Auntie Goes Berserk

"I, I..."

The girl's face flushed red in an instant. When her family looked at her, she grew even more flustered. A mist of tears veiled her pretty almond-shaped eyes, sparkling in the candlelight.

I prefer older sisters, but bullying a little sister who'd cry for ages after one punch is pretty satisfying, Xu Qi'an thought.

Xu Lingyue puffed out her cheeks, then raised her head as if she had given up all pretense and met Xu Qi'an's eyes. "I just wanted to know how you saw through the case from the files, big brother."

Xu Xinnian, who had been pretending he didn't exist, could no longer keep it up. He silently raised his head.

He considered himself clever and had read the files too, but despite studying them repeatedly, he had found nothing. Yet Xu Qi'an had solved the case immediately after asking him for the files that day.

Auntie said nothing, but her chopsticks stopped reaching for food, and she stopped chewing.

"There's no such thing as a perfect crime. Apart from coincidences, any case involving human hands leaves clues behind," Xu Qi'an said.

Xu Xinnian couldn't help sitting up straight and listening intently.

"First, I noticed something wrong with the tax silver from the length of the escort route and the weight of the silver..."

Xu Qi'an went through his reasoning.

The more Xu Xinnian listened, the brighter his eyes grew, like a student whose teacher had cleared up his confusion at school.

His hand beneath the table clenched tightly into a fist.

When Xu Qi'an finished, Xu Erlang wore a calm expression, as if it were nothing special. "Not bad."

The Xu Household's Erlang had always said the opposite of what he meant, and his family was long used to it.

The pretty sixteen-year-old sister lowered her head, hiding the glimmer of admiration in her eyes.

Xu Pingzhi slapped the table in excitement and let out a vulgar oath. "So that's how it was! I didn't notice a thing."

Xu Xinnian glanced at his father and thought, It would be strange if you had noticed.

Xu Qi'an glanced at Second Uncle and remembered a saying: Alas, I've got no learning, so one "holy shit" gets me through the world.

Second Uncle was a martial man whose learning extended no further than writing his own name, and even that came out crooked, like chicken scratches.

"You uncultured brute, you can't even weigh things?" Auntie dissed her husband.

Xu Qi'an asked, "Were they wearing hand guards when they counted the silver?"

Second Uncle Xu thought back for a moment. Surprised, he said, "It seems they were. How did you know?"

It really was metallic sodium? Xu Qi'an gave him a long look. "Why wasn't that in the testimony?"

"It was an unimportant little detail. What was there to say about it?" At that, Second Uncle Xu began cursing. "It's all because that fellow Lu handed me a flask of osmanthus mead. You know your second uncle's capacity for drink is unfathomable, so I got greedy and drank a little. I didn't pay much attention to anything else. I'd forgotten all about it until you mentioned it."

Pig teammates like you are the worst. If that had been in the files, I could've figured out the truth sooner. Why did I have to kill so many brain cells? Xu Qi'an sighed.

In Second Uncle's eyes, it might have been no different from what clothes someone wore or how they styled their hair.

It had never occurred to him that it was a suspicious detail worth noting.

"Then, from the looks of it, that fellow Lu you mentioned, Father, is most likely the one who framed you," Xu Xinnian pointed out, hitting the nail on the head.

"It's all because I was muddleheaded. I nearly brought disaster down on the whole family." Xu Pingzhi suddenly grew a little melancholy. "Ningyan, back then, your father and I fought back to back in the Battle of Mountains and Seas. We said we'd survive together and rise to glory together."

"I survived, but your father died in battle. If big brother hadn't taken that blade for me, I'd have been the one who died. That was when I realized that if I wanted a better life, I had to live differently."

He couldn't go on being cannon fodder.

"So I sent Nian'er to study and chose to have you practice martial arts. I did have selfish reasons, in truth."

Auntie rolled her eyes. "Yes, your heart's entirely with your own nephew."

More than a hundred taels of silver a year!

