had not even explained what had brought him there that day before he was hauled away for a savage twenty-stroke beating.
Murong Feiyan frowned