"So, Auntie, are you saying Erlang isn't your own?" Xu Qi'an swore he hadn't meant to say that. His instincts had outrun his brain.

The original owner really had a lot of resentment toward Auntie.

"You little brat, what are you trying to say with that?" Auntie slapped the table in anger.

Xu Erlang and Xu Lingyue lowered their heads and shoveled down their rice, apparently used to it.

Second Uncle Xu's scalp tingled. "Enough! I finally managed to scrape my life back, and now I have to listen to you fight? I'd be better off dead."

Everyone lowered their heads and ate.

Xu Qi'an had some recollection of the Shanhai Campaign.

The world was boundlessly vast, and the Great Feng Dynasty stood supreme in the Central Plains, calling itself the rightful ruler under heaven.

Great Feng had founded its realm through martial might and governed it through Confucianism. At its height, ten thousand nations had come to pay tribute. To date, the dynasty had endured for six hundred years.

Twenty years ago, Great Feng had joined forces with the nations of the Western Regions to fight a decisive battle at Shanhai Pass against the grassland barbarians of the north and the Southern Barbarians of the southwest.

The forces committed by all sides had numbered a million soldiers.

The war had lasted only half a year from beginning to end. In those six months, a million lives had been extinguished.

It was one of the most brutal wars in history, known as the Shanhai Campaign.

Xu Qi'an's father had died in that war.

With my keyboard warrior's learning and the patterns I've picked up from street-stall literature, no dynasty can escape the three-hundred-year rule.

The so-called three-hundred-year rule was something Xu Qi'an had named himself.

As an amateur history enthusiast, he had drawn a pattern from the five thousand years of history in his previous life: setting aside the ignorant and backward Zhou dynasty, when the vassal kings had each ruled their own lands, not a single dynasty's national fortune had lasted beyond three hundred years.

The two Song dynasties and the two Han dynasties had also been dynasties that came after reorganization.

After turning it over in his mind, he concluded that the Great Feng Dynasty's six hundred years of succession were probably connected to the power system of this world.

Lü'e brought Little Bean back. She was hungry, so she stopped crying. She was too small to reach the dining table, so she sat between Lü'e's legs and let her feed her.

"Mommy, why did we have to stay in the black house? We never got enough to eat." Little Bean had remembered what she had gone through in the previous days.

She called the prison the black house.

Everyone at the table fell silent. A look of pity appeared on Auntie's face.

Second Uncle Xu sighed. "It was because Daddy did something wrong."

Little Bean said, "Oh," then added, "I woke up hungry yesterday and caught a bug. It had these on its head." She held two short little fingers up on top of her head.

That was a cockroach, one of the prison cell's two local tyrants, alongside the rat.

Everyone at the table changed color, feeling both ashamed and distressed. Letting a young child suffer like that was their failure.

"Y-you ate it...?" Li Ru's lips trembled, and her eyes reddened. She had given birth to this youngest daughter in her early thirties. Though the girl was a little foolish, she doted on her.

Little Bean Xu Lingyin said in a clear little voice, "Then I heard Mommy's tummy go 'gurgle, gurgle.'"

The room fell silent for a moment, and everyone's heart sank.

Auntie's pretty face turned deathly pale. "And then?" she asked in a trembling voice.

"Then I stuffed it in Mommy's mouth. She ate it really fast!" Little Bean looked as though she expected praise.

Auntie swayed.

Xu Xinnian slowly set down his bowl and chopsticks. "I'm full."

Xu Lingyue said, "Me too."

Xu Qi'an said, "Full, I'm full. Heh-heh-heh."

Second Uncle Xu: "..."

Auntie froze for a few seconds, then lunged under the table. "Bleurgh!"

"Waaah! Waaah! Waaah!" Before long, a young child's pig-slaughtering wails echoed through the night sky.

I'll unfold this book gradually. The cheat, the main plot, the 36D older sister-none of them will be rushed out in the first few chapters. When I used to write, I couldn't wait to throw out every interesting setting and character at once. Now I've learned restraint. The right characters will appear at the right points in the story.